Two decades ago this weekend, rap’s most infamous bogeyman kicked off his reign with ‘The Slim Shady LP,’ his last album before money, fame, and the controversy that’s followed him since
He was so young, so raw, so angry, so hungry, so irresistibly crass. But at first, almost everyone managed to resist Marshall Mathers. “You bitches get a hysterectomy disrespectin’ me,” boasted the Detroit rapper known semi-professionally as Eminem on his very independent 1996 debut album, Infinite. “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.”
Sir, this is an Arby’s. The song is called “Open Mic” and sounds like it, gloomy and brash but not a little amateurish. 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. Not wack, exactly, but certainly wearying, his wordplay often so overwrought it devolved into word salad. 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.
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. It was like, ‘Oh, here comes the white rapper’”). It flopped hard, in any event. “After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier,” Em told Rolling Stone a few years later. “A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. 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.”
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And then, he had a revelation. On the toilet. That’s probably just coincidence. This revelation consisted of two words: Slim Shady. “Boom, the name hit me, and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it,” Em recalled. “So I wiped my ass, got up off the pot and, ah, went and called everybody I knew.”
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. A star, and a scourge, and an intergalactic bogeyman was on the verge of being born.
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. “I had to break in,” he told Rolling Stone. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go. There was no heat, no water, no electricity. I slept on the floor, woke up, went to L.A. I was so pissed.” He was in L.A. for a national MC battle called the Rap Olympics. He finished second, to his dismay; first prize was $500 and a Rolex. (“He really looked like he was going to cry,” recalled longtime manager and future album-skit superstar Paul Rosenberg.) But during that trip, Dr. 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. When Jimmy played this, I said, ‘Find him. Now.’”
They found him.
