YG Built a Song Around Eminem's 'Kill You' — and Flipped Its Rage Into Reflection

One of the more surprising Eminem moments of the year didn't come from Eminem. It came from YG.

On June 19, 2026, the Compton rapper released his new album The Gentlemen's Club (via 4Hunnid/10K Projects), a 15-track record stacked with features from Tyler, the Creator, Pusha T, J.I.D, Ab-Soul and Buddy. But the song that's caught the most attention from the Eminem corner of the internet is the third track, "Kudos" — because it's built directly on top of one of Slim Shady's most infamous flows.

What YG Actually Did

"Kudos" flips the hook and post-chorus from "Kill You," the venomous track that opens Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP back in 2000. If you know "Kill You," you'll feel it the second the hook lands — the cadence is unmistakable.

Crucially, this isn't a straight sample lift. It's an interpolation: YG and his team re-recorded the part, refined the string arrangement underneath it, and dialed the intensity way down. Where "Kill You" is all bared teeth, YG's version moves at a slower, heavier, more melancholy tempo. The hook he lands on — "Kudos to everything that made me / But lately, everything I ain't into" — turns Eminem's snarl into something closer to a reckoning with his own past.

Same Flow, Opposite Emotion

That tonal inversion is the whole point, and it's what makes the borrow interesting rather than lazy. On the opener of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem uses that cadence to attack — it's provocation as performance, designed to make you flinch. YG takes the exact same rhythmic pocket and uses it to look backward, with a kind of appreciation and weariness for everything that shaped him.

It's a neat demonstration of something true about great flows: the cadence is an instrument all by itself. Strip away the words and the rage, keep the rhythm, and you can play an entirely different feeling on it. Eminem wrote a weapon. YG turned it into a mirror.

Why Eminem Is in the Credits

Because "Kudos" reworks the actual melodic and rhythmic hook of "Kill You," the song carries the original's writing and production DNA in its credits. Eminem is listed as a co-writer, alongside the two men who built the original beat — Dr. Dre and Mel-Man, who produced "Kill You" together in 2000.

There's a deeper layer of lineage here worth appreciating. "Kill You" itself was built on a sample of French jazz pianist Jacques Loussier's "Pulsion." So "Kudos" is, in a sense, a third generation of that same musical idea — Loussier to Dre and Em, and now to YG — which is exactly how hip-hop has always carried its DNA forward.

The Quiet Subtext

What makes this land as more than a fun bit of trivia is who's doing the borrowing. YG has never been especially vocal about Eminem as a formative influence — his lane, his catalog, and his West Coast lineage point in other directions entirely. So for him to construct one of the most personal, reflective songs on his new album around an Eminem hook is a real tell about where Marshall Mathers sits in the genre's bloodstream.

You don't reach for "Kill You" as a scaffold unless that song is lodged so deep in the culture that its cadence reads as common language. Twenty-six years after it kicked off The Marshall Mathers LP, artists with no obvious stylistic debt to Eminem are still mining its bones — not to imitate him, but because the architecture is strong enough to hold a completely different house.

The Bigger Picture

This is the kind of legacy moment that doesn't show up on a plaque. "Kill You" already has its certifications and its place in the canon. But influence is measured in a second, slower currency: how often other artists, years later, instinctively reach for your work as raw material — and how far they can bend it from your original intent and still have it work.

YG bent "Kill You" about as far as it can go — from homicidal provocation to a grown man taking stock of his life — and it held. That's not a knock on either artist. It's a compliment to both: to Eminem for writing a flow durable enough to survive the transplant, and to YG for hearing reflection inside a song that was originally pure rage. On an album full of features, the most interesting collaborator on The Gentlemen's Club might be the one who never set foot in the studio.