Dave Mays Went on Drink Champs to Defend The Source's Eminem War. We Pulled the Tape, and the Court File.

Twenty-three years after the press conference, The Source's co-founder is still arguing the case. The panel pushed back, and the paper trail has its own opinion.

REVOLT uploaded the new Drink Champs on Saturday, September 19: N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN with a four-person panel of Dave Mays, Miss Jones, Mecc Rashawn and Doggie Diamonds. The episode runs just past three hours. The part everyone is clipping starts around the 38-minute mark, when talk of XXL's rise turns into the old war, and Mays, who co-founded The Source in a Harvard dorm room and was eventually forced out of it, re-litigates Benzino versus Eminem in real time.

We went through the full captions. Some of what has been attributed to him is not quite what he said, and some of what he did say has a history the recaps skipped.

Set to 40:00, where Mays starts walking through how the beef began. The Eminem stretch runs to roughly 51:30.

What Mays actually said

His origin story is the familiar one: Benzino "mentioning Eminem on the mixtape, Eminem going crazy, started putting out these diss records" (at 40:10). Then the tapes. Mays says Eminem's side approached them with an offer to keep the recordings buried, a claim we could not confirm independently, and that The Source went ahead anyway:

Dave Mays: "In the end it was decided that, you know, we have a journalistic, you know, obligation to, you know, talk about this, you know, music that was discovered." (at 40:57)

Then the credentials: "The Source showed Eminem mad love for years," and "he was the first white person ever on the cover of the Source magazine" (at 42:29), plus a Source Award for lyricist of the year "very early on his career."

The Elvis moment arrives at 46:27, and the room does not let it slide. One voice defends the comparison on the grounds that Elvis "was a product of his time." Mecc Rashawn shuts that door: "There was never a time in the '90s where if you weren't writing your own [stuff] you weren't immediately escorted out the door" (at 47:40). Another panelist adds the line that settles it for the table: "Eminem was authentic." (YouTube's captions do not label speakers; attributions here follow the flow of the conversation.)

Mays then clarifies what he meant, and this is the quote being summarized as Eminem "hijacking" hip-hop:

Dave Mays: "[He] was a vehicle that they use to take control. It wasn't even him. Again, same thing. I mean, it's bigger than him. It's the music industry. Corporations, they want to control the music." (at 48:04)

Two corrections to the recaps. The word "hijack" is not in the audio. And "It wasn't even him," the half of the sentence that softens it, has mostly been left out. His target, by his own framing, is Interscope and Universal, which he says controlled "70, 80% of the entire hip-hop music market" at the time (at 51:14). He does not, in this episode, say Universal pulled its advertising; that detail has been imported from older coverage.

Checking the claims

First white artist on the cover. This one holds up as far as the record goes. The Beastie Boys, the obvious candidate to predate him, did not get a Source cover until 2012, a tribute after Adam Yauch's death that The Source itself described as "their very first Source cover." We found no evidence of a 3rd Bass or Vanilla Ice cover. The Source's own May 2002 Eminem issue opened its editorial by reminding readers of "the first time we put a white rapper on the cover."

The Source Award. We could not confirm it. The published winner list we checked for the 1999 Source Awards (August 18, 1999, Pantages Theatre, Hollywood, which is the "out in LA" Mays mentions) shows Eminem nominated for solo new artist, not a lyricist win.

The advertising story. Mays has already knocked this down himself. In his January 2022 VladTV interview he said Interscope "pulled all their advertising," but that it "didn't have any impact on the company financially and that's a story that's been pushed, a narrative that's been pushed" (at 1:35:46).

VladTV, January 2022, set to 1:35:46. At 1:40:58 he adds: "I think it getting personal wasn't the right way to handle it, at least through the pages of the magazine."

That 2022 line is the closest thing to regret Mays has offered on camera. On Drink Champs, asked whether things would have gone differently had he separated himself from Benzino, he said only "I don't know" (at 46:01).

The part nobody on the panel brought up

The quick version of the war: Benzino's "Pull Your Skirt Up" in late 2002, Eminem's "The Sauce" and "Nail in the Coffin" in reply (still ranked among the most lopsided diss wins on Complex's list, and never officially released to streaming). On Tuesday, November 18, 2003, Mays and Benzino held a press conference and played teenage recordings, including "Foolish Pride." Eminem said he made it as a teenager, out of anger after a breakup with a Black girlfriend.

Then it went to federal court. Shady Records sued; a temporary restraining order landed December 15, 2003; The Source put the full lyrics on its website in January anyway. On June 8, 2004, Judge Gerard Lynch found the magazine had violated his order and made it pay Shady's legal fees. And in the companion opinion, the judge addressed the exact comparison Mays reached for this month: "Like other white musicians who have been successful in musical genres or forms pioneered by Africans or African-Americans, from Benny Goodman to Elvis Presley to Paul Simon, Mathers has been accused of..." Then he declined to referee it: "It is for fans of hip-hop, and not for this Court, to decide what if anything this episode means for their opinions of Mathers as a man and as an artist."

The fans decided. So did the people in the room. When Mays made a similar case on Clubhouse in January 2021, Royce da 5'9" was moderating, with Just Blaze among those in the room, and Royce removed Mays from the room with a parting "Enough of Dave Mays." On this panel, it was Mecc Rashawn. It is the same pattern we tracked in the two earlier Drink Champs episodes that argued whether Eminem counts, one of which, the Bubba Sparxxx sit-down, the hosts bring up again here at 49:52.

The war that never ended

Eminem has never let it close either. In January 2024 his verse on "Doomsday Pt. 2" went back at Benzino by name, and within days Benzino answered with a diss titled, of all things, "Rap Elvis."

Mays opened this segment listing everything The Source did for Eminem, the Unsigned Hype column, the cover, the love, and he is right about most of it. It is also the problem with his case. The magazine that discovered Eminem is the same one that later decided he was a corporate vehicle, and the only thing that changed in between was who he dissed.