Nelly “felt like a dick” after Eminem feud, which he puts down to “misinterpretation”

Nelly has reflected on his decades-old feud with Eminem, saying he “felt like a dick” afterwards due to a “misinterpretation”.

• READ MORE: Eminem – ‘The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce)’ review: well-crafted songs and empty provocation

Speaking on the Bootleg Kev podcast recently, Nelly was asked about his beef with Eminem in the early 2000s. At the time, Nelly was fresh on the scene, while Eminem was already a bona fide star. Due to a “misinterpretation” of one of Eminem’s lines that the ‘Just A Dream’ rapper initially took as a diss towards him.

Nelly then went onto MTV’s Total Request Live (TRL), where he took a shot at Eminem, saying he didn’t like Eminem’s “sly little comments”: “I don’t play with candy. I eat M&Ms… I just don’t think dude plans on coming to tour to St. Louis.”

Eminem responded by calling him out on the 2002 diss track ‘Invasion’, which was largely aimed at Ja Rule and Benzino. On the track, he referenced Nelly’s ‘Air Force Ones’, rapping: “Stomping in my Air Force Ones / But you won’t be able to tell / If it’s two pairs or one / It’s just gonna feel like so many feet kicking you.”

On the Bootleg Kev podcast, Nelly shared that the two were later about to squash their beef without taking the feud any further, and even called Eminem “the GOAT [Greatest Of All Time]”.

According to Nelly, Eminem reached out at an afterparty in Detroit: “Somebody came and was like, ‘Yo, Em wanna come through and holler’… He was like, ‘Yo man, my daughter… [is a fan]’ I felt like such a dick. We were Eminem fans! And just miscommunication, man.”

“He’s a dope cat and I’m glad we got that out of the way,” Nelly continued. “It’s fucked up when people that you fuck with and that you admire on a level… it’s like, dude spits…. I’m glad we squashed that. Em is a cat.”

Nelly sparked controversy earlier this year when he performed as part of Donald Trump’s inauguration celebration for his return to the White House. After the performance, his streaming numbers dipped almost immediately. His music was streamed 1.54million times on the day of the inauguration, down from 1.63million a week earlier.

After drawing criticism for his performance, Nelly defended his decision, saying: “I didn’t know that I had to agree with your political choices. If you follow what I do, this shouldn’t even be an argument. He is the president. He won.”

“I’m not doing this for money. I’m doing this because it’s an honor. I respect the office. It don’t matter who is in office. The same way our brothers and sisters go to war to put their life on the line for whoever is in office. So, if they can put their life on the line for whoever is in office, I can damn sure perform for whoever is in office.”

In a three-star review of Eminem’s 2024 record ‘The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce)’, Jordan Bassett wrote for NME: “So, who killed Slim Shady? In bringing him back to the light and showing him up as irrelevant, perhaps Eminem’s done his old pal in for good. OK, we get it – Shady was a shocking character. Now that he’s dead, how about getting some new material?”

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