Marshall Mathers, who records as Eminem, is among the best-selling recording artists of any genre and the one who did most to move rap from a regional American form to a global commercial default. His reputation rests on technique: dense internal and multisyllabic rhyme delivered at speed, and an ear for scanning a line against a beat rather than simply along it.
He was born in 1972 and grew up mostly in and around Detroit, which is where the work is set and where its social detail comes from.1
The records that matter
Dr. Dre signed him after hearing an early tape, and produced the run of albums that made his name. The partnership is central to the sound: Dre's spare, low-slung production leaves a great deal of room, and the rapping fills it.
- The Slim Shady LP (1999) introduced the alter ego — a deliberately unreliable narrator that let him write in a register nobody was meant to read as autobiography.
- The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) is the one most often named as his best, and the commercial peak — it sold at a rate essentially unmatched for a rap record at the time.
- The Eminem Show (2002) turned the subject inward — fame, family, and the position he had arrived at — and he produced much of it himself.
8 Mile
The 2002 film, loosely drawn on his early years in Detroit, gave him the wider audience that the records alone had not. Lose Yourself, written for it, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song — the first rap recording to do so, and still the one most people can quote from memory.2
Why he divides opinion
The same records that made his name drew sustained criticism for their violence and for homophobic and misogynistic content, and the argument over how much the Slim Shady framing excuses has never really been settled. It is a genuine disagreement about the work rather than a footnote to it, and any honest account of him has to carry both halves.
He is ranked in Best hip hop artists, where the argument that actually gets had is with Kendrick Lamar — the two are rated on almost opposite grounds, one for what he can do to a bar and the other for what he can do to a record.
The technical ceiling he set for rhyme in mainstream rap is the part almost nobody disputes.
- 1Mathers, Marshall "Eminem"The Detroit Historical Society on the years before the record deal.detroithistorical.org
- 2Losing Yourself All Over AgainAn oral history of the film, and of the battle scene it recreated.grantland.com