Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [12]
“Em just couldn’t believe he was sitting there and that Dre liked his music,” Rosenberg says. “What else can you say? The guy’s sitting in a room with Dre and Dre is like, ‘I want to fuck with you.’”
The first day they worked together, Dr. Dre and Eminem recorded four songs in six hours. Two of them, “My Name Is” and “Role Model,” made the album and distinctly defined the Slim Shady persona. They are an invitation and a warning, an arrival with a disclaimer of all that will follow. Like Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?,” “My Name Is” is a hummable anthem that trademarked Eminem in just one song. “My Name Is” is nursery-rhyme catchy, a showcase of Eminem’s humor over a bouncy beat built around the funky piano hook of the eclectic, openly gay, African vocalist Labi Siffree’s “I Got the …”—ironic, considering the accusations in Eminem’s near future.
“My Name Is” did more than introduce Eminem to the world, it established a tradition: the caliber and tone of the singles that would announce each of his following albums (“The Real Slim Shady” for 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP and “Without Me” for 2002’s The Eminem Show). “My Name Is” set the precedent of prediction that now flows through all of Eminem’s lyrics: It is a debut single from the point of view of the already-famous. It is a dictated message to a huge, preexisting fan base by an artist who had barely been heard outside of his hometown.
When The Slim Shady LP was released on February 23, 1999, the pop-culture landscape wasn’t ready. Due to the heavy rotation “My Name Is” had gotten on radio and on MTV for nearly a month, the LP debuted at number two, selling more than 300,000 copies in a week.
“When ‘My Name Is’ was released on MTV, his underground buzz was as big as an underground buzz could get back then,” says Paul Rosenberg. “The underground has changed, but at the time you had a scene that was really anti-MTV and all of the Puff Daddy jiggy videos. The underground wanted some real rap. These kids bought vinyl and really searched for something different than mainstream hip-hop. Eminem did a show at Tramps in New York that was completely sold out and he didn’t even have an album out. And that is a pretty big deal. It was a great show. That crowd was all fans, some who had seen him perform before, some who had bought tickets just to see him. From the beginning he was an MTV staple, so that puts him automatically with the kids. It depends on where he is playing or what tour he was on, but Eminem played to a lot of different crowds.”
The album holding on to number one the week The Slim Shady LP was released was TLC’s Fanmail, anchored there by its mooching men caveat, “No Scrubs.” The number three spot was held by The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The spotlight for the past year had belonged to women: Celine Dion, the chest-beating diva whose chart-topping ballad “My Heart Will Go On,” from the film Titanic, went on and on; Lauryn Hill’s string of hits, “Ex-Factor,” “Doo Wop (That Thing),” and “Everything Is Everything,” blazed across the charts; Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” rallied for girls’ nights out; and Madonna returned with “Ray of Light.” The Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls rode atop the first wave of teen pop, the Spice Girls enjoying a pair of albums on the charts simultaneously, and both groups logging well over one hundred weeks on the Top 200 Albums list, while newcomers such as Britney Spears and *NSYNC nipped at their heels. In rap, Will Smith’s Big Willie Style, Mase’s Harlem World, and Puff Daddy’s No Way Out led a celebration of all things fly and material with, in the case of Puffy and Mase, a side salad of gangsta posturing. Jay-Z and DMX represented the hip-hop streets in quality while