The Public Enemy song that Eminem tried to copy
Eminem is always happy to shout out his rap predecessors, crediting his favourites for setting the stage for him to later step onto. Public Enemy are among those to have influenced him with their ideas, inspiring the lyrics to one of his songs in particular.
Em spoke about this during a conversation with his friend Elton John, which was for a feature for Interview magazine in 2017. With Em immediately addressing John affectionately by the C-word, and John returning the favour by calling the rapper an “old bastard,” the nature of their friendship became quite evident from early in their chat.
At one stage, the pair began to discuss Eminem’s song ‘The Storm,’ which he wrote in response to the then new presidency of Donald Trump in 2017. The song appeared to take the form of a freestyle, which was recorded and aired during the year’s BET Hip Hop Awards.
Describing it as “an example of someone actually getting off their ass and saying something, and it reverberating through the world,” John was evidently impressed by Em’s rhymes, which included lines like, “But we better give Obama props / ’Cause what we got in office now’s a kamikaze / That’ll probably cause a nuclear holocaust.”
Em admitted that, while the video was shot in an off-the-cuff seeming way, ‘The Storm’ was not actually a freestyle. He’d written it in advance of recording the video, and, as he admitted to John, he was explicitly seeking to mimic the Public Enemy song ‘You’re Gonna Get Yours.’
“I don’t know if anybody got that,” he said, “but that’s kind of the feel that we were going for. My main concern was trying to get the message out and also memorize all the words.”
‘You’re Gonna Get Yours’ featured on Public Enemy’s first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, from 1987. It was released as the album’s second single, and it really put the group on the map as a political act of particular note. Em was hoping to tap into the spirit of resistance that they exhibit on it.
His effort, ‘The Storm,’ was about “having the right to stand up to oppression,” he told John. It wasn’t about disrespecting the US, its people, or its military, but it was about speaking “out against shit that’s wrong.” Em was arguing his case that Trump’s actions as a politician were unacceptable.
“We have a president who does not care about everybody in our country,” he insisted. “He is not the president for all of us, he is the president for some of us. He knows what he’s doing.”