Kanye West Says He Once Tried To Steal Eminem’s Drum Sounds

Kanye West once tried to steal beats from Eminem.

West makes the revelation in an interview with Scratch, saying he hatched the plot to steal the kit while producing the title track for D12’s “D12 World” in the early 2000s.

My basement flooded last month and ruined my collection of Scratch Magazines so please forgive the quality. pic.twitter.com/VPyhUsxQ1i

— Howard “Treble” Cox (@Trebworld) March 19, 2020

“I think Eminem is a dope-ass producer,” West says. “So I wanted to ask him to trade drums, but I was intimidated because he was such a superstar and everything.” So instead, the rapper says he decided to do the next best thing: make copies of the drums’ sounds when Eminem wasn’t in the studio. But that plan was thwarted, West recalls. “I started copying them and the next thing I know an engineer comes in and straight grabs the disk and leaves,” he says.

Still, West credits the attempted theft with teaching him a lot about producing a good sound when laying down a beat. “I was seeing how he truncated sounds, like chopping the air completely,” he says. “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.”