Eminem vs. Machine Gun Kelly: The Battle Between Two Generations

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Two of the biggest white rappers in the world are beefing.

Marshall Mathers (aka Eminem), and Richard Colson Baker (aka Machine Gun Kelly) have been consistently firing verbal shots at each other for the past month. While animosity between Eminem and Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) has been brewing since around 2012, the kettle is now boiling hot with both rappers recently dropping multiple diss tracks.

On one side you’ve got the veteran rapper Eminem, who’s been in the industry much longer than Machine Gun Kelly, and was even an inspiration for MGK. On the other side, you have Machine Gun Kelly- a younger rapper, much less famous than Eminem, who is apparently standing up for himself and “his generation” by going against Eminem. While this feud originally began as “Eminem vs. Machine Gun Kelly”, the argument has elevated to “old generation vs new generation”, with multiple different opinions throughout the hip hop community. Machine Gun Kelly believes he’s representing the younger generation, but are young people on the same page?

Many people have traced the beginning of the feud back to a tweet made by Machine Gun Kelly in 2012 about Hailie Mathers, Eminem’s daughter. MGK, who was 21 at the time, referred to Hailie as “hot as f***” when she was only 16.

For someone who self-claims to stand up for younger generations, you’d expect Machine Gun Kelly not to make a sexual comment about an underage girl. Or even take it back, But, that’s not the case. In an interview with Hot 97 in 2015, MGK explains how he felt the tweet got him blacklisted from Shade 45, a popular hip hop radio station on Sirius XM created by Eminem and Shady Records.

The feud remained very calm and static until Eminem dropped his album ‘Kamikaze’ out of nowhere. On the album Eminem verbally attacks tons of people in the hip hop community, but specifically targets MGK on the track ‘Not Alike’ when he says “And I’m talking to you but you already know who the f*** you are, Kelly/ I don’t use sublims and sure as fuck don’t sneak-diss/ But keep commenting on my daughter Hailie”.

A few days later, Kelly responded with the song ‘Rap Devil’, a diss track with a name that counter’s Eminem’s “Rap God” nickname. The entire track disses Eminem and his music. Eminem has yet to respond, but the Internet has, with mixed reactions.

The beef between Eminem and Machine Gun Kelly is a feud too common in hip hop to be surprised about. They are the archetypes for the old and new generations, with opposing perspectives of music. But when we really look into it, both rappers have made sexual comments about minors, so who’s really looking out for the younger generation?