Trivia / Eminem

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• Black Sheep Hit: Em had an unprecedented Black Sheep Hit with "My Name Is" (the second single off The Slim Shady LP - the first was the much more aggressive "Just Don't Give a Fuck"), which typecast him into launching every album with a novelty song that mocks celebrity gossip. Because of the lighthearted tones of these tracks and their suitability for a video, they serve as the lead singles to his albums and, as a result, are some of his more popular and well-known songs - even when the albums they're attached to are twisted Black Comedy or outright brooding in tone. In the 2010s, Eminem stopped making these songs and expressed Creator Backlash against them, seeing as they had originated as the product of Executive Meddling and didn't, in his opinion, do anything to make anyone's lives any better, noting in "Guts Over Fear" he'd 'rather make "Not Afraid 2" than another motherfuckin' "We Made You"'. He did continue to make comedic songs/videos that nodded to the tradition, but they stopped serving as lead singles and became more stylistically diverse.
  • "My Name Is" from The Slim Shady LP. "My Name Is" deserves special attention because it is so much an outlier that nothing else in Eminem's discography, before or since, has sounded like it. It's based on a barely manipulated soul sample with psychedelic keyboards, while everything else on the album is done in a spooky, synthetic G-funk style; Eminem also raps it in an almost conversational flow, using little in the way of his signature complex rhythm patterns and rhyme schemes. He also raps it as Slim Shady in a squeaky, nasal voice that he stopped using after this album. Its sound is hard enough to classify that it was heavily played on rock stations, who viewed it as being suburban comedic Rap Rock rather than the Dr. Dre-produced, Battle Rapping-derived hardcore hip-hop work it was intended to be. Notably, despite extensive attempts to replicate the song, neither Eminem nor Dre could even figure out how to make another record that sounded like it.
  • "The Real Slim Shady" from The Marshall Mathers LP and "Without Me" from The Eminem Show are follow-ups to "My Name Is" to the point where the three stack like a musical trilogy, and all three really stand out in style and mood from anything else on their respective albums. Each is like hitting the Silliness Switch on otherwise Darker and Edgier albums full of Black Comedy and explicit lyrics. "Without Me" even begins with a reference to the previous two with "guess who's back, back again?"
  • "Purple Pills" from Devil's Night
  • "My Band" from D12 World
  • "Just Lose It" and "Ass Like That" from Encore!
  • Apart from "3 a.m.", which is typical of the content on the album, all of the singles on Relapse are oddballs:
    • "Crack a Bottle" was the first time Eminem had launched a studio album with a song that wasn't a goofy novelty hit - instead, it's a Glam Rap (!) posse cut with Dr. Dre and 50 Cent. Slim is doing funny but basically conventional Boastful Rap on the song, not fitting the album concept, and it's the only Slim cut on the album which doesn't use the Relapse accent. The reason for this is because it had been intended for Dre's legendary Development Hell album Detox, which at the time was supposed to form a tryptic with Em and 50's albums, with an overarching concept of following a recovery process - "I Relapse, then Before I Self Destruct, I Detox". Detox ended up not coming out.
    • "We Made You" from Relapse is in the tradition of the goofy novelty records, with a music video directed by Joseph Kahn (who directed "Without Me"). On its own, it's about Slim Shady lusting after female celebrities - but in the context of the album, where it comes after a track about lynching Lindsay Lohan, it's much darker song about a priapic Loony Fan Serial Killer targeting drug-addicted women, fitting the Slasher Movie album concept. "We Made You" is also the final primary-colored diss joke single in the classical style, as Eminem decided that the formula was played out and didn't release one for Recovery. His later comedic singles tend to nod at this tradition, but diverge in significant ways - at least until enough time had passed that he was able to use the candy-coloured MTV-pop imagery again as a Stylistic Callback.
    • "Beautiful" is a Rap Rock ballad produced in a totally different way to the rest of the album, and Eminem performs it in a strange, deep voice that he never used before this and didn't use again. This is because it was a song Eminem started writing on his first day in rehab in 2006, possibly intended for the scrapped album King Mathers; Em decided it was the best song written during that time, finished it off, and kept it as testament to how much he'd improved since getting clean.
  • While not a comedy lead single in the same way as the other examples, Recovery's lead single was "Not Afraid", an inspiring gospel-rap ballad that, while it has jokes in, stands out from the rest of his entire discography for being earnestly positive, having none of the sarcasm, hostility, Self-Deprecation or provocation that forms his Signature Style. Much like "My Name Is", above, Eminem wasn't able to replicate this no matter how much he tried, with his later attempts at making "Not Afraid"-like songs (such as "Survival" and "Guts Over Fear") being more ambivalent and negative, in line with his earlier inspirationals like "Lose Yourself" and "Sing For The Moment".
  • "Berzerk" from The Marshall Mathers LP 2 - silly, contains celebrity disses, but also a Genre Throwback to late 80s hip-hop, with the visuals, sound, sample, and Eminem's delivery and accent evoking Beastie Boys.
  • "Framed" from Revival - based around Anti-Role Model and controversy-magnet themes like "The Real Slim Shady", but also a (silly) Horrorcore song with a dark, moody beat that the video makes into a prequel to Eminem's Relapse Medical Horror single "3 a.m."
  • Though dissimilar from other examples, "Venom" from Kamikaze is the only non-diss track on the album (unless you count him insulting his fans), and also got much more reach from being the theme to, well, Venom.
  • "Godzilla" from Music To Be Murdered By and "Gnat" from Music To Be Murdered By Side B both have videos with a distinctive visual style meant to call back to Eminem's earlier comedy hit videos, complete with ultra-bold colours, Homage Shots and Eminem interacting with and reprising his old characters and personas from these videos. "Gnat" also recaptures the topical aspect of his older comedy lead singles, being about the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: "Lose Yourself" was this for 8 Mile. Though 8 Mile was not obscure, "Lose Yourself" completely outstripped it. It won Eminem an Academy Award (the first ever for a hip-hop song), remains his best-selling single, and was ranked at #166 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs of All-Time.
• Breakthrough Hit: "My Name Is".
• Colbert Bump: English singer/songwriter Dido went global after Eminem sampled a part of her song "Thank You" for "Stan".
• Content Leak: Bootlegs of the The Eminem Show were leaked before the album was scheduled to be released. The album was released a week earlier than intended as a result.
  • "Encore" got leaked weeks earlier then intended during the summer of 2004 resulting in being delayed until November of that year with Eminem having to quickly record several new songs in a matter of weeks(and the leaked ones ending up on the "Straight from the Lab" EP).
• Creator Backlash: He has a lot of things in his songs that he comes to regret:
  • Eminem doesn't look back fondly on his long-forgotten debut album Infinite. He admits to not having found his own style yet, that he was trying too hard to sound like Nas, and that the album was more like a demo tape than a proper album.
  • Eminem became so sick of "My Name Is" that after a while, he would only play snippets of it at his concerts - often stopping the song to declare that he was sick of it. He eventually clarified that he thinks it's a great record, but resented how it overshadowed his more personal work, particularly "The Way I Am".
  • By 2002, Eminem was highly critical of The Slim Shady LP, complaining that his beat-riding and technical ability on it was "horrible" and that the high-pitched, nasal voice he used to portray Slim Shady sounded annoying and stupid - it's telling that he (as of yet) has never revisited the voice he used on the album since^note Except for one time on the song "Shady XV", but it was for only one line and to make fun of himself. It's generally considered to be one of his three best albums, if not his best.
  • Eminem also complained that "The Real Slim Shady" was too cheesy. It ended up becoming one of his Signature Songs.
  • Eminem created his Slim Shady alter-ego in order to 'have an excuse to rap pissed off' but developed a love-hate relationship with the character - being Shady offstage and on for several years, while experiencing the negative consequences of fame for the first time and binging on psychedelic drugs, left him Lost in Character and behaving in irresponsible, violent ways. He was also genuinely upset about the fact that his use of bigotry as Vulgar Humor was hurting the feelings of women and gay people. He toned down appearances from the character on and after The Eminem Show, and even killed him off in "When I'm Gone", emerging a couple of years later with his hair its natural dark colour again. However, the next album he released was Relapse, in which Shady comes back from the dead, worse than ever. Since then, he's concluded that his "evil twin" will always be a part of him and that he loves him, but their relationship isn't always that easy.
    • The Eminem Show has only a few Shady appearances, and they portray him in a Lighter and Softer way. On the album's lead single, "Without Me", Marshall opens the song by complaining that people only want Slim (before snapping back into character as Slim).
      I've created a monster
      'Cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more
      They want Shady, I'm chopped liver!
  • In particular, Eminem has a habit of insulting Relapse, his Concept Album in which he played a Slasher Movie-inspired version of Shady who rapped in a number of vaguely offensive accents.
    • "Not Afraid", the first single from his Recovery album has the lyrics "Let's be honest, that last Relapse CD was "ehhhh" / Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground".
    • Another track from Recovery, "Cinderella Man", has the following lyrics: "Fuck my last CD, that shit's in my trash."
    • Also on Recovery, in "Talkin' 2 Myself", he states that "Those last two albums didn't count / Encore! I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushing them out".
    • Hell: The Sequel's "The Reunion" is a satirical story about Slim abusing his girlfriend by forcing her to listen to Relapse in the car. She whines about the accents, he assures her his rapping is 'mad tight'. Eventually she takes out the CD and snaps it in half, which leads Slim to jam down the accelerator in rage and crash his car.
    • Also on Hell: The Sequel, in "I'm On Everything", Slim reverts to his Relapse Jamaican accent, then says, "I’ll send a fuckin' axe at you if you insist on a fuckin' accent^note (axe-sent)"
    • "Heat" opens with Em asking a girl if she's his Relapse album because "you've got an ass thicker than those accents".
    • In "Guts Over Fear", he says that he'd rather make a sequel to "Not Afraid" over "We Made You", which is a Relapse track.
    • As of 2020, however, Eminem himself changed his opinion towards the album, as he looked back positively on the album for the 11th anniversary of its release, and also emulated his Relapse rap style in Music to be Murdered By: Side B (Deluxe Edition) on the song "Discombobulated".
  • On The Marshall Mathers LP 2:
    • "Bad Guy" and the following skit, "Parking Lot", both express shame about "Criminal", a button-pushing homophobic song that he made in response to being forced to tone down some homophobia in the second verse of "My Name Is". In "Bad Guy", Eminem is murdered by a Loony Fan who plays him "Criminal" to taunt him before murdering him in the names of Stan and the bisexual hip-hop artist Frank Ocean - tacitly admitting hip-hop should really belong to the people he made fun of. In "Parking Lot", we return to the skit in the middle of "Criminal", only Slim gets hemmed in by cops and shoots himself, as a metaphor for how there actually were consequences for the stuff he said on "Criminal".
    • "Headlights", where he admits he came to hate "Cleaning Out My Closet" (one of his biggest hits off of The Eminem Show, where he constantly jabs and declares hatred towards his mother for his crappy upbringing) after his overdose in 2008. "Headlights" itself is Eminem actually apologizing to his mother for his horrible attitude and the song he made to diss her over ten years ago.
    • On the song "So Far.." from MMLP2, it's possible that his opinion on Recovery has even soured:
    Another one, after Recovery was so coveted, but what good is a fucking recovery if I fumble it?
  • Surprisingly averted with Revival, as despite being his most reviled album since Encore!, Em himself has not expressed dislike for it (though he's admitted he was unsure about it) and has more or less implied that he did not intend for it to turn out as mediocre as it did, saying, "I spend a lot of time writing shit that I think nobody ever gets." That said, he did take the poor reception to heart, convincing him to write, record and release an entire new album mere months later, which became Kamikaze.
  • Eminem was mortified by the leaking of some songs from his teen years as part of a no-hope white rap group in which he rapped racist statements, and once used the n-word. "Yellow Brick Road" from Encore! reflects on this.
  • He doesn't like Encore! much, because he was so strung out on drugs at the time that it hindered his skills and made him too depressed.
  • He's admitted to cringing at "Cleanin' Out My Closet" in recent years, mainly due to his more unfair criticisms of his mother's illness and declaring that he'd never let Hailie see her, especially after the two of them finally made peace. "Headlights" from The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is a more sincere apology to his mother.
• Creator Breakdown: A majority of his recorded output reflects on the uglier parts of his personal life. Because of this, he was given its own page here.
• Executive Meddling: The Marshall Mathers LP was 100% complete before Eminem was forced to add one more track, per request by the Interscope Records execs. They wanted a Spiritual Successor to the zany pop anthem "My Name Is" for the lead-in radio single. As we all know, the result was "The Real Slim Shady". The song's intent is quite obvious, since it doesn't sound like anything else on the entire album. Interestingly enough, Eminem went through a mountain of writer's block to reach that point, and he let out his surmounting frustration with the vitriolic (though excellent) "The Way I Am". According to Em, his displeasure with being typecast by the higher-ups fueled a brief feud between him and Interscope, which nearly got him kicked off the label. Of course, this corporate conflict ended up resulting in two great songs off a highly acclaimed and successful album, so this could be a case of Tropes Are Not Bad.
• Meme Acknowledgment: Eminem eventually opened an actual spaghetti restaurant called "Mom's Spaghetti" and was even present during the grand opening serving customers from a drive-through window.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: Recovery was originally intended to be Relapse 2, a Horrorcore album continuing in the style of Relapse, but Eminem was soon forced by Dr. Dre's commitments to the doomed Detox to seek other producers. The first of these, Denaun Porter, a childhood friend who knew him as a young MC, directed him in the booth to rap in his teenage style and drop that weird accent he had been experimenting with, which led to him developing a more wordplay-focused Boastful Rap style that he felt was much stronger and funnier than his horror work. At around the same time, he exhausted everything he had to write about being a crazy Serial Killer, and wanted to make material with the emotional weight his work had carried on The Eminem Show and Encore!. The horror-and-accent-play material that no longer fit his new direction got released as an Updated Re Release of Relapse, the Refill EP; a few of the more mundane Slim cuts that did fit the new sound ended up on a retitled album called Recovery, a pop-crossover New Sound Album that proved wildly popular and kicked off a Career Resurrection for Eminem.
• One-Book Author: In terms of his acting career (aside from cameos As Himself), his only on-screen film role is 8 Mile, and his only voice acting credit is the video game/50 Cent vehicle 50 Cent: Bulletproof. While he's received several offers for big Hollywood roles, he's usually turned them down due to wanting to focus on his music and family life — among projects whose starring roles he turned down include Elysium (which fell through when filming couldn't be done in Detroit) and Southpaw (which was envisioned as a loose successor to 8 Mile with Eminem in mind, but he pulled out in order to focus on making MMLP2).
• The Pete Best: A more tragic case for his posse D12; founding member Karnail "Bugz" Pitts met a violent end the same year Eminem broke through, and the year before Devil's Night, the group's major-label debut.
• Production Posse: Expect Dr. Dre and Paul Rosenberg (his manager) to have some involvement in any new music; and expect features from Royce da 5'9', 50 Cent (though he's been absent from Em's last 2 albums), Skylar Grey, The New Royales and/or Rihanna. Joyner Lucas might also be shaping up for this in the future.
• Rarely Performed Song:
  • "Cleanin' Out My Closet", a song detailing Eminem's strained relationship with his mother, was removed from his setlist after he reconciled with her in 2013.
  • Eminem retired all his Encore! material from his live set once the album's era was over, owing to its negative reception amongst fans and critics; for a while he still performed "Like Toy Soldiers", then later added "Evil Deeds" and "Mosh".
  • Virtually everything off of Relapse was only played live once or twice. Eminem was still relearning how to play live and only had a couple of gigs in which he performed Relapse material — Voodoo Fest in New Orleans, the album launch party, and some televised live performances of the album's singles like "We Made You", "Crack A Bottle". Eminem then underwent a severe Creator Backlash towards the album, and retired almost all material from the album other than "3 a.m.".
  • Despite being a fan-favorite, "Kim" has never been performed live by Eminem due to a promise he made to Kim, who he murders in the song. It has been said that he broke this promise at a show in Detroit, leading to Kim's suicide attempt, but the actual incident was him bringing a blowup doll on stage to play 'Kim'.
• Reclusive Artist: A downplayed examples. While he's done lots of concerts, videos, and live shows, nowadays, he hasn't been very comfortable with the spotlight lately and tends to stay away from most publicity, preferring to stay in Detroit when he's not working on his music. In fact, when "Lose Yourself" was nominated for an Oscar, he was at home dead asleep when the song won (perhaps for very late compensation to the Academy, he performed it 17 years later).
• Surprise Release: Kamikaze was released in 2018 with no prior announcements or advertisements as a deliberate contrast to the lengthy pre-release campaign for its predecessor, Revival, owed to this album's nature as a response to the critical and fan backlash towards that one. Eminem repeated the technique with his next album, Music to Be Murdered By, releasing both it and the music video for "Darkness" on the same day with no advance notice.
• Torch the Franchise and Run: A possible intent on Greatest Hits Album, Curtain Call. Eminem was in the grip of an Ambien addiction, was still in a Destructive Romance with his ex-wife, was sick of being a pop star and the Gilded Cage and press harassment it resulted in, and disgusted by the fact that people were worshipping him as a poet and voice of a generation due to his whiteness rather than his own merits. These themes had been present on Encore!, intended as his last album, which has a lot of Trolling Creator elements and is themed around suicide. Hence finishing off his career by recalling his old hits while also providing new songs that seem only intent to destroy his artistic credibility for future generations - Curtain Call was marketed with multiple TV appearances in which Eminem told the audience it was terrible and they shouldn't buy it - namely downright opening with a skit where he screams abuse at the audience before transitioning into the awful gerbil anal insertion singalong "FACK", a song frequently cited as his worst ever; the formulaic "Shake That"; and a saccarine reflection on his career meant as a goodbye before Em went on Hiatus, "When I'm Gone". Curtain Call instead went 7x Platinum and is the longest charting hip-hop album in history, and when Eminem recovered from his drug addiction, he realised he wanted the credibility back. A decade later, Eminem would brag on "SHADYXV" that putting "that shit" on a Greatest Hits album "was awesome! It takes some massive balls to do some shit like that!"
• Troubled Production: "Encore" big time as it was originally supposed to be released in the summer of 2004 but it ended up leaking early on music sharing sites resulting in the album being delayed and the original tracklist being reworked(with many songs originally intended for the album instead appearing on the "Straight from the Lab" EP)with several new songs being quickly recorded in a matter of weeks. The new songs that were recorded for the album were the ones that generally garnered the most criticism from fans due to their jokey and over-the-top nature(I.E. Big Weenie, My 1st Single, Rain Man, Puke, Ass Like That, etc)and them being the most obvious signs of Eminem's then ongoing drug problems(and Eminem admitted that had those songs not leaked it would've been a different album).
• Uncredited Role: He's worked as an uncredited ghostwriter for Dr. Dre.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Allegedly, Eminem wanted to collaborate with the Detroit rap group House Of Krazees, but plans fell through. Two of the members in the group formed Twiztid, who Eminem ended up dissing for unrelated reasons.
  • "’97 Bonnie & Clyde" would have had Marilyn Manson as a feature, but Manson turned it down due being too misogynistic.
  • He was originally planned to play the lead in Elysium, but the idea was dropped when filming in Detroit wasn't permitted to the crew.
  • Before he decided on rapping, he wanted to make comic books. To that end, he picked up quite a bit of skill as a draftsman.
  • "Hailie's Song" from The Eminem Show was not intended for public release; Dr. Dre talked him into it after playing it for his friends.
  • The Marshall Mathers LP was considered complete before "The Way I Am" or "The Real Slim Shady" were made; however, the higher-ups didn't feel it had much in the way of single-worthy material.
  • According to Em himself, while recording the third verse of "Stan", he had problems with the audio engineer that ruined a take that he stated was "way better" than the one we all heard.
  • For "Bad Guy", Eminem considered getting Dido to sing the chorus, but realized that her presence would risk revealing that it's a sequel to "Stan" before the twist in the third verse.
  • Former Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi revealed in an interview that Eminem was to contribute to Iommi's solo album, but Tony declined largely because he was unaware of Eminem at the time.
  • "Criminal" makes a reference to Eminem releasing a new album every year. According to his commentary on Genius, Eminem intended to do just that before his drug addiction got in the way.
  • At one point, Eminem was planning on collaborating with Elton John (who previously joined him for a live performance of "Stan") on an album that mixed Hip-Hop with Glam Rock. However, Proof's murder resulted in the idea falling apart, with John instead recording a sequel album to Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy without Eminem's involvement.
• Write What You Know: He is often either the speaker or the subject of his works.
• Write Who You Hate:
  • As he confessed to the Rolling Stone Magazine in an interview, "Brain Damage" is about his grade-school nemesis, D'Angelo Bailey, who once battered him so severely he ended up comatose from a cerebral haemorrhage.
  • He also acknowledges, in an interview with Hot 97, the beef with Ray Benzino, editor of the magazine The Source and the inspiration of many of Em's songs such as "Say What You Say", "The Invasion (The Realest)", "The Sauce", "Nail In The Coffin", "Welcome to Detroit City", "Go To Sleep", "We All Die One Day", "The Invasion (The Conspiracy)", "The Invasion (Armageddon)", "Doe Rae Me (Hailie's Revenge)", "Keep Talkin'", "Wrong", "Bully", "Fubba U Cubba Cubba", "Like Toy Soldiers", "My 1st Single", "Bump Heads", "Hail Mary", "I'm Gone", "Never Enough", "Big Weenie", "Gatman and Robbin" and "Killshot".

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