Songfacts®:

• Bad Meets Evil is an American Hip Hop duo composed of Eminem and Royce da 5'9. The two first met in 1997 at a concert in their home city of Detroit and soon formed Bad Meets Evil (Royce as Bad and Eminem as Evil). They released just a few recordings, including "Bad Meets Evil" which appeared on Eminem's major label debut, The Slim Shady LP. The rappers pursued solo careers after their initial work together and became embroiled in a feud. Sadness over the tragic shooting death of their mutual friend Proof in 2006 led to mended fences and Royce was featured on D12's 2008 mixtape Return of The Dozen and later went on tour with the group. With rap stalwarts Joe Budden, Crooked I and Joell Ortiz, Royce formed Slaughterhouse, which is signed to Eminem's Shady Records.
  
  The two Detroit rappers also recorded an EP together, and this is the first official single from the set. "Royce and I started hanging out again and inevitably that led us back into the studio," said Eminem. "At first we were just seeing where it went without any real goal in mind, but the songs started to come together crazy, so here we are."
• The reunion forced Royce to step his game up lyrically. "To me, Eminem is one of the greatest rappers ever. So if you're standing in there with him and watching him create, you can only spit on a certain level in order to even keep up," Royce told MTV News. "With me, I feel like it's good for me because I get pushed. It brings more out of me."
• Royce told HipHopDX.com that the Bad Meets Evil project came about after he and Eminem got back into the studio together again. "Normally, if you gonna do an LP where Em is involved, you start with a plan and then you go in and you do records," he explained. "This didn't come together like that; it just happened naturally. We just started cuttin' songs, just to be working with each other again, with no intent in mind. We didn't even know we were gonna do that many songs, so at around five or six songs, we lookin' like, 'Yo, man, we got these records, I think we should do something with 'em.' That's when we decided, 'You know what? We can just do this as Bad Meets Evil and just make it an EP.'"
• Miami-based reggae producer Supa Dups and his Black Chiney production partner Jason "JG" Gilbert were the original creators of the song for which the duo sampled their own vocals. "Me and my partner JG: He and I made the beat together. We just wanted to make a beat with just our mouths," Dups explained to MTV News.
• The two producers originally didn't have Slim Shady in mind when they made the beat. Dups explained to MTV News: "We just had the track and submitted it off to 50 Cent, Nicki Minaj and a couple of others. But Eminem, when we heard he wanted it, we were like, 'Cool, we'll hold it. That's Eminem.'
  
  I didn't even know the project was coming out. I didn't know what the beat was for; I just knew Eminem asked me for the files and I sent it to them," he continued. "When I saw Eminem in L.A. for Grammy weekend, Eminem said, 'Yeah, he ripped the track.' Later on that day, I met Royce, and Royce was like, 'Yeah, download that track man. We ripped that track. That's the first single.' I was like, 'What?' But until then, I still wasn't sure."
• The soulful singer of the hook is Aftermath artist and song writer Sly Pyper who previously lent his vocals to Dr. Dre's first Detox single "Kush." Sly explained his involvement on the Bad Meets Evil tune to MTV News: "It's part of the many years I've actually been working with Dr. Dre. Recently, we came out to Detroit, and [Dre] was doing some collabs with Em already. Em had part of a hook that he asked me to come and just lay my vocals on, lay the velvet on. So I got involved, wrote a couple of pieces on the hook as well."