Mother of Manchester bombing victim says Eminem is 'vile' for mentioning attack in new rap

Maggie Parker

The mother of one of the Manchester bombing victims has some words for Marshall Mathers.Eminem released a freestyle on Friday called “Kick-Off.” In it, he mentions the bombing that killed 22 people at Ariana Grande’s Manchester concert in May 2017.

In the song, the rapper references the bombing as well as the assailant, Salman Ramadan Abedi.

“There’s not a redeeming quality at all in me,” he begins. “Positive clean thoughts intervene/But they’re all either altered and mean/Assault and demean, tossed and they’re being lost in the scheme,” he continues describing his thoughts. “Squashed in between a brainwashing machine/Like an Islamic regime, a jihadist extreme radical/Suicide bomber that’s seeing/Ariana Grande sing her last song of the evening,” he spews in the track. “And as the audience from the damn concert is leaving/Detonates the device strapped to his abdominal region.”

He stops himself. “I’m not gonna finish that, for obvious reasons,” he says before moving onto the next thought.

Charlotte Hodgson, whose 15-year-old daughter Olivia Campbell-Hardy lost her life in the bombing that Eminem is referring to, came across the track and was disgusted by it.

“I didn’t think anybody could do this and be so disrespectful to us all,” Hodgson told the Manchester Evening News. “It’s vile and he is a vile human for doing it,” she adds. “Why would anyone compare themselves to a Jihadist or a bomber? I think he needs help if he sees himself like that.”

She also said that she could not understand Eminem’s fans. “Why would anyone want to listen to it for entertainment?” she asked. “Ariana did a very respectful song in memory of everyone there and that was lovely, a fantastic gesture, as she was involved too, but why would people want to make money out of such an horrific event?” she said, criticizing the rapper.

It could be because Eminem views freestyling as a form of combat, which he explains at the beginning of the video. “I’ve always looked at battle rap as competition or war,” he says. “And the main objective is to destroy, completely f***ing obliterate, your opponent by saying anything and everything, whatever the f*** you can, to get a reaction from the crowd,” he explained. Because of this, “nothing’s off limits.”

Many social media users, though, are on Hodgson’s side.

However, others don’t see the problem.

After the 2017 attack, Eminem helped raise money for the victims.

Still, the event remains a sensitive subject for Hodgson. “It kills me everyday,” she said. “At times it’s worse, as at the beginning, we were kept so busy. Now that things are quiet and we have time to think, it’s hitting hard.” Campbell-Hardy would have turned 17 on Nov. 28, two days before Eminem released this track. “We had a little party for her and raised a glass, but it’s just not the same.”

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