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After getting all of that serious, uber-sober material from last year’s Recovery out of the way, Eminem looks primed to get back to his roots with the Bad Meets Evil EP, Hell: The Sequel, with his old partner-in-crime Royce Da 5’9”. (If you recall, the two Detroit MCs appeared on a track by the same name on The Slim Shady LP).
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This new project is shaping up to be more of that old-school Eminem we’ve grown to know and love: raunchy, inappropriate and offensive. Just like we like him. But in case you’ve forgotten about the controversial Eminem, here are some of the most demented, over the edge lyrical songs of his career, from the albums leading up to his recent Recovery.
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The Slim Shady LP (1999)
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When most people bought Eminem’s major label debut, they did so because of the funny, innocent quips from “My Name Is.” Sure, we got lines about driving drunk and killing Dr. Dre, but that’s pretty innocuous by hip-hop standards. When fans finally bought the album though, they were in for a shock. Em wasn’t just the bleach-blonde kid that rapped better than Vanilla Ice. He was spitting dope bars and also being pretty gruesome in the process. One track, which is depicted on the album’s cover, has Eminem teaming up with his daughter to murder her mom, stuff her in the trunk and throw her off of a cliff. Now that’s family bonding.
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This is where Eminem became the king of hip-hop controversy we grew to love. Unlike, “Bonnie and Clyde,” this track had a video that was all over TRL (remember that show?), so the world saw Eminem and Dr. Dre firsthand teaming up to convince a guy to kill his own wife after finding her cheating on him. Even though the video had about 10 consecutive seconds bleeped out at the end, we understood the gist of it. Suddenly, Em was under the firestorm of criticism that he still has to fight from time to time.
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Dr. Dre- 2001 (1999)
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Dr. Dre’s 2001 is an undeniable classic, and Em shined on every one of his features. When he rapped about having his dead girlfriend in the passenger side of his car and waving her arms around to pretend like she’s alive ‘Weekend At Bernie’s’ style, his twisted sense of comedy came alive. The difference between Eminem and us? He’s oftentimes sick in the head.
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The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
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“Oh, now he’s raping his own mother…” and the Marshall Mathers LP never looked back. With this opening song, Em embraced his controversial image by killing about a dozen women in the span of four minutes. Oh yeah, and he does in fact talk about raping his own mother. But by the time he uses chainsaws to slice throats and kill someone by the name of Steven, you almost forget about that whole mother-raping part.
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This is a song from The Marshall Mathers LP with a forgotten Eminem verse — because frankly, not that many people felt like fighting through absurdly bad verses from RBX and Sticky Fingaz. But if you do hear Eminem’s verse, you’ll notice him going into full detail about the Columbine murders, a move that put artists like him and Marilyn Manson in the center of the media’s crosshairs. He also makes his desire to send then-President Bill Clinton to hell pointedly clear. Ah, the good old days when rappers could threaten violence against presidents without going to jail.
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This track makes “97 Bonnie And Clyde” look like a love song. On it, Slim Shady doesn’t rap as much as he just screams at the top of his lungs while verbally depicting a graphic fantasy of killing his baby’s mother. The song ends with Eminem slicing Kim’s throat while screaming “Bleed, B*tch Bleed!” At least he sings through the hook in a peaceful falsetto.
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D12- Devil’s Night (2001)
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Eminem’s antics always cross the line when he’s sharing bars with his Detroit brethren. Really, have you heard D12 group member Bizarre? The guy rapes his grandmother for crying out loud; Shady has to keep up. So he takes over “American Psycho” and murders the beat… and everyone else in sight. Gasp! The guy even runs with scissors!
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Relapse (2009)
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After a bout with heavy drugs that really affected the quality of his subsequent albums — really, Encore was an abomination — Em came back with a weird, twisted project that was even more over the edge than before. Case in point: “3 AM” had a video that only aired on Showtime because it was so violent. Maybe it’s because it features more cut-up body parts than kilos in a Rick Ross song. Unfortunately, his funny accent made us want to eviscerate ourselves by the end of the first verse.
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Top these opening lines: “I was born with a d*ck in my brain, yeah f*cked in the head/ my stepfather said that I sucked in the bed.” Hip-hop hadn’t necessarily been clamoring for its first child molestation-themed track, but we got it. The mental image still makes us cringe.
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We thought it was cute and funny when Mathers did the Triumph, The Insult Comic Dog spiel for “Ass Like That.” But on this track, he took it a bit further by impersonating the late Christopher Reeves and rapping with a mechanical voice and breathing machine to boot. Em later admitted that he hadn’t even known Reeves was dead at the time he recorded the track. Those drugs are serious, kids.