Yelawolf: “I was like, ‘Damn, man. If I could get Marshall on this? Ooh.’ I knew that if I could get a feature from him, this was the one I wanted. I knew that it wasn’t the expected record and I knew you’ve never heard Marshall on a record that’s sweaty-ass, holding the wall, Southern club.
“It was kind of like taking 8 Mile and putting it with Hustle & Flow. If I got that feature from Marshall, I wanted to bring him into my zone, my culture. And he fucking murdered it. It’s one of those records that, to me, as far as hip-hop and culturally on this project, is one of the most important records because of what it says about us as a team at Shady.
“Us three on the same record is a mindfuck. It’s almost like it shouldn’t be, but it is and it’s dope. That’s the whole point of this album. The album really has this balance of dark and light. Some songs feel good, some are dark, and some are in-between, but they all have a vibe of their own. They’re really specific in the vibes of the records.
“I’m really lucky to have the industry execs that I have around me because they encourage me to keep it 100% real. You’ve got to imagine that when I’m like, ‘Can we get Gangsta Boo on this record with me and Marshall?’ [other industry execs would be] like, ‘Gangsta Boo? With you and Marshall? On your only Eminem record?’ Instead, my team is like, ‘Fuck yeah. Gangsta Boo, that’s sick.’
“Nobody is really doing it, at all, especially for a debut album. Nobody’s got balls. They’re all fucking Fisher-Price-ass features. It’s cookie-cutter bullshit like, ‘Lets put all the stars on one record.’ I’m like, ‘You can get that at every Footlocker. I fuck with it, but is it special? No.’ It’s just about what artists want to be.”
Kawan “KP” Prather: “He came in and sprinkled some production over some records, because he said, “Hey this is great. Why don’t you try this?” And it’s like Eminem said it, so fuck it, let’s try it. It worked for you.
“Eminem never asked Wolf to do anything outside of what he had already done. That’s the cool part about it. Walking in, I was very nervous that it was going to be him trying to make Wolf a little more like him. Wolf never had that thought. I was probably the only one [with that thought] because I’m a fucking skeptic. I was like, ‘I don’t trust this shit.’
“We got up there and Marshall had a respect for what Yela was already doing. It’s a weird thing because he doesn’t have to [respect Yelawolf]. It kicked into how he even talks to him.
“Even the skit is funny as shit because we had to make him say, ‘Yeah, I just killed that shit.’ It’s like, who says that? But that’s the dickhead part about it. He said it bullshitting, and I was like, ‘Yeah, say that.’ He was like, ‘Hell nah.’ [Laughs.]
“He also was cool in the sense that he came into Wolf’s world. There were other records that could have gotten done, but we begged him to get on that record. It wasn’t like he didn’t want to do it.
“He was just like, ‘This isn’t my style. It’s so specifically Southern.’ I was like, ‘That means more to Wolf than you could understand if you got on that record.’ After he heard that conversation, he was like, ‘Yeah, I get it. Cool.’
“Reading the lyrics the first day—I copied and pasted what Em sent. I didn’t want to fuck up however he wrote it. If you look at how the rest of the lyrics [in the booklet] are written, it’s line by line. Eminem’s lyrics are a paragraph he sent. I was like, ‘I don’t even know how this rhymes. I don’t know how it connects.’
“I knew it sounded great, so I didn’t want to fuck shit up. He has a degree of difficulty that is the shit. It’s acrobatic shit, the way he’ll connect the third word in the fifth bar to the six line somewhere in the record and it all makes sense when you hear it. After he did that, Wolf went back and rewrote his verse like, ‘Shiiit.’”
Interesting shit. There's other parts that I cut out because they don't mention Em, you can read the rest of the stuff on Throw It Up here, and the full Complex feature that breaks down every track can be found here.
