Why did Eminem diss Moby?
Of all the people to become embroiled in a great feud with a hip-hop giant, Moby is about as unlikely a candidate as you could think of. But the vegan electronic hitmaker did indeed find himself beefing with Eminem during the early 2000s—and he held his own.
There was obviously a great deal of hand-wringing after Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP in 2000. Most of the moral panic was ridiculous, but there were also legitimate criticisms leveled at Eminem and his perceived misogyny and homophobia. Moby, who, during this period, was at the height of his career following the release of his album Play, was among the more famous Slim Shady critics. And, during the Grammys in 2001, he let it be known.
“I support Eminem’s free speech,” Moby was reported as saying. “I oppose censorship in all forms. He’s very good at what he does, but he’s also a misogynist and homophobe and racist and anti-Semite… I’m 33 and can see through it. But I can’t imagine that an 8-year-old in Idaho sees it as just a joke.”
Eminem, predictably, didn’t take Moby’s words lying down, and, for his next album, 2002’s The Eminem Show, he wrote a song that directly dissed Moby in precisely the terms that Moby had been upset by. In ‘Without Me,’ Slim calls out Moby, suggesting that Obie Trice should stamp on him and using a homophobic slur against him: “And Moby? You can get stomped by Obie / You thirty-six-year-old bald-headed f— blow me / You don’t know me, you’re too old, let go / It’s over, nobody listens to techno.”
Moby, for his part, took all this stuff calmly. He wrote a blog post about it in April 2002, noting, “I’m so amused… apparently Eminem disses me on his new single. I haven’t heard it yet, but I do think it’s very funny that he’s singled me out as an object of his scorn.”
The producer went on to praise Eminem’s abilities, while acknowledging the less savory elements of his persona. “The weird thing is that I actually do think that Eminem has skills as an MC, but it disturbs me that he glorifies homophobia and misogyny in his songs, especially seeing as his listeners are, for the most part, very impressionable 10-year-old boys. Oh well. I’m honored to have received my first celebrity diss. Well, first celebrity musical diss.”
Moby then said he wouldn’t be partaking in the beef any further. “I won’t be dissing him back (given the fact that my skills as an MC are terrible, almost as bad as Homer Simpson’s, okay, worse), but I will say, as I said before, that musicians need to assume a certain artistic responsibility when their fanbase is very, very young. A 30-year-old listening to an Eminem song that glorifies misogyny and homophobia is going to interpret the lyrics a lot differently than a 10-year-old listening to the same song.”
He ended by addressing Eminem directly, in a way that probably annoyed his enemy. “But anyway, if you’re reading this, Eminem, thanks for the diss. Really, I mean it. And no hard feelings from me.”
The situation didn’t end there, though, as Eminem’s bile towards Moby later bubbled over in public at the 2002 Video Music Awards, while he was accepting an award. “That little Moby girl threw me out of my zone,” he said at the podium, as the audience started to boo. “Keep booing, little girl. I will hit a man with glasses.”
Moby still didn’t take the bait, and, years later, he was again praising Eminem—this time for his track ‘Mosh’ lifted from the album Encore, in which Eminem criticises then-US president George Bush. Moby’s insistence on playing nice eventually seems to have rubbed off on Eminem, who, in his older age, has expressed regret about his Moby disses. And so ended one of the least likely celebrity beefs ever.