The narrative of the white rapper who’d come up in the harsh arena of Detroit seduced the public so much that they made a semi-factual movie about it, 8 Mile, with the emcee himself in the lead role. His popularity was somewhere in the region of finding money you didn’t know you’d lost. It’s damn near impossible to describe the cultural currency Eminem had back then.
At the turn of the century, Marshall Mathers was absolutely everywhere. But it also worked a microcosm for the wider pop climate.
It was a clever performance, ribbing on the wacky single’s central theme: that when it came to the Detroit rapper, accept no imitators. Beginning his performance of The Real Slim Shady outside New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Em and his squad of lookalikes entered the arena and made a beeline for the stage like white blood cells rushing to a wound. There’s plenty left to the imagination – is the Slim Shady character really as blameless as he makes out? – but it’s precisely those ambiguities that make Eminem the smartest pop star in recent memory.At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Eminem commanded an army of bleach-blonde soldiers. ‘Stan’ is a gruesome twist on the murder ballad form, wrapping together Eminem’s obsessions with celebrity-worship, mental illness and the delusions of fame while remaining concise and poignant enough to be an international smash. ‘Lose Yourself’, in that sense, is quintessential Em, and the closest we’ve come in song to meeting the real Real Slim Shady. In interviews and song, Eminem always tempered his shock tactics with a philosophy of empowerment, inspired by his own rags-to-riches story. Popular opinion says Eminem’s career petered out soon after ‘The Eminem Show’, but don’t overlook the ‘8 Mile’ factor. Future generations will balk at his punchline-thirsty homophobia, but there’s no doubt we’ll be listening for decades to come. N.W.A.” himself.Įven forgetting its verbally dextrous chops, ‘The Real Slim Shady’ is a classic on its pop merits alone, armed with replayably funny pop cultural gags and one of the most memorable rap choruses ever. The lyrics are relentlessly horrifying – at one point, Shady justifies date-raping a 15-year-old by reasoning “look at her bush, does it got hair? (Uh-huh!)” – but Em’s all-cylinders-firing creativity is irrepressible, notably when he gets meta and starts querying the ethics of “Mr.
Dre, and its evil twin, repped by Mathers in full Shady.
This early single sees Eminem split his narrator’s psyche in two: the guilty conscience, Dr. Alarmingly, it was a commercial triumph, charting as a UK Number 8 and greasing his transition into full-blown psychosis with follow-up single ‘Stan’. ‘The Way I Am’ destroys a diabolical beat with headfuck flows that tear up the media, the industry and even his fans in a scorched-earth frenzy. When Interscope begged Mathers for a fun, ‘My Name Is’-like track for ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’, they got something entirely more exciting. Particularly ferocious, the final verse reels off the traumas of his pockmarked childhood, culminating in hysterics as he yells that “I fucking hope you burn in hell for this shit”. After Mathers’ mum sued for his claim, on ‘My Name Is’, that “my mom does more dope than I do”, he penned this devastating account of growing up around her drug use.