D12 Finally Made the “My Salsa” Video — and Gave the Slim Shady Role to Michael Mathers
Twenty-two years after Eminem promised “look out for my next single, it's called My Salsa” in the outro of “My Band,” D12 delivered the song and the video. Em isn't in it. Instead there's a seven-minute industry satire in which a tribute act pitches himself onto the track and gets shown the door. Here's every joke, including the ones about Eminem that most write-ups missed.
By @bradleymines ·
Seven minutes, one fake Slim Shady, a pool full of salsa, and a running gag about a superstar who bought a zoo. D12 turned the biggest question about their comeback album into the joke of the video.
On the outro of "My Band" in 2004, Eminem said: "Look out for my next single, it's called 'My Salsa'." It was a throwaway line at the end of a song that was itself a joke about Eminem overshadowing his own group.
Twenty-two years later, D12 made the single real. "My Salsa" arrived on D12 Forever Vol. 1 on June 19, 2026, and the official music video went up on the group's channel on August 30, 2026. It runs 7 minutes 20 seconds and is directed by Diego Cruz.
Eminem is not on the song. He is not in the video. But he is, unmistakably, the subject of about three of its seven minutes.
The setup: "Making My Band"
The video is not really a music video. It is a sketch with a song inside it — a full parody of Making the Band, with the record-label meeting, the auditions, and the industry-guy monologues all played straight.
It opens cold on a manager pitching an unhinged treatment: "No, no, no, no. It needs to be bigger. I want dinosaurs, giraffes, kangaroos, couple boats." Then the conversation turns to the one thing everyone in the room actually cares about — getting the star on the record. And this is where the video does its real work.
The absent superstar is never named. He does not need to be. Over about ninety seconds, the excuses stack up:
- "He's the biggest star in the world. He's not gonna do it."
- "He just bought a zoo. He's got to take care of the animals… he's got to feed the animals. It's just expensive."
- "He just bought a recording studio. He makes beats now. He's not gonna come out."
- "He's going around town. He's here and he's there. He's everywhere. But he's getting too small, too. I don't know what he's doing."
That last one is the sharpest joke in the video, and it is a double. "He's here, he's there, he's everywhere" is the cadence of Eminem's own "Without Me" hook. "He's getting too small" is about the weight — the running fan conversation about Em's frame that has followed him for a decade. D12 wrote both into the mouth of a fictional manager explaining why the guy can't be bothered.
The meeting also produces the title. Someone pitches calling the video "Making My Band"; the label guy immediately claims the idea as his own, which is its own joke about how records get made.
The cameo
About three and a half minutes in, after Kuniva and Swifty have sat through a run of terrible auditions — "This ain't working. I'm not sure about any of these guys" — a man walks up to the group and tries to talk his way onto the song.
The exchange goes:
"Your palms are sweaty."
"I know, man. I woke up, my knees were weak, too. I don't know what's going on, man."
That is "Lose Yourself," delivered as small talk, by a man who is obviously doing a Slim Shady. He then pushes a verse on them — "Listen, this is the new verse… My salsa, okay, yeah, yeah" — and starts rapping while Kuniva tells him to stop. It ends with his character being shown the door — "Yo, just bounce. Get him up out of here, man. Please." — and, on the way out, still working the room for a follow. It is a scripted beat, and he plays it completely straight, which is the only reason it lands.
The performer is widely identified as Michael Mathers, the UK-based tribute artist generally regarded as the best Eminem tribute act working — a name that will be familiar to regular readers here. We have covered his first public Canadian tour, his Avicii Arena show in Stockholm, and his Las Vegas run. Getting the call from D12 themselves is about as clear a verdict on the act as the group could have delivered: of everyone who does this, he is the one they wanted on camera. D12's official video description credits the director and the album, and does not list cast, so the credit is not formally confirmed on the release itself.
The comedy in the scene depends on him being good. A weak impression makes the joke a cheap one; a convincing one makes it a real gag about absence, which is what D12 were after. Away from the sketch, the day job is a full live show — DJ, full setlist, arena-sized rooms. He has been performing as an Eminem tribute act since 2021, and the "This is Stan" show has since run in Las Vegas, Stockholm and across Canada. This is a festival set:
Exclusive: the selfie he sent us
Mathers sent Eminem News the photo below himself — in D12's own "My Salsa" merch, maracas, sombrero, dripping tomatoes and all. It is a fairly good indication of how he feels about the role, and about the group who gave it to him.
Exclusive: a photo from the Festwich stage
Full disclosure on our end: we have watched him work up close, and we know him. He played Festwich, the tribute festival at Heaton Park in Manchester, in 2025, and he was one of the best things on the bill — not a lookalike trading on a face, but a performer who could hold a crowd that size, keep the breath control together on the fast material, and stay in character between songs without any of it tipping into karaoke. He and his DJ, who is also his wife, have become friends of ours since. The photo below is hers, taken from the stage behind him that night and shared with us.
Readers can weigh the coverage with that in mind. Our view of the act has not changed since the night that photo was taken: he is genuinely good at a job that is far harder than it looks, and the D12 casting is the industry catching up to something a Manchester crowd had already worked out.
The casting is the entire point. Fans spent months asking whether Eminem would appear on a song he named in 2004. D12's answer was to hire the one performer who could believably walk through the door as him — and then write him out of the room.
The correction: Eminem is in the lyrics
Coverage of the video has generally said that Eminem's name does not come up in the song at all. That is true of his name — but not of the character.
In the first verse — Kuniva's, straight out of the opening skit — the line lands plainly:
"Ever since I put that little knife on Slim / he gets noided every time the lights go dim."
In a D12 record, "Slim" is Slim Shady, and "noided" is Devil's Night-era vocabulary. It is a small thing, but it is the difference between a group that scrubbed Eminem out of the song and a group that put him in the opening verse of the first single they named after his own joke. D12 did not pretend he wasn't there. They just didn't ask him.
The ending
The last minute returns to the sketch, and it is the funniest part. The manager reveals the vision the group never approved:
"You guys ready for the Jurassic Salsa? … The giraffes, with the pool of salsa, and the girls inside the salsa like chips."
What follows is a genuinely great deadpan bit — "That wasn't in the treatment. I didn't see anything about that." / "Giraffes." / "I don't remember a thing about any giraffes." — building to the only reasonable question anyone could ask: "Where did we get all this salsa from?"
What it means for the record
D12 Forever Vol. 1 is the group's first album in over twenty years, carried by Kuniva and Swifty McVay, made without Proof and without Eminem. On "Stepping Stone" in 2018, Eminem said his goodbye to the group in about as final a form as a song can manage. The group has, since then, been asked about him constantly.
"My Salsa" is D12's answer to that question, and it is a better one than a guest verse would have been. Instead of pretending the expectation didn't exist, they built a seven-minute comedy about it, cast the best Eminem tribute act in the business as the missing member, and made the punchline the industry rather than Marshall. Whether it reads as affectionate or pointed depends entirely on how much you wanted him on the track.
Either way, it is the most talked-about thing D12 have done in twenty years — which, given that "My Band" was a song about exactly this problem, is a fairly perfect place to end up.
Sources. Dialogue, lyrics and timings taken from the video embedded above — D12's official "My Salsa," uploaded August 30, 2026, 7:20, directed by Diego Cruz — and its official description. Michael Mathers identification per ePro (eminem.news); D12's credits do not list cast. Header image and studio still are frames from the official video; the selfie was supplied to us by Michael Mathers. "My Band" outro from D12 World (2004); "Stepping Stone" from Kamikaze (2018).