Machine Gun Kelly Describes Eminem’s New Album With Trash Emoji as Long-Running Feud Continues

Eminem’s new album, Music to Be Murdered By — Side B, has gotten one of its most highly anticipated reviews from fellow rapper Machine Gun Kelly. Eminem and Kelly have a highly-publicized feud going back about three years now, and from the looks of it, Kelly is not giving it up. The younger rapper tweeted about Eminem’s new album with a laughing emoji and a trash emoji just hours after its release.

“Those subliminals,” Kelly wrote simply in his tweet. Like some other listeners, he seemed to assume that Eminem’s lyrics made subtle references to him and their past feud. Most notably, in the song “GNAT,” Eminem rapped: “They say these bars are like COVID, you get ’em right off the bat / Infected with SARS and Corona, like you took a bite off of that / But it goes from martian to human, that’s how the virus attacks / They come at me with machine guns, it’s like trying to fight off a gnat.”

To many fans, the mention of “machine guns” was an obvious reference to Kelly, especially since he then compared those weapons to gnats. On the other hand, some Eminem supporters thought that Kelly was the one showing his eagerness to maintain this public feud. He posted another tweet in the early hours of Friday morning reading: “I’m under your skin.”

The public feud began in 2018 when Eminem poked fun at “mumble rappers” on his album Kamikaze. At the time, Kelly teased the middle-aged rapper for grumbling about the new generation and set himself apart from Eminem in a diss track called “Rap Devil” — a reference to Eminem’s “Rap God.”

Eminem responded with his own diss track, and the two traded insults in songs for several months. The tension moved to the back burner, though it never seemed to die down entirely, as this week seems to prove.

Still, insults to Kelly were not the primary take-away from Eminem’s new album for many fans. Most were more focused on his lyrical apology to Rihanna on the song “Zeus.” In it, Eminem acknowledges the leaked, unreleased lyrics where he cracked jokes about Rihanna suffering domestic violence at the hands of Chris Brown. He rapped: “But, me, long as I re-promise to be honest / And wholeheartedly, apologies, Rihanna / For that song that leaked, I’m sorry, Ri / It wasn’t meant to cause you grief. Regardless, it was wrong of me.”

Music to Be Murdered By — Side B is Eminem’s second full-length studio album of 2020. It is available now wherever music is sold and streamed.