Chris Kirkpatrick recalled the moment he found out that Eminem wrote a diss track about him.
The NSYNC member remembered that the song Without Me, which called him out, came as a surprise to him in 2002.
“We did a show in Miami and we were coming back and I started getting all of these text messages, ‘Have you heard the new Eminem song? He makes fun of you in the Eminem song,’ ” the 53-year-old recalled as he appeared in CW’s The ’90s Boy Band Boom.
The popstar remembered thinking, “I love Eminem and *NSYNC rhymes with everything. *NSYNC, stink, you know. It’s really not that hard.”
However, his band members clarified, “And they’re like, ‘No, no, no, you. Chris Kirkpatrick.’ And I’m like, ‘Chris Kirkpatrick? That doesn’t rhyme with anything.'”
“And as it was coming out of my mouth, I’m saying, ‘This is Eminem.’ And then I hear, ‘Get your ass kicked,’ and I’m like oh, yeah.. I guess it rhymes with that. That makes sense.”
The boyband member went on to say that he was upset finding out that he had beef with the most popular rapper at the time, “And at that moment, I was like, ‘What does this mean? Do I have beef now? Is this, are we beefing? Man, that sucks.’ ”
The diss track had an impact on the success of their band, he noted, adding that it became popular to poke fun at boy bands at that time.
He recounted that the toughest moment was when they lost Grammys, “A lot of that pop genre didn’t get that recognition we deserved. We were up for a couple of Grammys. The one that kills me the most was when we lost to Steely Dan for Best Vocal Performance on a Record.”