The darkly comic tour de force single “My Name Is” introduced Slim Shady as a vengeful, ogre-ish, loose cannon. Under the aegis of his titular anti-hero, Eminem felt the freedom to expound on anything that took his fancy. His sophomore album and major-label debut 1999’s The Slim Shady LP was issued through Interscope, and still has the capacity to shock. Bleaching his hair to add to the brattish image, Eminem now had a conduit through which he could vent both his cartoonish sense of humor and latent anger. “Boom, the name hit me, and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it,” he recalled. The genesis of this transformation came on a trip to the toilet, when Mathers concocted his Slim Shady alter-ego. “After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier,” he told Rolling Stone magazine. But the album failed to have the desired impact, which, in turn, had a profound effect on the rapper. The subject matter was already highly personal, detailing the trials of living in one of Detroit’s poorest areas, and Eminem’s hopes for girlfriend Kim and their soon-to-be-born daughter, Hailie. 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. Recorded in 1996, it found the nascent star still developing a distinctive style. Many overlook Eminem’s little-known debut album, Infinite. At times his lyrics played out like a real-life soap opera, their emotional directness preempting modern hip-hop stars like Drake.

The act of playing detective and trying to separate fact from fiction is one of the great pleasures of trawling through Eminem’s music.

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