“Yeah, He's Hip-Hop, Bro”: Glasses Malone Shuts Down the Ray Daniels Eminem Take

The Watts rapper who famously argues Drake and Kanye are not hip-hop got asked whether Eminem is. His answer is why the Daniels take keeps losing the room.

The Ray Daniels debate has now been running for almost a month, and it keeps producing the same result: a respected voice from inside the culture gets asked about it and sides with Eminem. The latest is Glasses Malone, on episode 697 of The Bootleg Kev Podcast, published September 17. When Kev brought up "a recent clip of Ray Daniels talking about Eminem not being hip-hop," Malone did not wait for the full question.

Glasses Malone: "They tripping."

Bootleg Kev: "Is Eminem hip-hop?"

Glasses Malone: "Yeah. Eminem ain't black. He's hip-hop though."

Why that answer carries unusual weight: Malone is arguably the most restrictive gatekeeper in these conversations. This is the same man who went viral on the same podcast arguing that Drake and Kanye West are not hip-hop, which is exactly why Kev pressed him on it. When the culture's toughest bouncer waves you in, the list argument has a problem.

Set to start at 20:16, where the Eminem segment begins. It runs about seven minutes.

"As good as rap can happen"

Malone's fuller answer is more interesting than a simple defense, because he refuses to make Em an alien. "Eminem is very much from a street urban cultural background. He's not behind on that," he said, placing him inside the culture by biography, not by exception. On skill, he coined the line of the whole news cycle: "I don't think Eminem was that much better than everybody. So Eminem raps as good as rap can happen." When Kev put him alongside Nas, Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar, Malone agreed: "They're all very much in the same tier."

He even gave Daniels his due on the commercial point, which makes the rebuttal sharper, not weaker: "Whether or not you thought he was better than Jay-Z or better than Snoop or better than Kendrick Lamar, even if you thought he was better, he's not 8 million records better." Race moved units, Malone concedes. "But him being hip-hop is for sure probably one thing that's not in question." Asked if Em belongs in the GOAT conversation: "Sure. Dude is phenomenal. He is top 10."

What Daniels actually argued

Worth restating accurately, because the clips flatten it. On the Drink Champs roundtable that started all this, which we broke down when the clips first went viral in August, Daniels called Eminem "the top five rappers of all time" in the same breath as excluding him: "I don't put him in a hip-hop list 'cause I think it's unfair." His argument is about rules, not skill. "Everybody got to make a club record, a girl record. Eminem made a record dissing his mom and sold more records than anybody. That's because he's white." Mad Skillz told him on the spot: "Your list invalid. He on the list."

The full four-hour episode finally hit YouTube on September 13, which is what reignited everything and queued up the responses now rolling in week after week.

Denaun made it personal

The other response worth your time came from inside the camp. Denaun Porter, in the same 3rd Verse sitting that has been generating headlines all month, spent twenty minutes on Daniels, and his angle was different from Malone's: he says Daniels knows better.

Denaun Porter: "When he said that shit I was pissed. [...] I know that Ray only saying that for likes and clicks. I know that for 100% sure fact, because I also know that he personally told me that he has respect for him."

He also dismantled the "dissed his mom" example with the obvious reading: "Most people don't want nobody to know the shit that their mama did to them. It wasn't like he dissed his mother, man. That was his trauma." And to Daniels' claim that no producer ever said they had a beat before Eminem got it, Denaun, who has produced for Em for nearly thirty years, simply noted that he personally had beats Eminem ended up rapping on.

The scoreboard, a month in

Since the clips surfaced in late August, the on-record responses have been Mad Skillz ("your list invalid"), Denaun ("likes and clicks"), and now Glasses Malone ("they tripping"), with Daniels himself holding the position mostly alone. Eminem has said nothing, which is the most on-brand response available; he addressed this entire genre of conversation on "White America" twenty-four years ago and has rarely felt the need to update it.

The debate will keep finding microphones, because it is a perfect podcast topic: unfalsifiable, emotional, and about the biggest catalog numbers in rap history. But it is worth noticing what even its author concedes. Top five of all time, by the account of the man who started the argument. The only dispute is which list he goes on. As problems go, Eminem has had worse.