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Eminem manager denies rumours about scrapped Shady Records compilation (but confirms there was a scrapped Shady Records compilation)
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 18 September 2020
Typical, isn’t it? You wait ages for an official denial officially dismissing claims that Eminem has or had new music to release and then two come along at once.
By ‘at once’, I mean they were about six months apart. Also, it’s probably safe to say that you haven’t been sitting around hoping that Eminem would deny that he’s releasing new music. Also, what we’re talking about now isn’t a denial that he is about to release new music, rather that he planned to last year but didn’t. But you know what, sometimes you just pick the wrong cliché for your opening sentence and then you’re stuck with it. We all make mistakes. I wish you’d just drop it.
Anyway, Eminem was never planning to put out new music to mark the 20th anniversary of his Shady Records label. That’s what you need to know here. “Oh, it’s probably for the 21st anniversary”, you’ll be thinking now. No. It is not. Not least because all this speculation regarding new material hinges on some 20th anniversary logo designs.
Earlier this week, designer Mike Saputo shared various unused ‘Shady XX’ logos on Instagram, writing: “So sometime last year, we started working on some things to celebrate Shady’s 20th. I worked up a ton of logos and other assets for it. Ended up the project never made it to the light of day, unfortunately”.
“So I was left with a whole bunch of stuff I thought came out pretty good, but nowhere to use it”, he went on. “Such is the design life”.
You’ll note that the designer didn’t explain what this abandoned anniversary project would have involved. But his remarks led to speculation that Eminem had been planning to release a new mixtape akin to his ‘Shady XV’ project. That release – put out for the label’s fifteenth anniversary – featured new material from artists on the label’s roster at the time, as well as Eminem himself.
Responding to that speculation a number of Shady Records’ current artists said on Twitter that they had not been aware of any such compilation plans. Tweets that were then somehow interpreted as proof that Eminem had been planning an anniversary release but had kept it secret from his label’s roster. Rather than proof that no such project had ever existed. Which it clearly was.
But if you don’t believe me, well, I have more proof for you. Because Eminem’s manager Paul Rosenberg has now cleared all this up. “None of this is accurate”, he tweeted. “The art was created for a vinyl box set that was scrapped due to production time”.
So that’s the news people. A thing was scrapped. But not the thing that some people thought was scrapped. A slightly different thing was scrapped. So now we know.
In terms of the other new Eminem material denial that we alluded to in that opening line you just will not stop banging on about, well, earlier this year, Eminem tweeted to confirm that he had not released a new album called ‘Marshall Law’. That was in response to a rumour that somehow began when Florida Senator Marco Rubio posted a tweet about martial law not having been declared in the US as a result of COVID-19, but he spelled it “marshall law”.
I think we’re all up to speed now. You know what happened, right? There is not and was never any new music from Eminem. Except that album he put out in January – ‘Music To Be Murdered By’ – which did (and does) exist.
