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If hip hop ever had a modern-day Shakespeare, it has to be none other than Eminem. A world-renowned artist with roots in Detroit, Eminem captures the full spectrum of human experience in his unparalleled lyricism. No emcee before him—and, in all likelihood, no one after him—has ever merged form and content so seamlessly in the hip hop genre.
So who is the man behind the microphone? Here is the story of this enigmatic, electrifying rapper.
Early Years
The bard of 8 Mile was born on October 17, 1972 in St. Joseph, Missouri. His birth name—Marshall Bruce Mathers III—was just about the only connection he had with his father, who left the family when little Marshall was just a toddler. (Though Marshall III wrote letters to his father a few years later, no response ever came from Marshall Jr.)
This was the start of a rather rocky childhood, which saw him constantly moving with his mother Debbie between Missouri and Detroit. Since Marshall had to change schools twice or thrice a year, he was a frequent target of bullying for being the new kid on campus. (The miserable experience of getting picked on would later be depicted in songs like “Brain Damage” and “No Love.”)
On top of this, Marshall appears to have had a contentious relationship with his mother as well. In his songs “My Mom” and “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” he accuses Debbie of causing him to be ill and slipping Valium into his food when he was a child. (Debbie would later categorically deny these accusations.) Marshall’s vitriol against his mother was yet another source of negative energy that would shape the dark tones of his early discography.
Amidst all the turbulence of his impoverished childhood, Marshall found refuge in his passion for rap music. In “Rap God,” he calls himself a “product” of 80s legends like Rakim, Lakim Shabazz, and the N.W.A. As a result, school wasn’t so much a haven for his academic growth, as it was the training ground for his freestyle rap skills. With every lunchroom battle that he attended with his bosom friend DeShaun “Proof” Holton, Marshall sharpened his tools of verbal assault.
It wasn’t just the cafeterias where Marshall was making noise. As early as the age of 14, he was already duking it out in the Detroit battle rap scene. As a white performer looking to make a name for himself in a predominantly African-American arena, Marshall struggled to win over the underground audience.
He would get his first break, though, when producer Marky Bass discovered his freestyling brilliance via a local radio station. Thanks to Bass and his Web Entertainment label, Marshall (now going by the name of Eminem) released his very first album Infinite in 1996. Unfortunately for the up-and-coming rapper, the reception for Infinite was lukewarm. The album is said to have sold anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand copies; and critics were hardly impressed with his effort.
The poor performance of the album, coupled with his struggles to properly raise his firstborn child Hailie, led to a suicide attempt, followed by the birth of his infamous alter ego.
The Rise of Shady
That persona was Slim Shady, an unhinged lover of drug acts, profanity, and violence. With the 1997 release of The Slim Shady EP, Eminem fully embraced his turn to horrorcore. Whereas he had not quite figured out his rap niche when he put out Infinite, he was now able to find a comfort zone in the purely sadistic voice of Slim Shady.
Eminem’s mean streak only intensified when he failed to win the 1997 Rap Olympics—an event that would also lead to the biggest break of his career. That day in Los Angeles, a copy of The Slim Shady EP happened to land in the possession of Dean Geistlinger, an intern for Interscope Records. By some twist of fate, the tape was handed to Interscope co-founder Jimmy Iovine, who then played it for producer Dr. Dre during one of their listening sessions. Astounded by what he heard on the tape, Dre demanded to get in contact with Eminem right away.
The 25-year-old rapper, who was barely staving off poverty at this point, saw his fortunes turn as he signed with Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment label. Thanks to the mentorship of his childhood idol Dre, Eminem would have an explosive three-year run that left an indelible mark on the hip hop industry. It started with the release of The Slim Shady LP, which introduced Eminem’s twisted alter ego to the mainstream consciousness in February 1999. On the strength of singles like “My Name Is” and “Guilty Conscience,” The Slim Shady LP would go on to win the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album.
The world would get even more Slim Shady when Eminem lent his verses and vocals to Dr. Dre’s 2001. Joining West Coast luminaries like Snoop Dogg and Xzibit on the album, Eminem held his own on songs like “Forgot About Dre” and “What’s the Difference.”
Then, in May 2000, Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP—the album widely considered to be his magnum opus. Poetic beauties like “Stan” and “The Way I Am” proved that he was clicking on all cylinders as a performer. No rapper crafted multisyllabic and internal rhymes like he did, and no artist encapsulated feelings of anguish and rage like he could.
Eminem’s audacity, however, drew not only critical acclaim but also the ire of various social groups. Politicians, celebrities, and the LGBT organization GLAAD all had a bone to pick with the rapper and his controversial lyrics. Their outrage wasn’t without merit: for all his technical brilliance, Eminem did not let up with the offensive language or horrorcore imagery. The backlash, though, did not stem the tide of accolades coming his way. The Marshall Mathers LP went on to become one of the fastest-selling albums of the 2000s, as well as Eminem’s second Grammy Award-winning album.
Eminem stayed on top of the rap game in 2002 with two more milestones in the industry. First, he released The Eminem Show—a project that featured political themes and strains of rap rock—which went on to be certified Diamond and the rapper’s third straight Best Rap Album at the Grammys. Eminem also crossed over into the film industry by starring in 8 Mile, a film that echoed his life story in many ways. Along with the movie’s box office success, the anthem “Lose Yourself” won Eminem an Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Downward Spiral
After the rapper’s hot streak on top of the hip hop industry, the trajectory of his life—both personal and professional—would take a different turn. When his fifth studio album Encore came out in 2004, it did not have the same legs as its wildly successful predecessors.
A year later, Eminem had to cancel the European leg of his Anger Management 3 Tour as his drug abuse, a long-time personal demon, exacted a heavy toll on his body and mind. In December 2005, still battered from his inner battles, he released the ominously titled Curtain Call: The Hits, as if to signify that his career was winding down.
His situation went from bad to much worse when his best friend Proof was fatally shot in 2006. Proof’s death intensified Eminem’s problems with drug addiction and weight gain. Around the same time, Eminem’s second marriage to his childhood sweetheart Kim Scott also fell apart. Then, in 2007, the rapper’s life nearly ended when he overdosed on the prescription pill methadone. Because the amount that he took was equivalent to four bags of heroin, Eminem was essentially two hours away from death.
The harrowing experience (vividly described in his song “Arose”) prompted Eminem to seek help in order to finally overcome his drug problem—a feat that he achieved in 2008.
Reinvention
Having attained sobriety, Eminem started to regain his bearings as an artist. In May 2009, he released the album Relapse, which depicted the battles waged in the process of drug rehabilitation. Though the horrorcore-style album did not receive the warmest reception from critics when it first came out, Relapse would eventually be recognized in retroactive reviews as one of Eminem’s stronger efforts.
The following year, instead of putting out Relapse 2 as he had initially planned, Eminem came up with a fresh project called Recovery. Infused with a positive vibe that was nowhere to be seen in his earlier albums, Recovery went on to be his biggest commercial success since The Eminem Show. Whereas his past hits were fuelled by outrage and negativity, the single “Not Afraid” expressed an uplifting message of empathy for those fighting personal demons as he had.
His next major outing—the 2013 album The Marshall Mathers LP 2—contained two signposts that marked just how far he had come in his personal and artistic growth. On the one hand, he bragged about feeling like a “Rap God” that mere mortal rappers could not touch. Notably, while many hip hop legends laid claim to the title of the industry’s “King,” only Eminem was audacious enough to proclaim himself the Rap God.
On the other hand, he publicly mended fences with his estranged mother in the song “Headlights.” While reconciliation with Debbie seemed highly improbable a decade earlier, Eminem went so far as to assure his mother that he no longer performed “Cleanin’ Out My Closet” in his shows. (His father, Marshall Jr., passed away in 2019; however, there are no indications that father and son ever made amends.)
Rap’s Wise Old Man
By the late 2010s, Eminem had grown into a grizzled veteran who was both idolized and targeted by his younger peers in the industry. Indeed, there was much fodder for criticism when his album Revival came out in late 2015. While Revival had a distinct aesthetic compared to his previous work (thanks to the rock-driven sound and larger-than-usual quantity of guest features), it failed to satisfy the expectations of the fanbase that had grown up listening to his revolutionary music.
In 2018, Eminem stormed back to the billboard charts with Kamikaze. The surprise album was a direct response to the criticism that he weathered upon Revival’s release. Amidst all the rage that Eminem unfurled, he made sure to give his stamp of approval to a handful of young rappers. In the song “Fall,” he namedrops Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Logic, and Big Sean as the artists who embraced his influence.
In 2020, Eminem whipped out another unannounced project entitled Music to Be Murdered By. The album, which drew influences from psycho-thriller director Alfred Hitchcock, had Eminem pushing the limits of his already established ingenuity. Amidst a resurgence in the popularity of speed raps, Eminem dropped the single “Godzilla”; it is currently one of the fastest rap songs on record, thanks to its high-octane final verse. Meanwhile, in the song “Darkness,” the violence that pervaded his old horrorcore was reframed into a call to action against gun control.
Legacy
Though the final curtain has not been drawn for Eminem’s music career, his legacy in the industry has been cemented by both his technical brilliance and his commercial success.
His entire discography—from his humble beginnings in Infinite to his reinvented style in Music to Be Murdered By—might as well be a poetry anthology. Eminem’s complex rhyme schemes represent the pinnacle of the nuanced rap structure introduced by pioneers like Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, and Rakim. The evocative imagery in his songs rivals that of classic poets like Poe and Browning; and his wordsmith abilities—that is, his unlimited creativity in combining words and stacking layers of meaning—are inarguably Shakesperean.
All told, Eminem is one of the most successful hip hop artists in the rap business. Aside from Infinite, all of his studio albums have reached Platinum status, with The Eminem Show achieving the rarefied air of Diamond certification. He is on the short list of recording artists with estimated global sales of at least 200 million records; other names on the list include Michael Jackson, Elton John, and Madonna. And, though Eminem once quipped “You think I give a damn about a Grammy?”, he has gone on to amass a total of 15 Grammy Awards (including six Best Rap Album distinctions).
For a performer who once felt unwelcome in the cutthroat rap industry, Eminem has transcended all the barriers he ever encountered to become a true icon of hip hop. After the untimely deaths of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. in the late ’90s, the throne of global rap supremacy was vacated; along with all-time greats Jay-Z and Nas, Eminem filled the void on top. Though more legends have emerged in subsequent generations, the “Rap God” still hasn’t left the summit.
Why Is Eminem Influential?
Eminem’s body of work commands the highest level of respect and admiration from his fanbase of rap music devotees, as well as the general audience that isn’t necessarily passionate about hip hop. This is because his music is widely accessible, in that his catchy beats and flows are well complemented by memorable verses that perfectly encapsulate shared emotions and experiences. Instead of being loved only by the hardcore segment of the rap fanbase, Eminem has drawn adulation from just about every type of music lover.
Eminem has also earned a reputation for being “your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper.” Emcees like Drake, 50 Cent, Wiz Khalifa, The Game, and Nicki Minaj have all paid tribute to Eminem’s rap style and accomplishments.
In addition, Eminem has been praised by his peers for his constructive criticism and, believe it or not, his supportive words and gestures. Such nuances are appreciated on a deeper level by his fellow artists that embrace his influence in the industry.
FAQs
Answer: Eminem and his ex-wife Kim Scott have a daughter named Hailie Jade, who has obtained a psychology degree from Michigan State University.
Eminem also has custody of two other kids: Alaina Mathers, the daughter of his ex-wife’s sister; and Whitney Mathers, his ex-wife’s daughter from another relationship. In a 2021 TikTok video, Whitney claimed the new name Stevie Laine and declared themselves non-binary.
Eminem was close to two male figures in his childhood. One of these was Ronnie Polkingham, his mother’s half-brother who introduced him to hip hop. Sadly, he took his own life in 1991. The other male presence in Eminem’s early years was his half-brother Nathan Kane Samara. Nate currently lives in Detroit with his wife and three children.
Answer: Eminem has had his fair share of beef with musical artists over the years. In some instances, Eminem’s reckless lyrics and temperament appeared to be the catalyst of the conflict; such was the case in his feuds with Insane Clown Posse, Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and Nick Cannon.
Other altercations have been supposedly instigated by Eminem’s foe, rather than Eminem himself. Canibus, Ja Rule, Benzino, and Joe Budden are among the artists that picked a fight with the icon.
Answer: The mentor-protégé dynamic between Eminem and Dr. Dre is evident in their collaborations, which include “Guilty Conscience,” “Forgot about Dre,” and “Crack a Bottle.”
Eminem has proudly worn his Detroit roots on his sleeve by teaming up with several talents from the Motor City. In 1996, Eminem and his childhood friend Proof joined four other Detroit-based rappers (Bizarre, Kuniva, Kon Artis, and Bugz) to form D12. Eminem is also one half of the “Bad Meets Evil” duo, with Royce da 5’9″ as his partner-in-crime.
Aside from Royce, Eminem has teamed up with (and frequently outperformed) other hip hop greats like Jay-Z, Nas, T.I., and Lil Wayne. Artists who have contributed beautiful hooks to his songs include Beyonce, Dido, Rihanna, and frequent collaborator Skylar Grey.
Bottom Line
Thanks to his powerful lines and memorable rhymes, Eminem will be remembered as an artist whose poetic brilliance captures the lowest of lows and the highest of highs. His songs constantly redefine the standards for the technical aspects of rap, while never failing to forge a powerful connection with his worldwide audience, thanks to shared themes of struggle and redemption. When all is said and done, Eminem can lay claim to one of hip hop’s highest honors: beyond dispute, he is in the “top five, dead or alive.”
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