Rap star Eminem has paid tribute to peers TI and Lil Wayne for restoring “substance” to hip-hop.

After the release of his new single We Made You, Eminem has revealed that despite taking a break from music he remained connected with hip-hop and felt the genre was “going downhill” during his absence.

“It seemed like kinda fast,” he explained. “You know, in them three years, it was like everybody just cares about the hook and the beat; nobody really cares about substance.

“But with this new TI album, with this new Lil Wayne album of recent, it seems like things are looking a lot better now.” He added: “You can appreciate Lil Wayne using different words to rhyme and actually rhyming words that you know.

“Or TI, where you hear s**t and you’re like Whoa, ah, I wish I would have thought of that! You know what I mean? “Or you hear all the compound-syllable rhyming and all that. It just seems like now the craft is getting cared about more.”