Nick Cannon appeared blindsided when Eminem took a swipe at him and his ex-wife Mariah Carey on the Fat Joe single “Lord Above” featuring Mary J. Blige earlier this year. In response, the Wild ‘N Out host dropped a series of diss tracks aimed at his longtime nemesis, including “Pray For Him” and “The Invitation.”
Four months later, the entertainment jack of all trades is still being asked about it. During a recent phone interview with Billboard, he was asked if he was surprised Em didn’t return with a diss track of his own.
“My response was his invitation to Wild ‘N Out, and that still stands,” he said. “You gotta remember, I was defending myself once again. He keeps bringing it up for decades. I’m one of those cats that matches energy. I don’t do it — I overdo it. Even in high school, I was a little guy, but if you made fun of me, I was gonna make fun of you, your momma, and that’s the same energy of Wild ‘N Out. It was a month of social commentary, but if you’ve ever heard me speak on this matter, I always give that dude his props as an icon in Hip Hop.”
Cannon added, “I think he knows better now. If he keeps talking about me, I’m gonna keep talking back.”
He later discussed a VladTV interview he did following the Slim Shady controversy where he says Em is a product of “institutional racism.”
“It’s the idea that there is a superior class of people who are judged by a different measuring stick,” he clarified. “It’s something Eminem has even addressed being a guest in the house of Hip Hop. When you come from a culture that was built by a community that didn’t have something of their own, but were able to embrace it and it became a new conduit of information for a new culture.
“And when someone comes in and shines in that medium and takes it to the masses, it’s the same thing as [what] Elvis Presley [did]. There’s nothing wrong with it, but you gotta accept it for what it is.”
Em reignited the decades-long beef when “Lord Above” dropped in December 2019.
“I know me and Mariah didn’t end on a high note,” he rapped. “But that other dude’s whipped, that pussy got him neutered/Tryna tell him his chicks a nut ‘fore he got his jewels clipped/Almost got my caboose kicked/Fool, quit, you not gon’ do shit/I let her chop my balls off too before I lost to you, Nick.”
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Cannon unsurprisingly took offense to the lyric and fired off the aforementioned “Invitation” that featured an intro from the incarcerated Suge Knight, another topic he addressed in the newly published interview. Cannon revealed he’s publishing a book about the disgraced Death Row Records executive that will arrive at the end of 2020.
“I go see Suge at least once a month,” he said. “What Alex Haley was to The Autobiography of Malcolm X is what I’m doing for Suge Knight. I’m giving him the opportunity to tell his story through my pen. We’ve already been chopping it up daily, and he caught wind of what was going on and wanted to say something on one of these tracks.
“As an author, I was just working on writing his book with him, and he wanted to look out for little bro, I guess. I got so many other focuses, from me releasing the Dr. Sebi documentary that I produced with Nipsey Hussle and then we’ll hopefully drop the Suge book by quarter four of this year. It should be here for the holidays.”
Revisit “Lord Above” below.