Source fires again at Eminem

The Source magazine, the nation’s leading hip-hop publication, has escalated the rhetoric in its campaign to portray white rap star Eminem as a racist.

The New York magazine, trumpeting the arrival on newsstands this week of a February issue looking at racism in the hip-hop field, said that it has acquired decade-old recordings by Eminem with a white rap group called Bassmint Productions that include several denigrating terms for blacks.

Last November, the Source released an early Eminem tape containing slurs against African American women, prompting an apology by the rapper, who said, “I’d just broken up with my girlfriend, who was African American, and I reacted like the angry, stupid kid I was. I hope people will take it for the foolishness that it was, not for what somebody is trying to make it into today.”

On Wednesday a spokesman for Interscope Records, which distributes Eminem’s recordings, said, “We’re done responding to their stuff. Eminem made his statements.”