• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 547 0

to shoot pictures of his house where he grew up and bits and pieces all around town for the inside of The Marshall Mathers album,” Jonathan Mannion says. “Afterward we were hanging out and I had heard just a couple of the songs they had finished for the album and a couple of others that were just vocal tracks and I was already, like, blown away. So he says he’s going to play one more and he puts on ‘The Way I Am.’ And he spit that, word for word, the whole thing, man. I took my friend’s camera right out of his hand and started shooting, like, ‘Sorry, man, give me that.’ Just to hear that song for the first time with him spittin’ it like that. Oh my God, I was floored, the kid was just fucking amazing. He’s out of here, no question.”

Eminem don’t give a fuck it’s not his birthday.

Eminem has left the joking aside in search of serious, heartfelt, and technically superior explanations of himself. His zany wit has been replaced by sarcasm and his earlier rhyme styles with more dexterous manipulations of language. He has become a stylistic feat in motion like the footwork of welterweight champion boxer Roy Jones Jr. or a dunk shot by Alan Iverson. Whereas Slim Shady lagged behind the beat, then rushed up to it and around it, lending an added level of humor and mania to Eminem’s delivery, the rapper has become an expert at laying his rap on the beat, sinking into it, making for a more powerful presentation. The Eminem Show is full of brilliant moments that sound like the breaking of linguistic laws for the sake of free association. A few gems are: “verse starts … MC’s heart” (“Till I Collapse”); “closest pal / poster-child” (“White America”); “crayons … chaos” (“Square Dance”); “miracles … syllables” (“Business”); “corrupt … syrup” (“Say What You Say”). This isn’t Slim Shady’s ecstasy trip; it’s a more serious, more skillful ride.

“I fucking hate ‘My Name Is,’” Eminem said in 2002. “I didn’t hate it when I first made it. When I do a record now, there’s an instinct thing that kicks in when a song could be big. When I listen to a song a few times and it starts to become cheesy to me, that’s when I know it could be a big record. Like ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ that started to get cheesy to me and I said, ‘I think people may like this.’ You know, the shit I really, really put my heart and soul into I don’t get recognized for. My serious shit like ‘The Way I Am’ is where I really dump out my true feelings. There’s a difference between being funny and being real and I feel like I don’t get recognized for the real shit, my best shit.”

Fame and this sense of not being noticed when he’s serious steered Eminem away from humor, toward earnest looks at his life, leaving the public less chances to miss his point. Songs like “Sing for the Moment” and “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” from The Eminem Show, as well as “Lose Yourself” from 8 Mile are concise, cinematic stories, in contrast to Slim Shady’s slapstick.

“I sampled ‘Dream On’ for ‘Sing for the Moment,’ and Aerosmith cleared it,” Eminem says. “That’s really great of them because it’s one of my favorite songs in the world. I was talking to Steven Tyler about it the other day and he said some true shit. He said if I have to make songs that appeal to everybody—like to get people to listen to my realer songs—that’s what I’ll do. Basically, my theory is the same: If I have to make cheesy songs to get people to listen to my harder songs, then that’s what I’ll do. That’s the theory that everyone in the business sticks with but it’s cool to see, especially those guys, they’ve been in the business so long, it’s great to hear that you have the same theories. You gotta play the fucking game, man, you gotta play the game I guess.”

Eminem is a perfectionist, a rapper who prefers the studio to the club and who has evolved into a producer quickly. “He’s a studio jockey, man,” Dr. Dre says. “He wants to get in there and make records. I admire that kind of energy, it keeps me on my toes.” Eminem’s growing production prowess is in the rolling, bombastic vein of his mentor, but with a rock-and-roll sense