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Home About. Share on Facebook. Share on Twitter. Share via Email. Close Modal Window. Hip-hop is not exactly renowned for its wallflowers, but there have been few stars as outrageously controversial as Eminem, aka Slim Shady. As prodigiously talented as he is confrontational, the Detroit rapper born Marshall Mathers on October 17, , worked his way up from the underground to become the most successful hip-hop artist in the world.
Among his many crowning achievements, in the 00s Eminem outsold every other musician in the US. Taking on the guise of Slim Shady, he employed jet-black humor to delve deep into his troubled past — and to imagine the darkest of alternate futures. But who was the real Marshall Mathers and who was Slim Shady? At times his lyrics played out like a real-life soap opera, their emotional directness preempting modern hip-hop stars like Drake. The real Slim Shady? Recorded in , it found the nascent star still developing a distinctive style.
However, it boasts a raft of complex rhymes and the verbal erudition of a man who had spent much of his youth absorbed in a dictionary. But the album failed to have the desired impact, which, in turn, had a profound effect on the rapper. In the book, she claims to have never exploited her son, and that her only concern was for her children. Eminem's mother never managed to hold down a job for more than several months at a time, so they moved frequently between Missouri and Detroit, Michigan, spending large chunks of time in public housing projects.
This itinerant lifestyle left a large impact on his personality. He had no close friends, kept almost entirely to himself and was treated like an outcast at each new school. Eminem attended Lincoln High School in Warren, Michigan, where he failed the ninth grade three times and eventually dropped out at the age of Yet despite being a poor student, Eminem always had a deep affinity for language, devouring comic books and even studying the dictionary.
I just felt like I wanna be able to have all of these words at my disposal, in my vocabulary at all times whenever I need to pull 'em out. You know, somewhere, they'll be stored, like, locked away. Eminem was just 15 when he met year-old Kim Ann Scott at a house party. Kim, who claimed that she didn't know her father and had been sexually abused by her stepfather, came to live with Eminem and his mother Deborah.
Eminem and Kim soon began dating, but their relationship was turbulent from the start. Deborah threw the couple out when Eminem dropped out of school. In , the couple had a daughter named Hailie Jade Scott. The couple broke up and got back together many times, finally marrying just before Eminem left on his first major tour in They divorced in Kim and Eminem continued to maintain a tumultuous off-and-on relationship until remarrying in , then divorcing again several months later.
Following their second divorce, the exes began a protracted, ugly and highly public custody dispute over their daughter Hailie. Eminem has rapped about Hailie throughout his career, including on the song "Mockingbird" and throughout his album Revival.
Hailie graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in psychology and has become an Instagram influencer. As a teenage dropout, Eminem found a way to express his passion for language, as well as to release his youthful anger, through the emerging musical genre of hip-hop.
Although at the time rap music was almost exclusively produced by Black people, Eminem, who has pale white skin and bright blue eyes, nevertheless entered into the Detroit rap scene as a frequent competitor in rap "battles"—competitions in which two rappers take turns insulting the other through improvised rap lyrics.
Eminem proved highly skilled at such verbal sparring and, despite his race, quickly became one of the most respected figures in Detroit's underground rap scene. He recalled, "I finally found something that yeah, this kid over here, you know, he may have more chicks, and he may, you know, have better clothes, or whatever, but he can't do this like me.
You know what I mean? He can't write what I'm writing right now. And it started to feel like, you know, maybe Marshall's gettin' a little respect. This period in Eminem's life—working odd jobs to make ends meet while participating in rap battles and desperately attempting to land a record contract—was later dramatized in Eminem's semi-autobiographical film from , 8 Mile.
Eminem went on to become one of the most acclaimed rappers in the genre's brief history. As much as any other individual artist, he is responsible for rap's transformation into a mainstream music genre. Inspired by the birth of his daughter Hailie to make a living as a rapper, Eminem released his first independent rap album, Infinite , in
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