The Marshall Mathers LP 2 Drops: Look Back at Eminem Over the Years

As a skinny white kid growing up in Detroit, Marshall Mathers had a tough time in school and ended up repeating at least one grade before ultimately dropping out. He used his experiences to fuel early lyrics, like in “Brain Damage,” where he rapped, “Way before my baby daughter Hailie/ I was harassed daily by this fat kid named D'Angelo Bailey/ An eighth grader who acted obnoxious, cause his father boxes/ so everyday he'd shove me in the lockers.” But because he was a quiet, unassuming kid who withdrew into his writing, he started performing early too, becoming a fixture at rap battles in his city.

In 1997, Eminem released his first official EP, despite having already put out an underground debut album the year before. The Slim Shady Album marked his first real storytelling in his songs, tackling everything from comic-book-style violence to the more serious poverty, drug, and family issues he witnessed every day. Using the alias Slim Shady, Eminem was able to put some distance between himself and his words. The album was picked up by Aftermath and Interscope and re-released with slightly tweaked tracks in 1999 as a full studio LP.

Eminem took the title of Best New Artist in a Video for “My Name Is…” at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards. The bleach-blond hip-hop star also took the stage for a physically understated but lyrically on point performance medley of his singles with special guests Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. It wasn’t the spectacle that his dozens of doppelgangers for “The Real Slim Shady” would be the following year, but he was still finding his footing and comfort factor with being a star.

Eminem created a series of animated short films based around his Slim Shady alter ego to play during his 2000 world tour, but they soon found themselves going wide on the Internet. Eminem’s comic-book version of himself mocked everything from pop princesses like Christina Aguilera to former child stars like Dustin Diamond and the then-current phenomenon South Park. Of course, sex and drugs ran rampant too.

Even while writing about rape, murder, and politics, Eminem made it no secret that his heart was with his daughter, Hailie Jade Mathers, and everything he did in his career was for her. He immortalized her on quite a few tracks—perhaps most controversially in “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” when he used recorded cooing from her crib mixed and mingled with his baby-talk rap about killing her mother. Since then, though, he has written about watching her grow up in “Hailie’s Song” and “Mockingbird” most explicitly. Though he is raising three girls as his own, Hailie is his only biological child.

Eminem and Kimberly Mathers were high school “sweethearts” who had a tumultuous relationship at best, dictated not only by his lyrics but also by court records. The two married for the first time in 1999, after they had already given birth to their daughter, but shortly after divorced. They remarried in 2006 and divorced immediately after again. While his angry and intense song “Kim” is the most obviously about his then-current state of the relationship, she has been referenced on countless other tracks, including “Love You More,” where he bemoans, “I throw you out the house, you throw me out the house/ I throw you on the couch, punch you in the mouth/ we fist fight 'till we turn this mother out/ and apologize after, laughter/ pain, it's insane, we're back in the same chapter again/ and it's sad but it's true, when i'm laying here with you/ there ain't nothing anyone could ever say or ever do…”

In 2002 Eminem took to the big screen to portray a fictionalized version of himself in the semi-autobiographical 8 Mile, directed by Curtis Hanson. Eminem played an aspiring rapper who was working a dead-end factory job and unable to get up the courage to even take the stage to battle, but by the end of the movie he was eviscerating the reigning champion and exposing him as a fraud with just the power of his words. He won an Oscar for “Lose Yourself,” an original, perhaps surprisingly traditionally inspirational, song on the soundtrack.

In 2008 Eminem spoke directly to his fans in a memoir of sorts that compiled song lyrics, personal photos, and other musings from the celebrity. He opened up more honestly in prose about his feelings on his childhood, including his absentee father, and the extent of his depression after the death of Proof.

After Eminem came back onto the music scene with 2008’s Relapse album, he also returned to acting in a cameo in the Adam Sandler movie Funny People. It was a rebirth of sorts for the artist who had gone through some tough times dealing with loss and addiction, and he wiped the slate clean by proving he was still on top of his game with wit and humor and, yes, even physicality. Judd Apatow praised his cameo in Funny People by saying Eminem “killed” it and was completely unflinching in his ability to improv anything to get the laugh.

In what has surely gone down as one of the most memorable concerts to date, Eminem took the stage with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg—and a hologram of Tupac—for the 2012 Coachella music festival. He was there to pay tribute to Dr. Dre’s work and contribute his verse from “Forgot About Dre” and “I Need a Doctor,” which may explain why the hologram got more press.