Eminem Finally Answered the Kid Rock Backlash Himself. It Took Him Two Sentences.

We flagged two weeks ago that every defense of the Eminem and Kid Rock collaboration had come from Kid Rock, not Eminem. That changed the night the album dropped.

When we covered the fan backlash over Eminem's feature on Kid Rock's "Halfway 2 Jesus" back on October 4, we noted a gap in the record: Eminem himself had said nothing about the criticism. Kid Rock had been doing all the talking, in his album foreword and in interviews, about why the two of them could stay friends across a 2017 freestyle that told fans like him to pick a side. That gap closed on Saturday, October 17, hours after the album actually came out.

The post

Eminem wrote two sentences on X:

Eminem: "Not about choosing sides, just choosing to make music with my old friend. Praying for all of us."

Eminem's October 17 post, his first direct public comment on the backlash.

It is a short statement, but it is doing specific work. "Choosing sides" is a callback, intentional or not, to the exact language of his own 2017 BET Hip Hop Awards freestyle, where he told fans who supported Donald Trump that they had to pick between him and the president. For nine years, that was the standing precedent: Em drew a line, and said he was fine losing fans over it. His answer here is not that the line moved. It is that a 40-year friendship with one specific person on the other side of it was never inside that line to begin with.

What Kid Rock had already said

Kid Rock had been framing it the same way for weeks, but it was his framing, not Eminem's. In the album's liner notes, he called Eminem "my old friend" and said the two had "stayed friends through it all" despite differing politics. He repeated the point in a Billboard interview tied to the release, saying he never wanted to pull Eminem into his political world and that the two only talk about politics occasionally. Asked why Eminem appears on just one track rather than the "7 Sins" feature originally announced, Kid Rock joked that doing two songs together would have people thinking "we're dating," and described the album itself as being about forgiveness and second chances.

That track swap is its own story, one we already reported in detail: Kid Rock moved Eminem off "7 Sins" and onto "Heal My Faith," and Lil Wayne took the open slot. By the time "Halfway 2 Jesus" actually shipped, the Kid Rock feature everyone had been waiting on was live, and so, within hours, was Eminem's statement.

What's in the verse itself

Several outlets covering the album's release described the content of Eminem's "Heal My Faith" verse as addressing the political divide directly, with one line describing Kid Rock as his brother rather than his political enemy. We have not independently transcribed the verse against the master audio ourselves, so treat that specific phrasing as reported by Consequence and other outlets covering the album, not as a line we verified word for word. What we can confirm independently is the two-sentence X post above, which carries Eminem's name directly and matches across every outlet that covered it, including Rolling Stone, Billboard and AllHipHop.

The history this is actually about

None of this is a new friendship getting tested for the first time. Kid Rock appeared on Eminem's "Berzerk" video in 2013, and the two go back to 1998, when Eminem was still unknown outside Michigan. The clearest earlier marker of the "friends despite politics" line came in October 2024, the same week Eminem introduced Barack Obama at a Kamala Harris rally in Detroit, when he and Kid Rock traded posts about the Detroit Lions instead: "Here's one thing @KidRock and I do agree on... GO @Lions!!!!" Kid Rock wrote back that it showed "what class is." Saturday's post is the same move, just applied directly to the album instead of a football score.

What is still unconfirmed

A few things in the wider coverage are worth flagging rather than repeating as fact. We could not independently verify an exact timestamp for Eminem's post beyond "hours after the album's release" on Saturday, October 17, since the post itself carries no public timestamp visible in the coverage we reviewed. Kid Rock's quote about not wanting to pull Eminem into his political world comes from a Billboard interview we were not able to access directly due to a paywall redirect; we are relying on it as reported identically across multiple outlets rather than from the interview audio itself. And reporting on Eminem's own next solo album, which came up in passing in coverage of this story, remains speculation with no confirmation from Eminem, his label, or Paul Rosenberg, so we are not treating it as news here.

What is settled is the headline fact: after two weeks of Kid Rock speaking for both of them, Eminem spoke for himself. Thirty-one words, one prayer, and the same "old friend" framing Kid Rock had been using all along, now with Marshall Mathers's own name on it.

Header image: Kid Rock and Eminem in an archival photo shown in a Fox News Digital interview segment (video frame). Credit: Fox News Digital.