Two Drink Champs Episodes, Four Days Apart, One Argument: Does Eminem Count?

A rapper who was compared to Eminem for twenty years, and an executive who thinks the comparison should be banned. Both conversations happened on the same show inside a week, and together they are the most honest thing said about Eminem's place in hip hop in a while.

Eminem has not done an interview. He has not released a record this year. He has not toured. And in the last two weeks of August 2026 he was, somehow, the central subject of two separate Drink Champs episodes totalling nearly seven hours.

They were not billed that way. One was a Bubba Sparxxx episode; one was a Mad Skillz and Ray Daniels episode. But both spend their most interesting stretches on the same question, from opposite ends: what does it mean that the best-selling rapper alive got there without doing any of the things the job normally requires?

The versions circulating in fan coverage are missing the part where the argument actually resolves, so here is the full exchange from the source.

Part one: Ray Daniels says Eminem broke the rules — then puts him in the Top 5 anyway

The episode with Mad Skillz, executive Ray Daniels and DJ Epps went up on August 26, 2026 and runs over four hours. The Top 5 conversation starts about twenty minutes in.

The whole exchange, from the top of the Top 5 argument:

Nas and Jay-Z go unchallenged at the top. The fight is over No. 3. Ray Daniels says Drake, which nobody in the room likes. Mad Skillz says Kendrick. N.O.R.E. makes a case for 50 Cent built on international touring — the idea that 50 is genuinely global while others are only big in America. DJ EFN points out that if global reach is the criterion, Eminem has to be on the board.

Daniels does not take that well.

Ray Daniels: "Eminem can't be in the conversation. Why not Eminem? Because Eminem doesn't play by the same rules that everybody else that does hip hop does. Nore had to make a club record to be a star. Jay had to make a club record. X. Everybody got to make a club record, a girl record. It's a whole checklist of shit you got to do to be the number one rapper in hip hop. Eminem made a record dissing his mom and sold more records than anybody. That's because he's white."

Then the line that got clipped everywhere:

Ray Daniels: "If you said he's a nice rapper — Eminem is the top five rappers of all time. But I don't put him in hip hop, 'cause I think it's unfair. You're literally a Mick Jagger competing against [guys] that's rapping. It's just not fair."

Mad Skillz — a rapper who has taught hip hop at university level — was not having it:

Mad Skillz: "But Ray. The white boy can rap. You can say whatever you want to say about the white boy. Yes, he was white. Yes, he got to TRL quicker. Yes, he got to Dr. Dre quicker. He got the endorsements quicker. But at any given time, if you was from hip hop, at any given time, on any given record, you heard that white boy and went 'damn, he killed that.' Always. 'Cause he did."

"I can't respect your list. Your list is invalid."

Where it actually ends up

Here is the part that has gone unreported, and it is the most newsworthy thing in the whole exchange.

Roughly fifteen minutes after saying Eminem "can't be in the conversation," Daniels is asked directly:

N.O.R.E.: "So that number three spot with Drake — that would be Eminem for you."

Ray Daniels: "Yeah, probably."

So the actual outcome of the segment is that Ray Daniels ranks Eminem above Drake, and only landed on 50 Cent instead because N.O.R.E.'s international-touring argument moved him. Every clip of this conversation stops at the "not hip hop" quote. The tape does not.

He also gets closer to a compliment than the headlines suggest:

Ray Daniels: "Eminem is a great rapper. I just hate that we compare people like Jadakiss to him, and Jadakiss had to play by way different rules than he did. So for me it's unfair. I'm an executive, bro. I sit in the room when it's time to make the music. And it's like Eminem just — he can always be in that room over here. You ain't never heard nobody say 'I had that beat before Eminem got it.'"

"It's like he doesn't play in the same league as us. And don't get me wrong — the thing I like the most about him is he loves us and he represents us and he calls himself one of us."

That is a coherent position, and it is not really about Eminem's ability. It is a complaint about structural unfairness in the industry Daniels works in: that A&Rs and labels made Black rappers chase radio singles and let Eminem skip that entirely. Whether the fix for that is excluding Eminem from a list is another matter — but it is not the "Eminem is wack" take it got flattened into.

Two things he got wrong

In fairness to the record, two claims Daniels makes in the segment do not survive checking.

First: "His first record was 'Hi, My Name Is.' Name one [guy] that can make that they first single and sell a million records first week." That did not happen. The Slim Shady LP opened at roughly 283,000 copies in February 1999 — a strong debut, not a million. The million-plus week was The Marshall Mathers LP a year later, at 1.76 million, which remains the record. We laid all those numbers out in Eminem Album Sales: Every First-Week Number. The point Daniels is making — that a debut single that big was unavailable to everyone else — is arguable. The number is not.

Second: he criticises Eminem's guest verse on "Lean Back," then spends a minute insisting Andre 3000 was on the same record. He wasn't; the room eventually corrects him, and Daniels concedes he was thinking of a different song. Small thing, but it happens in the middle of him grading Eminem's verses.

Part two: Bubba Sparxxx, and the cost of being the comparison

Four days earlier, on August 22, 2026, Drink Champs put out a Bubba Sparxxx episode running two hours forty. Bubba mentions Eminem so many times that it becomes a running joke on the episode.

It is also the exact case study Ray Daniels' argument needs, from the other side. Bubba is the man who was compared to Eminem, constantly, and who paid for it.

What Interscope assumed

Bubba's account of why Dark Days, Bright Nights underperformed is specific and unflattering to the label. He was projected to sell 350,000–400,000, shipped 700,000 units, and came in around half the projection. His read:

Bubba Sparxxx: "There wasn't enough evidence out on me at the time. If you think about Eminem's story — he had the outsiders, the Lyricist Lounge… all they had seen at that time was 'Ugly.' It just wasn't enough evidence to make all them people want to go buy."

And then, the sharpest thing in the episode:

Bubba Sparxxx: "Interscope took certain things for granted with me because of where Eminem's strong areas were. He was a live performer. He had been performing live forever. Guess who hadn't. Guess whose third and fourth ever shows ever being on a stage with a microphone was MTV TRL… I was fucking terrified."

That is a genuinely useful piece of industry history. Eminem spent years in Detroit battle rooms before "My Name Is." Bubba got the same launch machinery with none of the reps, because the machinery assumed one white Southern rapper was interchangeable with another. He is careful, repeatedly, not to make it a grievance: "I don't like to even get into the comparison of me and him."

The diss he took as a compliment

The section fans have been clipping is about "G.O.A.T.," a leaked Eminem song on which Em takes shots at Bubba and Paul Wall. Bubba recites the bars from memory:

"Bubba Sparxxx just won't write 'cause he's so gone in that Snow White / Timbaland can't even get him to go to the studio / and it's sad 'cause he's dope — America's next great white hope."

His response was to correct the pharmacology and take the flattery:

Bubba Sparxxx: "I don't know where he was getting his erroneous information. I've definitely done coke in my life, but that wasn't my kryptonite. My kryptonite later in life became meth. But at this time, it was opiates."

"Even the time he dissed me, I thought it was a very complimentary diss… I was like, man, just [diss] me some more, baby."

He notes that around the same period Eminem put out "My Darling," where the line is "Paul Wall's dope and so's Bubba" — the version that actually got released. One song trashes him, the other praises him, and the released one is the compliment.

Paul Rosenberg apologised for the leak

Bubba was in a bad place when he heard it — "I was back in LaGrange, Georgia at the time. I was thinking real low of myself" — and he never considered responding. What he did instead was call Eminem's manager:

Bubba Sparxxx: "I reached out to Paul. I was like, 'Dude, what the fuck, man?' … He's like, 'Bro, I'm sorry that leaked.'"

He clarifies on the episode that this is Paul Rosenberg, not Paul Wall, and adds that he never spoke to Paul Wall about it because he assumes Paul Wall didn't care.

The compliment that took a week to land

The best moment in the episode is not a diss at all. Asked about his ranking among white rappers, Bubba relays what Eminem said to him directly:

"I don't know if you'd have made it if there had never been a me. But whether there was ever a me or not, you deserve the opportunity."

He says it is "to this day one of the best compliments I ever received," and — this is the part that makes it real — that "it took me like a week to even realise what the hell he was saying." He had to call the late Rico Wade to help him work out whether he had been praised or insulted. They talked it out and decided it was praise.

The Dr. Dre beat

Late in the episode, the hosts pose a hypothetical: Jimmy Iovine offers him a record with Eminem, but Em's half is on a Timbaland beat and Bubba's half is on a Dr. Dre beat. Bubba answers instantly:

"I'm gonna eat that Dr. Dre beat up. … I would love to do a record with Eminem. I always wanted to."

The bonus: N.O.R.E. flew a private plane to see "The Great White Hope"

Buried at the 44-minute mark of the Bubba episode is the single best Eminem story either episode produced, and it comes from N.O.R.E. It starts here:

N.O.R.E. was signed to Def Jam. Lyor Cohen — "my favourite CEO" — told him they were leaving at four. N.O.R.E. showed up at the office at one o'clock, assuming a commercial flight:

N.O.R.E.: "He's like, 'Yo, what are you doing here?' I said, 'The flight is at four. It's gonna take us like an hour to get to JFK.' He's like, 'No, we don't do no JFK.' I was like, 'I don't know what we doing.'"

"So he's like, 'Yo, we're going to see The Great White Hope.' And I'm like, I don't know who the hell he's talking about at the time."

They drove to the West Side Highway, took a helicopter to Teterboro, and flew out to what N.O.R.E. describes as Eminem's first tour after "My Name Is" — upstate New York, he thinks Rochester, correcting a host who assumed Detroit. It was, in his telling, the first time he had ever been on a private plane, and he was embarrassed about it.

Then the detail that makes the story:

N.O.R.E.: "As powerful as Lyor Cohen is, he couldn't get backstage. They had to look at me, and I was like, 'Yeah, he's with me.'"

N.O.R.E. doesn't think Cohen was trying to sign Eminem — Em was already at Interscope — but that "he was trying to get something. He wanted to see if it was real." On the way out, Cohen's verdict was three words: "The game will change."

A major-label CEO chartered a helicopter to a small upstate show to confirm a rumour with his own eyes, then couldn't get past the door without a rapper vouching for him. That is 1999 in one anecdote.

What the two episodes add up to

Put them side by side and the shape of the thing is clear.

Ray Daniels' argument is that Eminem's whiteness bought him an exemption from hip hop's commercial obligations, which makes ranking him against people who had no exemption meaningless. Bubba Sparxxx's episode is the natural experiment: a second white rapper, same label, same producer-driven Southern novelty angle, given the identical exemption — and it did not work, because he hadn't done the ten years of stage time. The exemption was real. It just wasn't sufficient.

Mad Skillz's rebuttal covers the rest: whatever doors opened early, the records were the records. And Daniels, in the end, agreed — he put Eminem above Drake and then talked himself into 50 Cent on a touring technicality.

Which is roughly where this argument has landed every time it has been had for twenty-five years. The interesting thing is not the verdict. It is that in the last week of August 2026, with Eminem saying nothing at all, three rappers and an executive spent seven hours litigating it anyway.

Sources. Quotes are from the two REVOLT Drink Champs episodes embedded above: Bubba Sparxxx (August 22, 2026 — Eminem sections at 29:50, 40:15, 43:50 and 2:06:20) and Mad Skillz / Ray Daniels / DJ Epps (August 26, 2026 — Top 5 at 23:00–29:15). First-week figures per Billboard/Nielsen SoundScan historical data.