Slim Shady’s Blues
Eminem’s music helped him to cope with his own suffering. It also helped his listeners cope with theirs.
Before American musician Marshall Mathers made a name for himself as the global cultural sensation Eminem, he was already a gifted lyricist and wordsmith on the Detroit underground scene. “I’ve been writing lyrics since I was like fourteen years old,” he explained at a press conference some years ago, “and just the more I wrote the better I kept getting at it.” His lyrics are sometimes outrageous, but they can just as often be thoughtful and introspective. This made Mathers a somewhat unusual figure on the notoriously macho American hip-hop scene and helped him reach an audience beyond the genre’s traditional fan base. As he explained in his 2008 memoir, The Way I Am: “I’m not alone in feeling the way I feel. I believe that a lot of people can relate to my shit—whether white, black, it doesn’t matter. Everybody has been through some shit, whether it’s drastic or not so drastic. Everybody gets to the point of ‘I don’t give a fuck.’”
Consider the lesser-known track “If I Had” from his second studio album, The Slim Shady LP in 1999—the record that really established his voice and introduced the world to his alter-ego, Slim Shady. It’s a tragic song about failure, poverty, and broken selfhood that opens with a self-penned poem about life, the world, and other people. It begins like this:
What is life?
Life is like a big obstacle in front of your optical to slow you down,
And every time you think you’ve gotten past it,
It’s gonna come back around to tackle you to the damn ground.
Life—those opening lines seem to say—is suffering. The introduction offers disenchantment on the subject of friends (“Friends are people that you think are your friends”) and money (“Money is what makes a man act funny”) before Mathers launches into the first verse and the track becomes a litany of daly frustrations, starting with “I’m tired of backstabbin’-ass snakes with friendly grins.” The song apparently emerged from a particularly unfortunate week in 1997, back when Mathers was still broke and struggling. “My fuckin’ engine blew out and a bunch of fucked up shit was all happening at the same time,” he later recalled in his 2000 memoir, Angry Blonde. The song begins by punching outwards, but there are moments of self-criticism, too—“I’m tired of committin’ so many sins…” By the time the track ends, we have been treated to an unforgiving portrait of despair.
Mathers had his own fair share of reasons to feel aggrieved. His childhood in post-industrial Detroit was poor and unstable. His father walked out when he was only six months old, and he was raised by his erratic and overbearing mother. He was moved from place to place and from one school to another, where he was often the only white kid. All this dislocation contributed to Mathers’s sense that he didn’t really belong anywhere at all. As a small and skinny boy, he was a frequent target of bullying, an experience he referenced in the song “Brain Damage” from the same album, which is about a childhood assault that left him in a coma for five days.
Mathers felt as though his masculinity was under siege. His uncle Ronny introduced him to the Beastie Boys at an early age, which gave him a sense of creative possibility. But when Ronny committed suicide, Mathers lost the only father figure in his life. He began participating in local rap battles using the name Eminem, and his precocious talent soon drew the attention of Detroit producers Mark and Jeff Bass, who helped him record his debut studio album Infinite in 1996. The album was a commercial failure and received mixed reviews. With his personal life in disarray and his creative fortunes looking bleak, Mathers reportedly attempted suicide. But by 1997, he had regrouped and recorded The Slim Shady EP, which led to an approach from Interscope Records. There, he was introduced to NWA’s former producer (and occasional emcee) Dr. Dre, who offered to helm Mathers’s next album. It was the break he had been waiting for.
Released in 1999, The Slim Shady LP distilled all the unhappiness, rage, and frustration Mathers had experienced into twenty tracks. “If I Had” was Eminem’s take on confessional blues, and each line seemed to correspond in its specificity to some broader feeling. “Tired of havin’ skinny friends hooked on crack and Mini Thins.” I’m tired of my sordid social environment. “I’m tired of this DJ playin’ your shit when he spins.” I’m tired of being overlooked and underappreciated. The lyrics bounce from the profound to the trivial, from the material to the spiritual, and from socio-political critique to darkly comic observation, and the songs’ thematic and linguistic diversity are complemented by the breathtaking flow. Eminem fantasises about what he would do with success if he found it, and his ideas range from the ridiculous (“If I had a million dollars, I’d buy a damn brewery and turn the planet into alcoholics”) to the profane (“If I had a magic wand, I’d make the world suck my dick without a condom on while I’m on the John”). The song ends with a defiant middle finger raised to the world and everyone in it: “If I had one wish, I would ask for a big enough ass for the whole world to kiss.”
The roots of hip-hop in African-American culture date back to the rhythmic songs sung by slaves in the antebellum era. As a versatile art form, it has evolved over time as technology has changed. Turntables, scratching, and samples were replaced by digital soundscapes, absorbing elements of rock and roll, disco, R’n’B, and dance music along the way. It has become a uniquely American pop-cultural form with many different waves and phases, from early New York City block parties in the ’70s to the new school and golden age of East Coast hip-hop in the mid-’80s (Run-DMC, LL Cool J) and the gangster rap of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Ice-T, NWA, Ice Cube, Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Wu-Tang Clan). The turn of the century was a time of transformation in pop culture and music, and Eminem caught the rap-rock wave that mixed rock, punk, and metal samples with hip-hop beats and lyrics. Def Jam Records’ founder and house producer Rick Rubin played a large part in the creation of this subgenre, particularly in his work on the Beastie Boys’ first album Licensed to Ill (1986) and Run-DMC’s smash-hit collaboration with Aerosmith, “Walk This Way,” the same year. But Eminem took the form and made it his own.
I was just a kid when Eminem hit his peak with The Marshall Mathers LP in 2000 and 2002’s The Eminem Show, which was the biggest album of the year in any genre. I was drawn by the unusual balance of absurdism and realism, which struck me as so personal that it was universal, and so horrible that it was funny. I had the sense that this tormented young artist was really feeling the things he was rapping about, even if the material itself was outlandish. Influenced by American rap and rock alike—from Erik B & Rakim to Jimi Hendrix—as well as films like The Truman Show (1998) and the horror genre, Eminem’s songs mixed pop-friendly guitar hooks with personal narratives that flipped between cartoonish lewdness and earnest sincerity. He wasn’t just a great lyricist, he was also an exciting performer who really sang his songs and imbued his words with soul. His music was more introspective and self-critical than most of the boastful gangster rap of the ’90s. He invited his listeners to see themselves with the same dark humorous objectivity with which he saw himself.
In one of those peculiar coincidences of the personal and the cultural, Eminem’s peroxide crew-cut, lyrical agility, and performative obnoxiousness became stratospherically successful almost overnight. The biggest single on The Slim Shady LP was “My Name Is,” in which Eminem introduced listeners to Slim Shady. “Hi kids, do you like violence?” the opening verse begins, “Do you want to see me stick nine inch nails through each one of my eyelids?” The Slim Shady persona allowed Mathers to explore his darkest impulses and let his imagination run amok. Above all, he identified with the sufferer and the underdog, and the structure of the rap lyric—in both freestyle and rehearsed form—offered an outlet for his frustrations and pain and a path forward. It allowed him to break out of his psychological prison and recover a sense of masculine identity.
And of course, he was a poor urban white boy in an overwhelmingly black scene. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine him having the same impact were it not for this fact. The notion of a white rapper was by no means novel—even before the much-derided Vanilla Ice, the Beastie Boys and their label-mates and rivals 3rd Bass (two white emcees and a black DJ) had already pioneered white rap under Rick Rubin’s guidance at Def Jam. But Eminem raised the smudging of racial and cultural lines to a whole new level, popularising the form to a broader audience that defied class and age. It made him the bestselling rapper of all time. His work offered the very best of cultural appropriation and captured something profound, not just about American culture and identity but also about the human condition itself.
In 2002, Mathers starred in 8 Mile, a fictionalised account of a week in his life directed by Academy Award-winner Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential). The film was named after the section of Detroit where the white side of town meets the black side, a metaphor for Mathers’s cultural significance. The story follows Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith Jr. (Mathers), as he struggles to pursue his dream of becoming a rapper while living in a trailer park with his mother and baby sister. Jimmy suffers a series of humiliations and setbacks until the film concludes with a cathartic rap battle, a format that requires two contestants to take turns verbally wrecking one another to a beat in front of a crowd. B-Rabbit destroys a few members of the divisive “Free World” gang while representing 313 Detroit. Memorably, in the last battle he preemptively disses himself in the form of a confession: “I am white! I am a fucking bum! I do live in a trailer with my mom!” Left without any room to attack, his opponent concedes and leaves the stage.
The film produced the smash hit, “Lose Yourself,” a song that tapped into anxieties of failure and dreams of success, for which Mathers was rewarded with an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It’s about the archetypal human challenge of proving oneself to oneself and affirming one’s place in reality—something to which almost everyone can relate.
The Slim Shady LP—and the song “If I Had,” in particular—illuminates themes that would become more pronounced in Eminem’s later work: transgressing social taboos, crossing the colour line, and being a weird cultural hybrid onto whom everyone could project his or her own preferred meaning. But it is not until the song’s outro that he just comes out and says how he really feels, and that lands hardest for me. “Tellin’ me to be positive, how’m I ‘pose to be positive when I don’t see shit positive, you know what I’m sayin’?” he asks. “I rap about shit around me, shit I see, you know what I’m sayin’? And right now I’m tired of everything. Tired of all this player-hatin’ that’s going on in my own city / Can’t get no airplay, you know what I’m sayin’?”
At the time of Eminem’s rise, the hip-hop genre was dominated by artists on the East and West Coasts. Detroit wasn’t especially well-known for producing famous rappers and the national scene was brutally competitive. Rap battles offered a chance for unsigned talent to stand out and pick up record deals, which was how Eminem was discovered by Interscope and his future mentor Dr. Dre. At the time, he was working for minimum wage in a fast-food joint and trying to make ends meet for his girlfriend and daughter.
Not only did Eminem go on to become a multimillionaire, but he is also now one of the most influential artists of all time, setting the stage for an entire generation of future wordsmiths like Kendrick Lamar. What he represented culturally would soon epitomise the white-boy rapper archetype, which would be endlessly parodied in film and TV in the coming decades. One thinks of the character J-Roc in the popular show Trailer Park Boys, who seems to have been ripped right out of the Slim Shady rhyme-book. By the 21st century, hip-hop was no longer an exclusively black form, and American culture and identity was no longer defined by race. It’s hard to imagine my own upbringing without the rap music I grew up with that helped to shape my social consciousness—Nas, Gang Starr, MF Doom, and of course, the great Slim Shady.
Following the success of The Slim Shady LP, Eminem would take a different approach to his favoured themes, writing more about dealing with success than failure and grappling with the strange import of his popularity, especially among the young. Since then, he’s recorded classics of all kinds, from the remorseful piece he wrote for his daughters about fatherhood, “Mockingbird,” to the light-spirited parody he wrote about fame, “Without Me” or the malevolent love song he recorded with Dina Rae, “Superman.”
Art and culture have since become so casually violent and sexually explicit that it is easy to forget just how controversial Eminem’s music was at the time—the graphic language, the vivid pop culture references, the lurid violence and misogyny, the public legal disputes with his ex-wife Kim and his mother. He was even arrested more than once for his use of profanity on stage. But Mathers always stood for artistic freedom, above all. There was something unapologetically male about his work, too, which was no doubt a product of his own crisis of masculinity. Mathers was accused of homophobia in his lyrics, but he always rejected that charge. In 2001, he performed his song “Stan” with Elton John at the 43rd Grammy Awards, and the two artists shared a public embrace afterwards.
“Stan” showcased Eminem’s gift for storytelling—the first few verses are written and rapped from the perspective of an increasingly menacing super-fan named Stan, who ends up killing his pregnant girlfriend and then himself. The track has less to do with the fan than it does with Mathers’s own feelings of guilt as he grappled with the demands of fame and the dangers of fandom. The song launched a cultural meme—the “stan,” which implies blind devotion and idolatry of the famous.
Mathers would adopt many different roles and identities in his songs and then lose himself in them like a method actor. Each represented a different part of his identity—Marshall Mathers, Slim Shady, Emimen—and each had a different meaning. Another huge hit single, “The Real Slim Shady,” explored this notion of the dark alter-ego and how it was reflected in his universalist appeal. There is, he said in a documentary about his life and career, “a Slim Shady in all of us, everybody has a shady side to ’em. So, in the video I’m asking ‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up’ and everybody’s standing up in the video because everybody’s got a Slim Shady in ’em.”
When you listen to Mathers’s music, it is evident how much he loves language. The raw and complex lyricism of his stories of hardship and suffering is instructive. Art provided him with a way of dealing with the pain of being alive. But he also coped with his suffering in a way that helped millions of others—myself included—to cope with theirs. All the platinum records, awards, and wealth aside, that’s a very special and important gift. You know what I’m saying?
