Eminem: Tape was ‘foolishness’

Eminem responded Wednesday to the release of a decade-old tape by the rapper that contains slurs against African American women, calling the “freestyle” performance “something I made out of anger, stupidity and frustration when I was a teenager.”

Two founders of the hip-hop magazine the Source, Raymond “Benzino” Scott, who is a rapper himself, and David Mays, unveiled the tape at a Tuesday press conference in New York. In the latest salvo in their long campaign to depict the Detroit rapper as a bigot, the pair issued a statement that said, “Bringing this tape to the public is the latest chapter in the Source magazine’s ongoing effort to expose influences corrupting hip-hop, including racism.”

Eminem issued a statement of his own saying the pair and the magazine “have had a vendetta against me, [his label] Shady Records and our artists for a long time.” Of the tape itself, he added: “I’d just broken up with my girlfriend, who was African American, and I reacted like the angry, stupid kid I was. I hope people will take it for the foolishness that it was, not for what somebody is trying to make it into today.”

-- Randy Lewis