Kanye West Once Tried To Steal Eminem’s Drum Kit

During the early to mid-2000s, Eminem was a prolific producer in addition to being one of the hottest rappers in the industry. One of his biggest fans was Kanye West, who revealed in a 2004 Scratch magazine cover story that he once tried to steal Em’s drum sounds to no avail.

After explaining that he used to steal “like a madman” from his mentor No I.D.’s record collection, Kanye spoke about being too intimidated to ask Em to trade drums while he was in the studio to work with the rapper’s group D12. During those sessions, Kanye produced the title track from D12 World.

“I had to work with D12, right?” Kanye remembered. “And I think Eminem is a dope-ass producer, so I wanted to ask him to trade drums but I was intimidated because he was such a superstar and everything.”

Kanye added that D12 member Kon Artis (aka Mr. Porter) would have shared his own drums, but Em’s drums were “some of the best drums in hip-hop.” So when Kanye saw Em’s MP disks in the studio, he tried to take advantage of the opportunity.

“I’m going to try and get as many sounds copied before they come in,” he recalled. “I started copying them and the next thing I know an engineer comes in and straight grabs the disk and leaves.”

Despite the unsuccessful attempt, Kanye was still able to pick up some new tricks from watching Em work:

I started seeing how he do, doing sh-t I wouldn’t do because I still had certain rules. If somebody’s a new producer they’ll do sh-t like speed the snare up +8, and that’s sh-t I wouldn’t do because I’m like, ‘I am sampling this snare.’ I was seeing how he truncated sounds, like chopping the air completely. It gives it a certain sound, the sound he wanted. I learned a lot going through Eminem’s drum set. Hopefully he’ll take it as a compliment.

Aside from producing much of his own music, Em also made beats for artists like JAY-Z, Nas, 50 Cent, Jadakiss, and of course, his own group D12. In 2004, he even served as the executive and primary producer on 2Pac’s posthumous album, Loyal to the Game.

Of course, Eminem was mentored as a producer by Dr. Dre, who Kanye has called one of his biggest inspirations. In a 2010 essay for Rolling Stone, he remembered trying to imitate Dre’s sound:

When I was learning to produce, working in a home studio in my mother’s crib, I tried to make beats that sounded exactly like Timbaland’s, DJ Premier’s, Pete Rock’s and, especially, Dr. Dre’s. Dre productions like Tupac’s ‘California Love’ were just so far beyond what I was doing that I couldn’t even comprehend what was going on. I had no idea how to get to that point, how to layer all those instruments.

In the Scratch interview, Kanye also named Eminem as one of the Top 5 producers and Top 5 rappers while stopping just short of putting himself in the category. “But me and Em together, we’re like Prince and Stevie [Wonder], you know,” he declared. “We’re the type of people that can help other people out, but can also just go into the studio completely by themselves and make masterpieces.”

Check out portions of the interview below, as shared by Howard “Treble” Cox on Twitter:

This wasn’t the first time Kanye admitted to biting another producer’s drums. On his College Dropout closer, “Last Call,” he explained how using Dr. Dre’s “Xxplosive” drums on his beat for JAY-Z’s “This Can’t Be Life” helped birth his style:

I made this one beat where I sped up this Harold Melvin sample. I played it for Hip over the phone, he’s like, ‘Oh, yo that shit is crazy Jay might want it for this compilation album he doin’, called The Dynasty.‘ And at that time, like the drums really weren’t soundin’ right to me. So I went and um, I was listening to Dre Chronic 2001 at that time. And really I just, like bit the drums off ‘Xxplosive’ and put it like with a sped-up sample, and now it’s kind of like my whole style, when it started, when he rapped on ‘This Can’t Be Life.’

Ironically, Kanye would later “cuss out” Drake producer 40 for jacking his sound on the rapper’s career-defining mixtape, So Far Gone.

Years after trying to steal Em’s drums, Kanye linked up with him on Drake’s 2009 track, “Forever.”

Read all the lyrics to Eminem and Kanye West’s biggest hits on Genius now.