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Eminem has told presidential candidate and terrible rapper Vivek Ramaswamy to stop using his music on the campaign trail.
In a letter addressed to the Ramaswamy campaign’s attorney, music licenser Broadcast Music, Inc. revoked rights to use Eminem’s music after the rapper himself contacted the company.
“’BMI will consider any performance of the Eminem Works by the Vivek 2024 campaign from this date forward to be a material breach of the Agreement for which BMI reserves all rights and remedies with respect thereto,” the letter continued.
First reported in the Daily Mail, the notice, dated Aug. 23, came just 11 days after Ramaswamy’s viral impromptu “Lose Yourself” performance at the Iowa State Fair.
“Vivek just got on the stage and cut loose. To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to the real slim shady,” Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told ABC News regarding the letter from BMI.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for Ramaswamy, suggested the campaign will obey the request in a statement to HuffPost.
Ramaswamy said in a 2006 interview with his alma mater’s newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, that “Lose Yourself” was a go-to for his rapper alter ego “Da Vek.”
Ramaswamy compared a Black woman to a Grand Wizard
Ramaswamy has also sparked a firestorm with comments comparing Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Black Democrat representing Massachusetts, to “modern grand wizards” of the Ku Klux Klan.
Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old businessman who has been running a GOP campaign in the mode of a millennial Donald Trump, initially made the remark Friday during a campaign stop in Iowa before doubling down in the face of criticism Sunday and Monday.
According to The Hill, the fight started when Ramaswamy on Friday in Iowa criticized remarks Pressley made in 2019 as racist.
Pressley at the time during an event at Netroots Nation, a liberal conference said that Democrats don’t “need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice.”
Pressley’s spokesperson at the time told The Washington Post that Pressley’s point was that “diversity at the table doesn’t matter if there’s not real diversity in policy.”
On Sunday, after Pressley ripped him for the remarks, Ramaswamy said he brought up the 2019 comments “to provoke an open and honest discussion in this country,” he told CNN’s “Inside Politics.”
Pressley had hit back at Ramaswamy’s comparison on MSNBC’s “Politics Nation” over the weekend, calling “the verbal assault” from the presidential hopeful “shameful” and “dangerous.”
“It is not that long ago that we were besieged by images of white supremacists carrying tiki torches in Charlottesville. It was not that long ago that a white supremacist mob seized the Capitol, waving Confederate flags and erecting nooses on the West Lawn of the Capitol,” Pressley told the host, the Rev. Al Sharpton.
She added that her “ancestors and living family members have been brutalized, lynched, raped by the Ku Klux Klan.”