Eminem shared his thoughts about another rapper competing for the 2025 Grammy Awards.
“I mean, it’s very stiff competition,” Eminem, 52, said during a December 24th appearance on SiriusXM’s Shade 45.
“Kendrick’s gonna sweep that s—,” he added. “He’s going to, and he should.”
The “Without Me” rapper is nominated for Best Rap Album with his July record, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce). Eminem and Kendrick Lamar, 37, are both up for Best Rap Performance and Best Music Video. Lamar is nominated twice in the Best Rap Performance category for his songs “Not Like Us” and “Like That.”
Eminem and Lamar have maintained a close bond over the years. Not only did they collaborate on Eminem’s 2013 song, “Love Game,” but the Detroit rapper has praised Lamar in various interviews.
“When I first heard Kendrick’s debut on Aftermath, I couldn’t believe it,” Eminem wrote on Genius in 2016. “The fact that it was his first real album and he was able to make it into a story which intertwines with the skits like that was genius.”
“That hasn’t really been done that many times, let alone on someone’s first time up. The level of wordplay, deliveries, the beats — it’s just a masterpiece,” he added.
In 2022, they performed together at the Super Bowl LVI halftime show, and Eminem told SiriusXM’s Sway Calloway that Lamar was “the very top, top tier of lyricists” at the time.
Lamar has a mutual appreciation of “The Real Slim Shady” rapper. “I got my clarity just studying Eminem when I was a kid. How I got in the studio was all just curiosity. I had a love for the music, but it was curiosity,” he told GQ in 2016.
“The day I heard The Marshall Mathers LP, I was just like, ‘How does that work? What is he doing? How is he putting his words together like that? What’s the track under that? An ad-lib? What is that?'” Lamar added.