Shorn of the humor of much of Eminem’s output, it’s the most chilling song he’s ever made. His mother came in for particular scorn on opener “Kill You” his wife was verbally attacked on “Kim,” a prequel to “’97 Bonnie And Clyde” that details an imaginary argument that leads to murder. While that album found critics and public alike trying to separate fact from fiction, The Marshall Mathers LP blurred the boundaries yet further with its mix of razor-sharp humor and personal attacks. The Marshall Mathers LP followed swiftly in 2000 and found Eminem expanding on the dark humor of its predecessor. However, The Slim Shady LP, which was partially produced by Dr Dre (and released via Interscope, home of Dre’s Aftermath imprint) was an unqualified success and turned Eminem into a global star. On “’97 Bonnie And Clyde,” a fantasy tale about a journey taken with his daughter to bury the wife he’d just murdered, the role of Eminem’s offspring is played chillingly by Hailie. Elsewhere, On “Brain Damage,” Eminem recounts an alleged bullying episode at the hands of schoolmate D’Angelo Bailey – and another court case ensued.Įven the purely fictional had an unnervingly personal note. One line in particular, “99 percent of my life I was lied to/I just found out my mom does more dope than I do,” overstepped the mark as far as mother Debbie Mathers was concerned, and resulted in legal action. While much of the song’s cartoonish ultraviolence was clearly fictional, the line between truth and fiction was sometimes uncomfortably blurry. At once self-deprecating (“I ain’t had a woman in years/My palms too hairy to hide”), Eminem was also brutally personal in his attacks. The darkly comic tour de force single “My Name Is” introduced Slim Shady as a vengeful, ogre-ish, loose cannon. Under the aegis of his titular anti-hero, Eminem felt the freedom to expound on anything that took his fancy. His sophomore album and major-label debut 1999’s The Slim Shady LP was issued through Interscope, and still has the capacity to shock. Bleaching his hair to add to the brattish image, Eminem now had a conduit through which he could vent both his cartoonish sense of humor and latent anger. “Boom, the name hit me, and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it,” he recalled. The genesis of this transformation came on a trip to the toilet, when Mathers concocted his Slim Shady alter-ego. “After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. But the album failed to have the desired impact, which, in turn, had a profound effect on the rapper. The subject matter was already highly personal, detailing the trials of living in one of Detroit’s poorest areas, and Eminem’s hopes for girlfriend Kim and their soon-to-be-born daughter, Hailie. However, it boasts a raft of complex rhymes and the verbal erudition of a man who had spent much of his youth absorbed in a dictionary.
Recorded in 1996, it found the nascent star still developing a distinctive style. Many overlook Eminem’s little-known debut album, Infinite. At times his lyrics played out like a real-life soap opera, their emotional directness preempting modern hip-hop stars like Drake. The act of playing detective and trying to separate fact from fiction is one of the great pleasures of trawling through Eminem’s music.
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