On Wednesday, Eminem dropped a new seven-minute song called “Campaign Speech” seemingly out of the blue, and like a lot of Eminem songs, it featured him name-dropping a handful of celebrities. Donald Trump, Robin Thicke, and Colin Kaepernick all made the cut.
But the celebrity shout-out that raised the most eyebrows in the sports community came near the end of the song when Eminem devoted about 30 seconds to rapping about ESPN First Take moderator Molly Qerim. Here’s what he said:
This is hardly the first time Eminem has said something like this about a female celebrity on a song, but within just minutes of the track being released, there were more than a few people tagging Jalen Rose—who is currently dating Qerim—on Twitter and asking what he thought about the rapper name-dropping his girlfriend. Like Eminem, Rose is from Detroit, so people immediately started to wonder if Eminem had some sort of beef with Rose and called for Rose to respond:
We actually thought Rose would ignore what Eminem said, but on Wednesday’s episode of ESPN's Jalen & Jacoby, Rose addressed it and said that he’s not upset at all about Eminem including a shout-out to Qerim on "Campaign Speech." He did say that he was taken aback the first time he heard Qerim’s name mentioned, but he explained that he didn’t see the shout-out the same way that a lot of other people did. Here’s the interaction that Rose and his co-host David Jacoby had about the song:
You can head here to listen to the Jalen & Jacoby podcast in its entirety. Qerim still hasn’t responded to the shout-out yet, but if you missed the interview we did with her back in January, you can check it out here.