Joe Budden Trashed “Heal My Faith.” He Still Said Eminem “Ate” on It.

Joe Budden has called Eminem "dated" and "uninformed" on this same show. This week he still gave him the verse.

Joe Budden does not hand out praise for Eminem lightly, and he has the receipts to prove it. So when a new episode of The Joe Budden Podcast turned to Kid Rock's "Heal My Faith," the track where Eminem raps about their three-decade friendship, the reaction was never going to be simple. Budden hated the record. He did not hate the verse, and he said so in specific terms, first reported by eminem.news.

The clip, posted by the channel Joe Budden Pod Reactions. Quotes below come from eminem.news's write-up of the segment; there is no official transcript yet, so treat exact wording as reported rather than independently timestamped.

The verdict: bad song, good verse

Budden drew a hard line between the record and the rapping on it. On the song itself, as quoted by eminem.news, he didn't mince words:

Joe Budden: "The song is absolutely horrible, 'cause Kid Rock."

On the collaboration as a decision, he was just as blunt: "I don't love the choice. He didn't have to rap with Kid Rock." But on what Eminem actually did with the sixteen bars, Budden flipped entirely:

Joe Budden: "I thought he absolutely smoked that verse." And later: "As a rapper, he ate."

Per eminem.news, Budden went further than a passing compliment, saying that when Eminem is making a point the way he does on "Heal My Faith," which runs through the Viper Room, Dr. Dre and the Oakwood apartments before landing on the line "he is my brother, not my political enemy," he doesn't think anybody else can match him. Budden reportedly singled out the flow and the way the verse explains the song's whole backstory in real time, even while saying he would have wanted a different hook and more straightforward hip-hop production under it.

Marc Lamont Hill wasn't having the message

The split in the room didn't stop at Budden. Co-host Marc Lamont Hill, the CUNY Graduate Center professor who has sat on the show's panel since 2024, reportedly pushed back on the actual substance of "Heal My Faith," not the bars. The song's pitch, as Kid Rock has described it to Billboard and as Eminem reinforced in his own post announcing the album, is that a decades-old friendship can survive opposite politics. Hill rejected that framing on air, according to eminem.news, which places this squarely inside the backlash that has followed the collaboration since it was first announced: fans and commentators split on whether "choosing not to choose sides" is itself a side.

That is the same fault line Eminem tried to close with two sentences on X when the album dropped: "Not about choosing sides, just choosing to make music with my old friend." Budden's panel didn't buy the premise even while one of them bought the rapping.

Why Budden grading a verse is the story

The reason this clip is worth a headline, and not just podcast noise, is who is saying it. Budden and Eminem have a public history that goes back further than most of Eminem's current collaborators. Budden left Shady Records and Slaughterhouse on rocky terms, and when Eminem used Kamikaze in 2018 to go after critics of Revival, Budden was one of two names he aimed at directly. Budden answered on this same podcast at the time, calling Eminem "dated" and "uninformed" and saying flatly that he'd "been better than you this entire fucking decade." That album is still the one Eminem fans point to most, eight years later, and the Budden feud is a permanent footnote to it.

None of that history disappeared this week. Budden still thinks the song is a mistake and still isn't on board with the politics-don't-matter pitch. What changed is narrower and, inside that history, more notable: on the specific sixteen bars Eminem wrote about Kid Rock, the guy who has called him dated and uninformed said nobody else writes it better. It is not a reconciliation. It is a rapper with a decade of scores to settle grading another rapper's bars on their own terms, and giving him the win.

What we could not verify

We have not found an official transcript or timestamped clip from The Joe Budden Podcast's own channel for this segment, only the reaction upload and eminem.news's account of it. The quotes above match what eminem.news published, and the video confirms the episode exists and is about these songs, but we could not independently confirm the exact wording or the order the co-hosts spoke in. We also could not confirm which full episode number this clip is drawn from, since reaction channels often post it before the parent show's own upload goes up.

Header image: Joe Budden on The Joe Budden Podcast (frame from YouTube clip). Credit: Joe Budden Network.