Quality-wise, he’d get a little better from there, and then, alas, a whole lot worse. 2 on the Billboard album chart, lower that first week than TLC’s FanMail but higher than The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill it would be the last time an Eminem record didn’t immediately hit no. “Got pissed off and ripped Pamela Lee’s tits off / And smacked her so hard I knocked her clothes backwards like Kris Kross.” The vast majority of that line didn’t make it on MTV, but the kids, ah, got the message. Buoyed by the MTV-born smash single “My Name Is,” it remains as delightful and whimsical a delivery system for pure ultraviolence as you could imagine, or polite society could stand.
Dre and released by Interscope and Dre’s own Aftermath Entertainment, came out 20 years ago this weekend, on February 23, 1999. The Slim Shady LP, executive produced by Dr. When Jimmy played this, I said, ‘Find him. Dre and Interscope Records cofounder Jimmy Iovine stumbled across a copy of The Slim Shady EP, and Dre’s response was immediate: “In my entire career in the music industry, I have never found anything from a demo tape or a CD. (“He really looked like he was going to cry,” recalled longtime manager and future album-skit superstar Paul Rosenberg.) But during that trip, Dr. He finished second, to his dismay first prize was $500 and a Rolex. for a national MC battle called the Rap Olympics. I slept on the floor, woke up, went to L.A. There was no heat, no water, no electricity. “I had to break in,” he told Rolling Stone. One night soon thereafter, Em came home to the Detroit apartment he was sharing with friends-his infant daughter, Hailie, and her mother, Kim, were living elsewhere-and found an eviction notice. A star, and a scourge, and an intergalactic bogeyman was on the verge of being born. The Slim Shady EP, released in December 1997, was a massive, disquieting improvement, deep and dark and concussive, a horrorcore funhouse ride to Actual Hell, from the Black Flag–style mirror-smash cover art to the song called “Just Don’t Give a Fuck” to the other song, then called “Just the Two of Us,” in which Em and a cooing baby girl hit the beach to dispose of the murdered corpse of that baby’s mother. “So I wiped my ass, got up off the pot and, ah, went and called everybody I knew.” “Boom, the name hit me, and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it,” Em recalled. This revelation consisted of two words: Slim Shady. Motherfuckers was like, ‘You’re a white boy, what the fuck are you rapping for? Why don’t you go into rock ’n’ roll?’ All that type of shit started pissing me off.”Īnd then, he had a revelation. “A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. “After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier,” Em told Rolling Stone a few years later. It was like, ‘Oh, here comes the white rapper’”). Infinite sold as few as 70 copies (per Eminem’s autobiography) and as many as a few hundred (per his early producers, the Bass Brothers, who concede that “we couldn’t get arrested back then. Like many a petulant early 20-something with precious little to his name and way too much to prove, he was, to put it simply, using way too many napkins. Not wack, exactly, but certainly wearying, his wordplay often so overwrought it devolved into word salad. You could marvel at the kid’s abrasive charisma, and maybe even laugh at his dopiest it-came-from-the-third-grade punch lines (“You couldn’t flip shit playin’ in toilets with a spatula”), but still find young Em far too dense, too clever, too Nas-worshiping earnest, too fixated on rhyming for rhyming’s sake. The song is called “Open Mic” and sounds like it, gloomy and brash but not a little amateurish.
“You wanna feel the full effect of me, hand a TEC to me / Intellectually superior, I’ll make the wack wearier / Inferior, deteriorate, like bacteria.”
“You bitches get a hysterectomy disrespectin’ me,” boasted the Detroit rapper known semi-professionally as Eminem on his very independent 1996 debut album, Infinite. But at first, almost everyone managed to resist Marshall Mathers. NO PERSONAL INFO For the sake of clarification: personal information does include emails, phone numbers and addresses.He was so young, so raw, so angry, so hungry, so irresistibly crass. He crossed over to the mainstream popularity with his re-interpolation of the rock & roll classic "Runaround Sue." Arriving on-stage with a pompadour and a leather jacket, G-Eazy became known as "the James Dean of rap", but his music is much less troubled than that name might imply. This is the official G-Eazy subreddit! G-Eazy is an American rapper, songwriter and producer.