My Life 2: Sequel to My Life: A Jordan Walker Story

Chapter 25: Everything About Eminem

Marshall Bruce Mathers III (born October 17, 1972), known professionally as Eminem is an American rapper, songwriter, and record producer. He is credited with popularizing hip hop in middle America and is critically acclaimed as one of the greatest rappers of all time. Eminem's global success and acclaimed works are widely regarded as having broken racial barriers for the acceptance of white rappers in music. While much of his transgressive work during the late 1990s and early 2000s made him widely controversial, he came to be a representation of popular angst of the American underclass and has been cited as an influence for many artists of various genres.

After the release of his debut album Infinite (1996) and the extended play Slim Shady EP (1997), Eminem signed with Dr. Dre's Aftermath Entertainment and subsequently achieved mainstream popularity in 1999 with The Slim Shady LP. His next two releases, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) and The Eminem Show (2002), were worldwide successes and were both nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year. After the release of his next album Encore (2004), Eminem went on hiatus in 2005, largely due to a prescription drug addiction. He returned to the music industry four years later with the release of Relapse (2009) and Recovery was released the following year. Recovery was the best-selling album of the year worldwide. In the following years, he released the US number one albums The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013), Revival (2017), Kamikaze (2018) and Music to Be Murdered By (2020). A twelfth studio album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) is slated to be released in mid-2024.

Eminem made his debut in the film industry with the musical drama film 8 Mile (2002), playing a fictionalized version of himself, and his track "Lose Yourself" from its soundtrack won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, making him the first hip hop artist ever to win the award. Eminem has made cameo appearances in the films The Wash (2001), Funny People (2009) and The Interview (2014) and the television series Entourage (2010).

He has also developed other ventures, including Shady Records, a joint venture with manager Paul Rosenberg, which helped launch the careers of artists such as 50 Cent, D12 and Obie Trice, among others. He has also established his own channel, Shade 45 on Sirius XM Radio.

In addition to his solo career, Eminem was a member of the hip hop group D12. He is also known for collaborations with fellow Detroit rapper Royce da 5'9"; the two are collectively known as Bad Meets Evil.

Early Life

Mathers was born on October 17, 1972, in St. Joseph, Missouri, the only child of Marshall Bruce Mathers Jr. and Deborah Rae "Debbie" (née Nelson). He is of Scottish, Welsh, English, Cherokee, German, Swiss, Polish, and possibly Luxemburgish ancestry. His mother nearly died during her 73-hour labor with him. Eminem's parent were in band called Daddy Warbucks, playing in Ramada Inns along the Dakotas-Montana border before they separated. His father abandoned his family when he was a year and half old, and Marshall was raised only by his mother, Debbie, in poverty. His mother later had a son named Nathan "Nate" Kane Samara. At age twelve, he and his mother had moved several times and lived in several towns and cities in Missouri (including St. Joseph, Savannah, and Kansas City) before settling in Warren, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Eminem frequently fought with his mother, whom a social worker described as having a "very suspicious, almost paranoid personality". He wrote letters to his father, but Debbie said that they all came back marked "return to sender".

When he was a child, a bully named D'Angelo Bailey severely injured Eminem's head in an assault, an incident which Eminem later recounted (with comic exaggeration) on the song "Brain Damage". Debbie filed a lawsuit against the public school for this in 1982. The suit was dismissed the following year by a Macomb County, Michigan judge who said the schools were immune from lawsuits. For much of his youth, Eminem and his mother lived in a working-class, primarily black, Detroit neighborhood. He and Debbie were one of the three white households on their block, and Eminem was beaten several times by black youths.