Eminem Finally Sat Down. It Was About a Cassette He Got for Christmas in 1985.

Ten days ago a Shade 45 host posted nine words and the fanbase decided an interview existed. It does — and as of Saturday you can hear all of it, not just the two minutes SiriusXM clipped. Here is what is actually in it.

On Friday, September 4, 2026, at 7pm ET, Shade 45 aired "Eminem: Back To School (Da Ol Skool Way)": a one hour special in which Eminem plays records that shaped him, with D-Stroy walking him through the stories behind each one. SiriusXM billed it as a Labor Day special. It is the first substantial Eminem interview since the STANS broadcast in August 2025.

When we first published this on Saturday morning, the only pieces of it anyone could hear were two SiriusXM clips totalling two minutes forty. That changed the same day. ePro, the long-running fan outlet, posted a 29 minute 33 second cut of the conversation to YouTube on September 5 — the full talk, with the records that played between segments edited out. We have embedded it below and rewritten this piece around it.

One caveat worth stating plainly: this is a fan upload of a SiriusXM broadcast, not an official release. It may not stay up. The two SiriusXM clips further down are the official ones, and those are not going anywhere.

Everything below is from that audio, with timestamps into the ePro upload. The two SiriusXM clips are still here too — they are the only officially released pieces, and they cover the LL Cool J and student-to-teacher exchanges.

The best thing in it is a stack of blank cassettes

The single most revealing stretch of the hour is not in either clip. Around 3:18, D-Stroy asks about listening to The Wizard on Detroit's WJLB at his grandmother's house. Eminem explains that he owned almost no rap records, so he built a library by stealing one off the radio in his sleep:

Eminem: "It was amazing, because back then I didn't have — like, I might have had one or two cassettes. I didn't have many. So I just had blank cassettes. So I would go to sleep that night and I just hit record, and record The Wizard, and go to sleep. Get up the next morning and see what I got."

And the obvious flaw in the method, which clearly still annoys him:

Eminem: "Sometimes it'd be frustrating, because he'd only play like one verse of 'Go See the Doctor,' like Kool Moe Dee, and then it would go into something else, and you'd be like, fuck, I want to hear the rest of it."

He notes The Wizard was mixing house, hip hop, R&B, funk and techno together "because that's what was going on in Detroit." The Wizard was Jeff Mills, later one of the founding figures of Detroit techno. Eminem does not say the name, and it is not clear he knows it; he is describing a mix show, not a legend.

The other acquisition story is better still. At 4:23:

Eminem: "I remember I bought a bootleg Paid in Full at a gas station for three dollars."

He sums up the whole period at 4:42: "I was getting rap in bits and pieces, and I was a sponge, so I would take whatever I could get. And I didn't even know I wanted to rap yet."

Before the rapping, the drawing

The interview opens somewhere nobody expected. D-Stroy spends the first two minutes on Eminem's comic book art, and specifically on the cover of Eminem Presents: The Re-Up, the 2006 Shady Records compilation whose illustrated sleeve Eminem drew himself. At 0:55 he explains the process:

Eminem: "Yeah, I did it in sections. It took me like two months. I drew everybody separate and then we had to put them in the computer and shrink them down to the same size. That shit was time consuming. I'll never do it again."

On what he was doing while he drew it, he is unsentimental: "I was going through that phase where I was taking a lot of drugs and drawing." The Re-Up came out in December 2006, inside the stretch he has described elsewhere as the worst of his addiction.

There is also a real limitation he volunteers, which reads like a rapper describing sampling:

Eminem: "That's how I learned from comic books when I was a kid. I'm not great at drawing out of my imagination. I have to actually look at something, and I can draw what I see. But I can see a drawing and draw it almost exactly like it is, if I see it."

Uncle Ronnie, the Breakin' soundtrack, and one afternoon

At 2:03, the origin point. Ronnie Polkingharn — Eminem's uncle, functionally a brother, who died in 1991 — brought over the soundtrack to Breakin', and the Ice-T track on it sent him to the film rather than the other way round:

Eminem: "He brought the soundtrack over and that's what made me want to see the movie. He played Ice-T, 'Reckless,' and then Ice-T was in the movie and I was like, oh shit, what's this? [...] In hindsight now, that day changed my life forever."

D-Stroy supplies the detail that Ice-T's on-screen credit in Breakin' is "Rap Talker," which delights Eminem enough that he calls back to it two minutes later, introducing himself as "the Rap Talker, Marshall Mathers."

He also confirms he break danced as a kid — Ronnie taught him — and that he attempted a head spin exactly once, at around twelve. On why he never tried again:

Eminem: "I was like a fudgy ball of dough and I had no business trying to do anything standing on my head."

The boombox on the front lawn

This is SiriusXM's first official clip, and it starts at 5:45 in the full audio. D-Stroy opens with a good question: what did LL Cool J teach you that had nothing to do with music? Eminem refuses the premise and goes to the music first.

Eminem: "Well, at first it was everything to do with music, because when Radio came out, I remember I was 11, and Radio came out and that was like the first album I had. I got that tape for Christmas and it was the first, like, full rap cassette I had, and I used to just play it on repeat front to back, front to back, front to back."

Then he answers the question he was actually asked:

Eminem: "So he impacted me music-wise, and then later in my career, like, I remember reading his book, and he went through a lot of the same I went through as a kid. So I could relate to some of that, but I didn't really know that about him until adulthood, when I read the book."

The book is I Make My Own Rules, LL Cool J's 1997 memoir written with Karen Hunter. It is not a gentle read. LL describes being beaten for years by his mother's boyfriend, and witnessing his father shoot his mother and grandfather when he was four. D-Stroy asks whether it was a stepfather situation. Eminem says yes, something like that, and leaves it there.

On his own first rap, he talks himself through the timeline in real time:

Eminem: "He was what made me want to rap in the first place, being I think 11 or 12. I think 12, maybe, I wrote my first rap, and it was just like LL Cool J. Actually, I think I was 13, because Bad had come out. That's when I wrote my first rap, because it sounded just like Bad."

D-Stroy: "That's the second album."

Eminem: "Yep, that's the second album. Radio, I didn't want to rap yet. I just loved it. I didn't even try yet."

And then the image that makes the clip worth the 106 seconds. In the full audio he places it at his aunt Edna's house — the clip trims the name:

Eminem: "I used to set my little radio on the front lawn and face it up, so the speakers are pointing up to the sky, and just play that and just perform it while cars are driving by in the street."

One line the clip does keep, and which lands differently at 53 than it would have at 30. Asked about the confidence Run-DMC and LL projected, and how badly he wanted it as a kid, he says: "I wish I had it now. I wish I had any confidence right now."

A note on the dates, because they do not quite land

Nothing here is a gotcha, and none of it changes the story. But the ages are two years light in both directions, consistently.

LL Cool J's Radio was released on November 18, 1985. Eminem was born on October 17, 1972, which means he had turned 13 a month before it came out, and was 13 that Christmas, not 11. Bigger and Deffer, the second album he correctly identifies, arrived on May 29, 1987, when he was 14, not 13.

What is striking is that the gap is right. He remembers roughly two years between owning Radio and writing his first verse, and there are eighteen months between the two records. The relative memory is intact; the absolute one runs a couple of years behind. He is audibly reconstructing it out loud rather than reciting it.

How he actually learned to rhyme

From 9:59 onward the special turns into something closer to a technical seminar, and this is the section that most rewards the full audio. Asked which MC first made him wonder how a thing was even done, he names Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, Rakim and Redman, and describes not being able to hear multisyllabic rhyme at first — only noticing it once Kane and G Rap did it on Marley Marl's "The Symphony."

Then, at 10:23, the homework:

Eminem: "I would take words on the paper, and I'd take a phrase [...] and even if it didn't make sense, I would put it on the paper and I would line up the syllables up underneath each phrase, so that every syllable rhymed. Until I got better and better at it, enough to make it make sense. Because at first I was rhyming one and two syllables."

He gives an example phrase of pure nonsense he built to drill the pattern — deliberately meaningless, because meaning came later. This is the clearest account he has given of the mechanics, and it is essentially a stacking exercise on lined paper.

On Rakim, he lands on something more interesting than praise:

Eminem: "When you heard one of his songs, it sounded like something that had been there forever, because of his voice. It wasn't like, oh, this is new. It sounded like something that just existed. It's hard to explain."

And at 13:53 he pre-empts the obvious objection to all of this — the "lyrical miracle" complaint — with a distinction worth quoting in full:

Eminem: "It doesn't make you better just because you're doing this much lyrical complexity. But it is part of a skill set that you learn in hip hop, and it's kind of like hip hop 101. So when I hear rappers that don't do it, I'm like, how do you not know how to do this? [...] Taste in music is subjective, but skill set is not subjective. It's like a basketball player dribbling the ball between his legs and reverse dunking. That's a skill set that doesn't make you LeBron James, but it's a skill set that is essential for you to even compete."

Elsewhere in the same stretch he credits Redman with teaching him that two words that do not rhyme can be bent until they do — "you can take two words that naturally don't rhyme and you can enunciate them to make them rhyme" — and says the Outsidaz were doing the same thing when he met them. He also gets briefly, genuinely annoyed that Masta Ace's early catalogue is hard to find on streaming.

The summer he stopped writing

At 22:29, asked about breath control and physicality, Eminem tells the Treach story. He had heard "O.P.P." and liked it. Then he heard "Yoke the Joker."

Eminem: "To me, I was competitively rapping with all the rappers — even though they didn't hear me, I heard them, and I was trying to compete with them. And when I heard Treach for the first time, bro, I didn't write for the whole summer. [...] I didn't know he was going to be a problem like that. And then when I played that album front to back the first time, every song kept getting more lyrically complex, and every flow — he was a master of doing so many different styles on one album. And I was just like, yo, I'll never be that good. I don't even want to do this anymore."

He also says Treach taught him a specific physical technique — using the upper palate to get force into a delivery — which he says he consciously studied.

The reciprocal question, at 23:28, produces the funniest admission in the hour. Asked which of his own songs he is most comfortable performing without fumbling, he says the slower ones, "Sing for the Moment," anything like that. Asked about "Rap God":

Eminem: "There's no breaths in that. Some of the medulla part, it's just — I forgot to write any space for breaths."

One album, and two sealed copies of it

At 24:46 D-Stroy asks for a single listening assignment: one album every kid going back to school should hear. Eminem answers immediately — Nas, Illmatic — and then gets ambushed by the follow-ups, including one from a third voice in the room asking which Kool G Rap album, which prompts a laughing "I didn't know I was coming here to get grilled, bro."

Then the collector detail:

Eminem: "I have one that I listen to and then I have one that's unopened. Actually, I have two sealed of Illmatic."

The moment it flipped

SiriusXM's second clip is the one that got picked up, and in the full audio it is the closing question, at 25:52. D-Stroy asks when Eminem stopped being the student and became part of somebody else's hip hop education.

Eminem: "Wow. Well, I think being in the underground scene was definitely a learning experience for me. I don't know if I had realised yet, though. When the album dropped and I first started hearing other rappers, like, I felt like they were trying to sound like me. I was like, 'Wait, what the fuck? They're trying to sound like me?' Probably '99."

Third voice: "So after the Slim Shady LP?"

Eminem: "Yeah, after Slim Shady LP dropped. There was some rappers coming up in the underground and shit that, I don't know. I don't think I was there yet. Like, everybody had their own shit, and I didn't realise, like, till the first album dropped that there was, like, now rappers are starting to sound like me. Pretty fucking wild."

The Slim Shady LP came out on February 23, 1999 and sold 283,000 copies in its first week, so his "probably '99" is exact.

An update on the unnamed voice. The Source attributed this follow-up to Paul Rosenberg, unconfirmed from the clip alone in the first version of this piece. The full audio settles half of it: there is definitely a third person in the room, D-Stroy addresses him as Paul at least twice, and he interjects with questions — including the Kool G Rap one that gets him told to fall back. D-Stroy also sends love to Paul Rosenberg by name in the sign-off, consistent with The Source's attribution — a man named Paul is in the room asking questions. No surname is audible on the Slim Shady LP line itself, so that one voice stays labelled rather than named.

Detroit, and the break dance he did not do

At 27:10, asked how important it was to put Detroit's sound into the culture, Eminem declines the credit on factual grounds:

Eminem: "I don't know if I was trying to put Detroit on, because Detroit had already had rappers that had major deals. Awesome Dre. There was a lot of really good Detroit rappers. But it was fun to see the city get worldwide attention, and it was an honour for me to be a part of that."

He names Proof in the same breath as the MCs who shaped him. Asked at the end whether he had anything to add, he offers a closing bit that is the whole tone of the special in two sentences: if they were all in the studio together he would break dance for them — "and I would not spin on my head." He confirms he never had a B-boy name.

Every remaining replay

You no longer have to catch a broadcast to hear the conversation, which is what changed on Saturday. But the broadcast is the only place to hear it as a show — with the Ice-T, Newcleus, LL Cool J, Masta Ace, Redman and Naughty by Nature records playing in the gaps, which is the half ePro's cut removes. These are the airings still listed on Shade 45's schedule as of Saturday, September 5, all times ET:

After Tuesday the schedule is empty. Nothing is listed for September 9 onward.

Closing the loop on our own piece

On August 25 we published a piece arguing that the "new Eminem interview" rumour was one post with no date, and listed five things that would confirm it. Four have now happened: SiriusXM programmed it with a date and time, published a blog post, released clips, and put a full description on the channel listing. The fifth, a post from Eminem's own accounts, has not surfaced, which is exactly the pattern we described.

We got the shape right and the subject wrong. We said it would be satellite-first with clipped highlights doing the heavy lifting, loose, and more about craft and memory than news. That is precisely what it is. We also guessed it would touch the charity sneaker auction, the Dolly Parton letter or the Lions. It touches none of them. It is an hour about being 13 in Detroit with a cassette.

There is one more piece of symmetry worth noting. In April 2024, when D-Stroy launched CTRL ALT DSTROY on Shade 45, Eminem recorded him a welcome: "D-Stroy, this is Eminem. Welcome to our station. Suck it." Two and a half years later, D-Stroy is the one who got him to talk about the boombox.

Sources. This piece was first published on the morning of September 5, 2026, from the two SiriusXM clips alone, and substantially rewritten later that day once the full conversation became available: the two SiriusXM YouTube clips published September 3, 2026 (1:46 and 0:54), and ePro's 29:33 upload of the full conversation published September 5, 2026, with timestamps into that upload given inline. The ePro upload is a fan post of a SiriusXM broadcast and may be removed. Passages where Eminem recites other artists' lyrics are described rather than reproduced. Broadcast details, the special's title and description, and the replay schedule come from SiriusXM's Shade 45 channel listing and its September 4, 2026 blog post by Matt Simeone. Release dates: Radio, November 18, 1985; Bigger and Deffer, May 29, 1987; The Slim Shady LP, February 23, 1999; Eminem Presents: The Re-Up, December 5, 2006. Eminem's date of birth, October 17, 1972. LL Cool J's memoir I Make My Own Rules, published 1997 with Karen Hunter. Ronnie Polkingharn died in 1991. D-Stroy is David Melendez, of the Arsonists, who began hosting on Shade 45 in April 2024. Replay times are from Shade 45's published schedule on September 5, 2026, converted from UTC to Eastern, and subject to change by the channel.