N.O.R.E. and DJ EFN recently welcomed Benzino to Drink Champs, where the former publisher of The Source had an emotional moment. But it took him awhile to get there. Slamming alcohol throughout the nearly three-hour interview, he got progressively more intoxicated until he was a blubbering mess.
However, Benzino did manage to utter some words of wisdom regarding the rap community as a whole—while touching on his decades-long beef with Eminem and tumultuous relationship with his rapper daughter, Coi Leray. At one point, he admitted he’d be willing to make peace with Eminem if he allowed it but was disappointed by how much it affected his father-daughter dynamic.
“I don’t have nothing against Eminem,” he said. “He can rap, but I care about us [Leray] more. I don’t want to talk about it no more. My daughter came to industry figuring ‘I gotta be cool with Eminem because everybody is against my dad.’ I don’t hate Eminem. I don’t know him to hate him. I don’t hate white people, tired of this s###, man. It’s just too much. I don’t want to be the bad guy.”
As the interview came to a close, Benzino encouraged everyone to come together in unity. But because he was so drunk, DJ EFN and N.O.R.E. were having trouble getting him to sit down. As N.O.R.E. tried to bring up the transgender allegations, Benzino cut him off and claimed, “I’m a gangster. I’ll kill people”—then quickly changed his tune.
“Hip-Hop was given to us by God to save us,” he continued, stumbling. “The bottom line of all this is we gotta come together and stop bullshitting with each other and stop criticizing each other and disrespecting each other. We gotta unify together. Even if we wrong and we make mistakes, we gotta come together. Enough is enough. They using it against us bro. Let’s come together. The world loves us. Let’s just come together. Even the young n###s everywhere. Let’s just stop. I love y’all n###s. There’s no reason to be killing each other and going against each other. We all come from nothing. It’s a blessing we can feed each other’s families from this s###? Why are we like this?”
A source close to Drink Champs told AllHipHop both DJ EFN and N.O.R.E. attempted to get Benzino to slow down on his alcohol consumption, but he didn’t listen. It’s evident in the clip, too. Watch the full interview above. The Eminem and Coi Leray discussion kicks off around the two-hour and 30-minute mark.
