Rapper Eminem asks US Presidential Election candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to stop rapping his songs

The youngest Indian-Origin Republican presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy has received a notice from Marshall B. Mathers III, better known as the rapper Eminem for using his music in election campaigning, The New York Times reported on Monday.

According to The New York Times, the licensing arm of Mathers’s record company, BMI, informed the Ramaswamy campaign in a letter dated Wednesday and reprinted in The Daily Mail on Monday that “BMI will consider any performance of the Eminem works by the Vivek 2024 campaign from this date forward to be a material breach” of the firm’s licensing rules, “for which BMI reserves all rights and remedies with respect thereto.”

This comes after the Ramaswamy broke into an impromptu version of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” at the Iowa State Fair. The 38-year-old Ramaswamy while campaigning started performing rap when an enterprising sound technician played the song “Lose Yourself”.

“Vivek just got on the stage and cut loose,” his campaign spokeswoman, Tricia McLaughlin, said on Monday. “To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to the real Slim Shady,” another of Mr. Mathers’s noms de plume.

Earlier this year, Ramaswamy announced his 2024 US presidential election bid.

The 37-year-old Vivek Ramaswamy is a native of southwest Ohio. His mother was a geriatric psychiatrist and his father worked as an engineer at General Electric.

Ramaswamy was born on August 9, 1985, and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. His parents migrated to the US from Kerala.

He is the second Indian-American to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primary after Nikki Haley. He is the fourth Indian-American ever to run for the White House --Bobby Jindal ran in 2016 and Vice President Kamala Harris in 2020.

Ramaswamy joined the Republican field following ex-US President Donald Trump and former South Carolina governor and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley's presidential bid announcement.

A second-generation Indian American, Ramaswamy founded Roivant Sciences in 2014 and led the largest biotech IPOs of 2015 and 2016, eventually culminating in successful clinical trials in multiple disease areas that led to FDA-approved products, according to his bio.

Before entering the presidential ballot, Ramaswamy has to win the Republican Party's presidential primary which will start in January next year. The next US presidential election is scheduled to be held on November 5, 2024.