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By Root 641 0

the producer who developed 8 Mile around him, Eminem shape-shifted from sarcastic to serious and goofy to gangsta in the space of an answer. He lit up his MTV performance debut on the Music Video Awards in 1999 with a medley of “My Name Is,” “Guilty Conscience,” and “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” performed with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, which highlighted his hip-hop pedigree and a theatrical, high-energy stage presence. At the MTV Awards and the Grammys that year, Eminem looked like he might actually laugh during his acceptance speeches, as if he couldn’t believe he was being rewarded by those he mocked. A year later, in 2000, as his negative media image loomed and his personal life began to unravel, Eminem played to his reputation. Accepting one of a handful of MTV Awards for The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem pulled a speech from his pocket, allowing a pile of “pills” to fall on the stage, and he summed up the event as “The one night where you can fit all these people I don’t like into one room.”

In his first appearance on MTV’s TRL, the same week The Slim Shady LP was released, the rapper was subtly hilarious. The show’s co-guest of the day was pop-rapper-turned-underwear-model-turned-actor Mark Wahlberg, there to promote his current film, Three Kings, to the channel’s teen audience. The contrast between Eminem and Wahlberg’s Jazzercised take on hip-hop less than a decade earlier couldn’t be missed by the viewers old enough to remember when he called himself Marky. Wahlberg represented two pillars in Eminem’s hate files: crappy white rappers and teen pop. The screaming youths in the studio audience probably were not aware of Wahlberg’s rap career, coincidentally as an Interscope Records artist, too, fronting the pop rap outfit Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The Bunch sold a million records in 1991, thanks to the high-energy hit “Good Vibrations,” but failed to connect on their second and final album, You Gotta Believe. Their brief notoriety did, however, pave the way for 1993’s Form … Focus … Fitness, the Marky Mark Workout, a stepping-stone to Wahlberg’s film career.

“Marky Mark, fucking asshole. Bastard prick,” Eminem told me about that day on TRL. “I don’t know what the fuck his problem was. He walked up in there like fuckin’ ‘What, is there supposed to be some fucking tension in here?’ He’s a fucking little faggot. I’m standing with Carson Daly and we’re off air. And some dude who works for MTV tells us Mark Wahlberg is coming in, says he’d appreciate it if we don’t call him Marky Mark. I thought that was kinda funny. I wasn’t planning on doing that shit anyways. Little fucking homo. Then he comes up and he’s standing on the side when we was off air and he’s like, ‘What, is there supposed to be some fucking tension in here or something?’ I pretended like I don’t hear him and shit. Then we’re on air and Carson calls him on set and I’m like, ‘What up, Mark?’ He shakes my hand but he don’t even look at me. He goes, ‘Where do you want me to stand?’ Carson’s like, you can just stand there. I’m like, ‘We’ll just stand around here like one big fun bunch!’ So I threw a stab at him. He didn’t want me to say Mark-y. Probably didn’t want me to say funk-y neither.” Eminem punctuated the “fun” moment with a bug-eyed look at the camera. Wahlberg looked as if he had forgotten his next line in a scene.

Moon over Barcelona: Eminem accepting one of his three MTV Europe Awards in Barcelona, Spain, on November 14, 2002.

“Marky looked away and shit when I said that,” Eminem said, “with a look that was like ‘fuckin’ dick.’ So Carson congratulates me on my sales for the week and Marky Mark is like, ‘Oh, you got an album out?’ Fucking dick! Nah, you fucking bitch. You already heard it everywhere, you fat fuck. You probably got six copies, you fucking little queer. After I leave, Carson and Mark are talking about Korn on the air and Marky Mark says, ‘I like Korn. Ice Cube turned me on to them. I usually don’t like white people who do music, though.’ Trying to throw another stab at me I guess. What the fuck is he? Because he don’t do music