Hit-Boy Tells the Story He Never Told: Kanye Wanted Eminem on His Song, and Ended the Relationship When He Said No

One of the great lost Eminem features, killed in 2013 by a producer protecting his father's verse.

Hit-Boy sat down with Go with Elmo Lovano for a long career interview, and thirty-seven minutes in he told a story he says he has never told publicly. It is flagged in the episode's own cold open, so he knew what he was giving them.

The year is 2013. Hit-Boy has already produced "Niggas in Paris" and "Clique" for Kanye West, which is as close to the centre of that world as a producer got. He has also just finished an album of his own.

Hit-Boy: "It's a song I made called 'Grindin' My Whole Life.' I never told this story. Basically I had made this album and 'Grindin' My Whole Life' was on the album, and I went to play the album for Kanye, just on some one-on-one, chopping it with him, playing the album. Like 2013. And he was like, bro, I like this song. He's like, you should let me get the song."

Set to start at 37:31. The full exchange runs to about 40:00.

Why he said no

The refusal is the part people are skipping, and it is the only part that makes the decision readable.

Hit-Boy: "Mind you, my dad had just got out. My dad was on the song. This was like my breakout for my label. I had all my artists on the song. It was a moment, right? So I'm like, bro, I got my peoples on here. You could take the beat, do your version, keep the 'Grindin' My Whole Life' concept."

His father is Big Hit, who is on the record alongside N.No, B. Carr, Audio Push, Bmacthequeen and Kent M$NEY. It was a posse cut for the label Hit-Boy was trying to launch, built around a verse from a man who had just come home.

Then the ask that would have replaced all of them.

Hit-Boy: "He was like, I want to put 2 Chainz and Eminem and all these people. In retrospect, I should have just did that, you know? It sounds crazy, but I was that gung-ho about, I'm about to put me and my people on."

He offered the obvious compromise and cited precedent for it: "Take it, do your version. We could do it like how you and Twista did 'Slow Jamz.' He used it on his album, you used it on your album. It was all good. So he was like, alright, cool."

The version that exists. Big Hit's verse is the one Hit-Boy would not trade.

The email

Hit-Boy: "And then he emailed me like the next day and was like, bro, if you don't give me this song, we not working no more. And I had to make a decision as a man, to be like, I'm probably about to not have a relationship with Kanye no more. And I just was like, then I just passed on it."

He is careful not to make it a single incident. "It's deeper than that. We had a lot of back and forth bumping heads back in there. But that was the nail in the coffin." He hopped on a Game record West appeared on around 2020, "a couple little sparse things here and there," and that is the extent of it since.

He also names the cost in plain terms. "I had to sacrifice the fame part of that, the clout part of that. I had to really kind of feel like I started from ground zero."

What it would have been

Eminem and Kanye West have shared exactly one commercially released record: "Forever," the 2009 posse cut with Drake and Lil Wayne from the More Than a Game soundtrack. Four rappers, one beat, no follow-up in seventeen years.

A 2013 Kanye version of "Grindin' My Whole Life" with 2 Chainz and Eminem would have landed in the gap between Yeezus and The Marshall Mathers LP 2, which is to say at the exact moment both men were making the hardest-edged music of their late careers. It also would have been the second Eminem and 2 Chainz record, more than a decade before the first one arrived: "Kyrie and Luka," the DJ Premier-produced track from the 2024 bonus edition of The Death of Slim Shady.

None of it happened, because a producer would not take his father off a song. That is a better reason than most lost collaborations get.

Sources. Quotes are from "Hit-Boy: From Kanye and Jay-Z to Kendrick and Nas, The Story of a Hip-Hop Super Producer," posted to the Go with Elmo Lovano channel. The Kanye exchange runs from 37:31 to roughly 40:00, and the same clip is used in the episode's cold open at 1:38. "Grindin' My Whole Life" is credited on Hit-Boy's own channel to N.No, B. Carr, Big Hit, Audio Push, Bmacthequeen and Kent M$NEY. Hit-Boy produced "Niggas in Paris" (2011) and "Clique" (2012). "Forever" was released in September 2009. "Kyrie and Luka" appeared on the bonus edition of The Death of Slim Shady in 2024. Kanye West's side of this account has not been given; everything above is Hit-Boy's recollection.