Awesome / Eminem

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• Beating U2 for Best Original Song at the 75th Academy Awards ("Lose Yourself").
  • On that note, "Lose Yourself" became the first rap song to win an Oscar.
• Performing at the Grammys with the biggest gay entertainer alive as a Take That! to people who said he was homophobic.
  • Not only that; said gay entertainer was the person Eminem asked for advice in order to get fully clean from drugs.
• Not Afraid is an apology to the people he's wronged and a denouncement of the people who put words into his mouth, not to mention a pledge to be a better person.
  • The song drips with Heroic Resolve:
    And I just can't keep living this way
    So starting today
    I'm breaking out of this cage
    I'm standing up, I'ma face my demons
    I'm manning up, I'ma hold my ground
    I've had enough, now I'm so fed up
    Time to put my life back together right now
• Benzino escalated his beef with Eminem to digging into Em's past and publishing tapes where he made racist remarks in The Source. Rather than diss back, Em sued The Source for defamation of character. This lost the magazine much of its credibility (along with millions of dollars), and got Benzino and his business partner David Mayes fired. That said, Em did diss Benzino a few times prior—"Bully", "The Sauce,"—"Nail in the Coffin" - and these are all outright brutal.
  • On the tape episode, there's "Yellow Brick Road" from Encore, where he discusses the episode and how he considers it an enormous Old Shame, for which he apologises to the people he offended. Back then, it was rare for us to see him admitting he was wrong.
  • "The Sauce" in particular contains the opening Spoken Word in Music "I just want the whole world to know that I did not start this, but I will finish it."
• When Em got dragged into 50 Cent's beef by Ja Rule, he also gave him a piece of his mind by way of intricate diss tracks. In particular, his take on 2Pac's "Hail Mary" alongside 50 and Busta Rhymes; and not just using the beat of the track, but also crafting verses that match the original to the very same number of syllables used. Fridge Brilliance also comes into play, since the song is their own way of desecrating at the notion that Rule was the purported "second coming of 2Pac."
• Much of Hell: The Sequel for showcasing how fast Em can rap. The album also shows that, despite — or perhaps because of — Eminem sobering up, his Slim Shady persona is now in top form, in all its hilarity and craziness.
• Carrying out the very complicated multi-syllable rhyme scheme for the entire first verse of "3 AM", which opens Eminem's return to rap on Relapse after treating Encore as his farewell album years prior:
  You're walking down a horror corridor
  It's almost four in the morning and you're in a nightmare, it's horrible
  Right there's the coroner, waiting for ya
  To turn the corner so he can corner ya, you're a goner, he's onto ya
  Out the corner of his cornea, he just saw ya run
  All ya want is to rest cause you can't run anymore, you're done
  All he wants is to kill you in front of an audience
  While everybody is watching in the party, applauding it
  Here I sit while I'm caught up in deep thought again
  Contemplating my next plot again, swallowing a Klonopin
  While I'm noddin' in and out on the ottoman
  • And it keeps going from there. Shady's back indeed.
• On the more emotional side of awesome, the lines in "Cold Wind Blows" where God is talking to Slim Shady may well send a chill down your spine:
  "This is for your sins, I cleanse you
  You can repent, but I warn you,
  If you continue
  To Hell I send you"
  And just then, the wind blew
• "Renegade" in general is a crowning moment of awesome. It's the only guest spot on "The Blueprint", he blows Jay-Z out of the water so bad, that to this day people assume it's Em's song featuring Jay-Z, and it set Marshall on the fast track to be considered one of the G.O.A.T. Even Jay will admit to having been outperformed by him on the track.
  • Speaking of guest spots, there's also his spot on Drake's "Forever". Skip to 4:50 for his part. Eminem has one verse on a song with Drake, Kanye West and Lil Wayne and manages to outshine them all. Em's verse was so good that there's rumours the other rappers rewrote their parts to try and match him, and he still beat them. To add to the awesomeness of that verse, this was essentially his way of making a comeback after his hiatus after Relapse.
• One line in "Sing For The Moment" where Em gives one argument that kills one huge criticism of him.
  If it's all political
  and my music is literal
  and I'm a criminal
  How the FUCK can I raise a little girl?
• "Rap God", which is a great showcase of Eminem's insane technical skills. When he says that "lyrics coming at you at supersonic speed", he isn't kidding; he lets 101 words in 16 seconds without a single pause.
• His opening verse to "Go To Sleep". He made it clear to both Benzino and Ja Rule that you do NOT threaten or insult his daughter.
  There ain't gonna be no reasonin' speakin' with me
  You speak on my seed, then me no speak-a inglés
  We just gonna beef and keep on beefin' unless
  You're gonna agree to meet with me in the flesh
  And settle this face-to-face, and you're gonna see
  A demon unleashed in me that you never seen
  And you're gonna see this gangsta pee on himself
  I see you, D12, and thanks, but me need no help
  Me do this one all by my lonely, I don't need 15 of my homies
  When I see you, I'm seein' you, me and you only
• Let us not forget the opening to the second verse of the track that defined a legend, "The Real Slim Shady":
  Will Smith don't gotta cuss in his raps to sell records
  Well I do
  So fuck him and fuck you too
  • From the same song, he simply destroys Moral Guardians who consider him a bad role model on kids, bringing up Tom Green as a prime example of this and how nobody flinched when he made bestiality jokes on his TV show for all to see, whereas people freak out at Eminem for making offensive jokes or swearing in his songs.
    Sometimes I just wanna get on TV and just let loose... but I can't, but it's okay for Tom Green to hump a dead moose.
• Even some of those who don't care for Eminem will admit that "Stan" is brilliant.
  • And his duet with Elton John... incomparable.
• "Low Down, Dirty" was pretty much Slim Shady's Establishing Character Moment.
• How does Em decide to enter Instagram?
• "Brain Damage" from The Slim Shady LP is so compelling from a storytelling standpoint that one might gloss over the fact that he managed to fit the phrase "orange juice" into a four-bar rhyme scheme.
• "Bad Guy", the opening track to MMLP2, which serves as the sequel to "Stan" and, like its predecessor, features Em's masterful in-character storytelling. Matthew, Stan's kid brother mentioned in the eponymous track, is now a teen hell-bent on revenge for what he feels was Eminem's responsibility in Stan's death.
• On the day after April Fool's Day 2015, Em added annotated selections to his full catalog on Rap Genius as well as music from other rappers. It's safe to say that the site lost its shit (just read the comments).

• His long-awaited guest appearance on the TechN9ne song Speedom (WWC2). Tech and Kalliko are definitely not amateurs in the field of speed, but Eminem outshines them because he just snaps, and manages to make Rap God look slow by comparison. To clarify, he sounds like some speed-adjusting editing tool was done on some parts of the verse...but he was really just rapping that fast.
• During the 2017 BET Hip Hop Awards, Marshall spits a four-and-a-half minute freestyle devoted entirely towards his views on President Trump, and he doesn't sugarcoat anything. Highlights include Em comparing Trump to a kamikaze about to start a nuclear holocaust, shouting out Colin Kaepernick, and criticizing Trump's overall lack of action towards the people suffering from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Las Vegas mass shooting (which was considered to be the deadliest in US history), trying to distract the public from the previously mentioned disasters, and his somewhat hypocritical stance as a world leader after criticizing Hillary and Obama for doing things that he now does as president. And at the end, Marshall gives his own fans an ultimatum: himself or Trump.
• After the massive hype of dropping "Kamikaze" out of nowhere with no announcement, fans got riled up again hearing "Killshot", Em's response to Machine Gun Kelly's diss track "Rap Devil". Like with Ja Rule, if you diss Hallie, Eminem can and will crush you.
  This is it, as big as you’re gonna get, so enjoy it. Had to give you a career to destroy it.
• "'Till I Collapse" from The Eminem Show has a 5x Platinum from the RIAA. The most impressive part about it? It was never released as a single.
• A rare occasion where doing nothing is still awesome; Nick Cannon released his laughably bad diss-track "The Invitation" calling Em out, but people were still wondering if Marshall would respond, especially since Nick pushed Em's Berserk Button of insulting his children. Em's response? Nothing. Even Machine Gun Kelly got a diss track! Cannon doesn't even get that.
  • He did give some kind of response in "You Gon' Learn", his collab with Royce Da 5'9. It's pretty clear Eminem doesn't really think that Cannon's worth his attention, given his response consists of a whole four lines.
    "I bust my ass for this shit and I swear
    It ain't even worth dissing someone so offbeat
    That they can't even figure out where their words
    Should hit the kick and the snare."
    • And for extra awesome, he misses both, on purpose, engaging in Stylistic Suck to make a point.
• "Godzilla" shows that, at 47 years old, he is still one of the greatest rapid-fire rappers in the world, setting a new world record with a 30-second verse with 229 words. Even after 2 decades in the spotlight, the Rap God still lives up to his name.
• Performing "Lose Yourself" at the 2020 Oscars. To give some background, it won Best Original Song in 2003, but Eminem was still battling addiction and asleep at the time. Since past winners were going to be honored in a montage and Music to be Murdered By had just come out, they asked him to perform. Well worth the wait.
  Thanks for having me Academy. Sorry it took me 18 years to get here.
• The fact that, as of Music to Be Murdered By, he has had ten consecutive albums debut at number one in the US, the only artist to do so.

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