Eminem releases 'Killshot' — diss response to Machine Gun Kelly's 'Rap Devil'

Why it matters

September 3, 2018. Eminem released "Killshot" as a SoundCloud-first single in response to Machine Gun Kelly's "Rap Devil," which had come out three days earlier as a response to Em's "Not Alike" on Kamikaze (released August 31, 2018). The full cycle ran one week. Eminem's response closed it. "Killshot" drew 38 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours, the largest single-day hip-hop debut on the platform at the time. The song is a sustained, technically dense, four-minute Eminem demolition of MGK's career, appearance, and rap-credibility. The Eminem-vs-MGK exchange was, in many ways, the inverse of the Drake-vs-Meek-Mill round three years earlier: an established artist using a younger challenger to demonstrate that the older artist had not lost the technical edge. The win-or-lose verdict went to Eminem by general consensus. MGK pivoted to pop-punk shortly afterward and has not been in the rap conversation since. The episode is partly a kind of memorial moment for the old-school written-verse diss exchange in an era where most rap conflict happens on Twitter. You should hear the verses if you have not.