Oh boy, Eminem is in trouble. An audio leak of unused lyrics from a 2009 session had Slim saying “Of course I side with Chris Brown, I’d beat a bitch down too.” Which is not ideal. But I think we need to put some thought into what this means before we get our pitchforks.

First of all, the audio clip, which surfaced on Reddit, is from ten years ago. People change a lot in 10 years. Ten years ago Marvel movies were still good, Donald Trump was a reality TV star and whoever Leonard DiCaprio is dating was learning her times tables (and I’m guessing she never grasped them). At the time, Eminem was really pushing a misogynist image that he appears to have moved on from.

Secondly, and this is still related, these were lyrics in a song and not something he said in an interview or expressed as a viewpoint he had. Brian Wilson doesn’t really want to go to Kokomo, which is not even a real place anyway and Don Henley unfortunately didn’t get trapped for eternity in a haunted hotel.

In 2013, The Onion ran a story with the headline “Eminem Terrified As Daughter Begins Dating Man Raised On His Music.” The comedy in this is, of course, that Eminem doesn’t actually believe the terrible things he says in his music. And this is far from the worst thing he’s ever said in a song.

But also, he didn’t really say it in a song. He considered saying it in a song. They lyric was obviously cut from the final version of the song, ‘Things Get Worse’ when it eventually released. Now, we don’t know exactly why it was cut, but I don’t think it’s fair to assume Eminem stands behind this lyric when he never put it in the final version of the song; obviously, for whatever reason, he felt it was inappropriate.

Now, some people were angry over the deleted lyric, like supermodel Emily Rattata, who is in the top percentage of Emilys and had this to say on Twitter.

Bye Eminem you’re an actual joke https://t.co/MgsQM4NN5U

— Emily Ratajkowski (@emrata) November 6, 2019

Like I said, I don’t think it’s fair. He’s essentially playing a character, it was 10 years ago and he ended up cutting the lyric, making it more of a thought he had than a thing he said.

I understand why people would be mad about it, Chris Brown is a huge piece of shit and people get unreasonably angry about this sort of thing now, but I think it’s safe to say Eminem doesn’t actually think beating the shit out of your girlfriend is a good thing.