Happy birthday, Marshall. And Eminem. And Slim Shady.
Marshall Mathers, the rapper who set the world on fire when he stepped onto the scene with his major label debut album "The Slim Shady LP" back in 1999, turns 50 on Monday.
He does so as an Oscar winner, a 15-time Grammy winner and one of the best-selling artists of all time. He's also been a controversy magnet and a cultural lightning rod, although his days of stirring up picketers and protests have mostly subsided.
Next month, Eminem will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside a 2022 class that includes Duran Duran, Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, Pat Benatar, Carly Simon and the Eurythmics. Em got in on his first year of eligibility, 25 years after the release of his debut album, the scrappy, locally distributed "Infinite."
He's since released 10 additional studio albums, scores of collaborations and hundreds of songs.
These are his 50 best, the criteria being they had to be commercially released on an Eminem project with Eminem credited as the lead artist. There are no leaks, mixtape tracks or underground songs here, and there is a separate tally of his 10 best collaborations sprinkled throughout the list.
Eminem has amassed an impressive body of work over the course of his career, and age 50 is no longer the barrier for rappers that it once was. So we have every reason to believe we'll be updating this list again in 10 years, when Slim Shady turns 60.
But for now, at his half-century mark, here are Eminem's 50 best songs on the occasion of his 50th birthday. Do a square dance. Sing for the moment. And lose yourself in the music.
50. 'We Made You' (from 'Relapse')
Eminem has made better and more successful celeb-skewing tracks, but this one works best when taken in context of his headspace during "Relapse," which makes it something of a subconscious cry for help from deep within his psyche. "You're a rockstar," he's convincing himself, "everybody loves you," pleading with his own id to get his life back on track. Meant as a good time, it's eerily haunting, and the beat will bounce around inside your head for days if you let it.
49. 'Elevator' (from 'Relapse: Refill')
Tackling the absurdity which his life had become, Em wrestles with the notion of going from broke and dreaming of going gold to "living in a house with a f---ing elevator."
48. 'Alfred's Theme' (from 'Music to Be Murdered By — Side B')
Over a looped sample of the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" theme, Em piles up a dizzying number of references and metaphors ("got me sitting on numbers, like a pocket dial"), at one point stopping to sing "Happy Birthday" in the mirror and checking his own notes to make sure he's still able to keep up with himself.
47. 'Infinite' (from 'Infinite')
From his 1996 debut album, a pre-Dr. Dre, pre-fame Eminem steadily flows over a midtempo Mr. Porter beat and comes off sounding like Nas or Souls of Mischief with his pure love of the mechanics of '90s hip-hop. The skills were always there, and here's the evidence.
46. 'Criminal' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
Some frighteningly indefensible homophobic lyrics aside, Slim Shady is in top form here, switching rapidly between characters — he plays Gianni Versace, a record exec and a philandering Southern preacher all within a few lines — while gleefully playing up his bad boy persona, even stopping to rob a bank mid-song.
45. 'Ass Like That' (from 'Encore')
It's not the most juvenile track in Em's arsenal — that distinction belongs to "Fack" — but this baffling offering comes awfully close, and somehow manages to combine Middle Eastern rhythms, a Triumph the Insult Comic Dog cadence and an Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. It's a surreal ride into the depths of his drug-addled thoughts — and bizarro creativity.
44. 'Public Enemy #1' (from 'Eminem Presents: The Re-Up')
Em ties the paranoia in his head — post-mega fame, pre-overdose — to a wide range of conspiracy theories, including 9/11, 2Pac's death and JFK's assassination, in a breathless countdown rap that clocks in at just under two frantic minutes in length.
43. 'Stay Wide Awake' (from 'Relapse')
A slasher movie on wax, with a Dr. Dre-laced beat that sounds like wind whistling through a graveyard and Em spinning sicko fantasies like Wes Craven jotting down ideas in his notebook. "Stay away from me 'cause I am dancing to quite a different drumbeat," he says, proving as much with each subsequent verse.
42. 'So Bad' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP 2')
Over a lurching Dr. Dre beat that is as thick as a tree trunk and as mighty as a brontosaurus stomp, Eminem's semi-sequel to "Superman" finds him playing loverman and coming off more like a sociopath.
41. 'The Monster' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP 2')
Eminem wrestles with fame, the monster of the title, as Rihanna (and an uncredited Bebe Rexha, who wrote the original hook) joins him on the chorus of this pop crossover that went on to win a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration.
40. 'The Ringer' (from 'Kamikaze')
After the mixed reaction to 2017's "Revival" album, Eminem comes back, barrels loaded, and unleashes lyrical warfare on fellow rappers, the media, even President Trump, on the smoldering opening track of his surprise-released "Kamikaze" LP, setting the tone for the entire album to follow.
39. 'Déjà Vu' (from 'Relapse')
Em addresses his overdose, its cover up, his struggles with sobriety and the death of his best friend Proof on this harrowing, almost uncomfortably honest chronicle, which tackles his depression, drug abuse and lethargy better and more succinctly than the similar "Beautiful," which was released as a single. Should have been this one.
38. 'Just Don't Give a F---' (from 'The Slim Shady LP')
The birth of Slim Shady. This track from "The Slim Shady EP" — which was later ported over to his major label debut album — finds him loosening his grip on reality and embracing his new over-the-top persona, bragging he's "the looniest, zaniest, spontaneous, sporadic, impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict, half animal, half man," showing the power of his wordplay and the direction in which he'd soon be headed.
37. 'Killshot' (single)
After Machine Gun Kelly took aim at Eminem on his track "Rap Devil" (itself a response to Eminem's "Not Alike," from "Kamikaze"), Em fired back, saying his biggest flops were Kelly's biggest hits, and that he'd rather be an 80-year-old Eminem than a 20-year-old MGK. In a not unrelated story, MGK soon radically revamped his career, dropping rap for a punk-pop look and sound.
36. 'My Mom' (from 'Relapse')
Eminem dregs up his favorite feud and blames his mother for his drug addiction, claiming his mom got him hooked on valium at an early age in an absurdist sing-songy nursery rhyme style, chanting "I'm on what I'm on 'cause I'm my mom" over an undulating Dr. Dre beat.
35. 'Mosh' (from 'Encore')
Long before he took aim at Donald Trump (and at a time when artists were much more hesitant to openly criticize top political figures), Em had George W. Bush in his sights, and he took him to task on this solemn, mournful critique of the president and the War in Afghanistan, which was released in the days leading up to the 2004 presidential election.
34. 'Bitch Please II' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
An old-school posse cut with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Nate Dogg and Eminem trading verses like they're sitting around the lunch table in middle school, rapping for rapping's sake, with Eminem sharply but playfully addressing his critics (namely, former Billboard editor Timothy White) in the wake of his breakout success.
33. 'Won't Back Down' (from 'Recovery')
A barnburning rock track brimming with charged guitars, howling organs and a defiant chorus from P!nk, while Eminem spews angrily like he woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
32. 'Rabbit Run' (from '8 Mile: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture')
It's a race against time for three tension-filled minutes, as Eminem — in the guise of his "8 Mile" character Jimmy "B-Rabbit" Smith — raps over a ticking clock that signifies his closing window of opportunity.
31. ''97 Bonnie & Clyde' (from 'The Slim Shady LP')
This haunting track — where Em coolly and calmly describes the murder of his daughter's mother to his baby girl — helped publicly establish the bond between Eminem and his daughter, one of the most important and ongoing themes in his work, and also proved Em to be both a scary-good storyteller and a good scary story teller.
30. 'Business' (from 'The Eminem Show')
Utterly effortless, it’s a testament to Em’s hitmaking abilities at this point in his career that this sounds utterly tossed off, and he knows it. "You ain't even impressed no more," he scoffs, "you're used to it."
29. 'Drug Ballad' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
A very different commentary on drugs than would come on Eminem’s latter albums, "Drug Ballad" celebrates youth and drug culture with a wistful, live-for-today nonchalance.
28. 'My Dad's Gone Crazy' (from 'The Eminem Show')
Em enlists a vocal assist from his daughter on this hilariously profane track where he describes his dedication to rap in several amazingly unprintable stanzas.
27. 'White America' (from 'The Eminem Show')
"The Eminem Show's" opening salvo is a seething statement that addresses Eminem's place in the culture and his reckoning with his own White privilege, both the doors it opened for him and the scrutiny to which it opened him up.
26. 'Berzerk' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP 2')
Rick Rubin's production (and the sampled guitars from Billy Squier's "The Stroke") gives this throwback track the feel of what Eminem might have sounded like if he was rapping in 1987, alongside Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C.
25. 'Sing for the Moment' (from 'The Eminem Show')
Seeing first-hand the power of his words and how what he says affects his fans, Em addresses his responsibility as an entertainer and weighs it against the hypocrisy of parents and the media, doing so over top a sample of Aerosmith's "Dream On," one of the biggest rock songs of all-time. (Note: Joe Perry's guitar solo was recorded specifically for this track.) The aim was to make a big song, and he nailed it.
24. '8 Mile' (from '8 Mile: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture')
Overshadowed by the Oscar-winning "Lose Yourself" — in the grand scheme of things, not a bad song to be overshadowed by — the title track is the unheralded gem of the "8 Mile" soundtrack, an in-character missive about the struggles B-Rabbit/ Em faced and the hurdles he had to jump in order to make it in the rap game.
23. 'Godzilla' (featuring Juice WRLD) (from 'Music to Be Murdered By')
Eminem takes his speed-rap abilities to Mach 10, cramming so many syllables into such a small space that he eventually throws in the towel, telling himself, "man, stop." What do you do when there's no one left to impress?
22. 'Square Dance' (from 'The Eminem Show')
Coming on like a demented polka and featuring a knowingly inane chorus, "Square Dance" manages to slip in some subversive lyrics about post-9/11 America amid the craziness of Em's breathless flow.
21. 'Shady XV' (from 'Shady XV')
Returning to Billy Squier — this time it's "My Kinda Lover" — Em turns this light as air track from his Shady Records 15th anniversary commemoration into a free-form exercise in rhyming, throwing out whatever words he can mash together, managing to mention everyone from Ronda Rousey to Linda Ronstadt to Asher Roth, and at one point rhyming Zach Galifianakis with "gallons of vodka."
20. '3 a.m.' (from 'Relapse')
As a radio single, “3 a.m.” didn’t necessarily work, but as the lead-in to "Relapse," it was a portal into the demented, horror movie, dark fantasy world the album inhabits.
19. 'Cold Wind Blows' (from 'Recovery')
Eminem opens “Recovery” flowing over an ice-cold Just Blaze beat — one of the first times he opened his doors to producers outside his immediate circle — which repeatedly strikes Eminem with lightning but cannot stop his forward momentum.
18. 'Bad Guy' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP 2')
Eminem is a master at weaving tales with multiple narratives, pulling the rug out from underneath listeners with surprise twists like a hip-hop M. Night Shyamalan. So it's not until deep into this dark and twisted story that it's revealed this is a direct sequel to "Stan," and Eminem deserves credit for keeping the surprise in tact, and forgoing tens of millions of streams by not giving this complex and chilling story a lazy name like "Stan 2."
17. 'Darkness' (from 'Music to Be Murdered By')
Speaking of bobbing and weaving on listeners, this "Music to Be Murdered By" track is so flexible in its narrative and word choices that it doubles as a song about Em's stage fright and his fight with sobriety, until it's revealed that it's the story of the Las Vegas shooter who killed 60 people at a 2017 concert. This tightrope act all unfolds over a haunting interpolation of "The Sounds of Silence" on a track produced by Em's frequent partner in rhyme, Royce 5'9".
16. 'Love the Way You Lie' (featuring Rihanna) (from 'Recovery')
Some of Eminem’s more groan-worthy puns — the window pane/pain line is still an eye-roller — are rescued by Rihanna's anthemic chorus on this track which acts as an anti-domestic abuse PSA following Em’s earlier, more incendiary work on the topic.
15. 'Not Afraid' (from 'Recovery')
A 12-step program set to music, with Eminem thanking his fans for their support through the hard times and promising to not let them down again. This was the birth of Eminem's motivational speaker era, although an unfortunate victim of his self-cleansing is his album "Relapse," which he unfairly dismisses as "ehh."
14. 'Without Me' (from 'The Eminem Show')
By the time "The Eminem Show" was released, the upbeat, celeb-skewing first single was old hat to Eminem, but "Without Me" proved there was still some life left in the old formula, and this playful, bouncy track is a perfect encapsulation of how on top of the world he was at the time.
13. 'Kill You' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
The opening track from "The Marshall Mathers LP" firmly establishes the album's angry but playful tone, and Eminem deftly sums up his entire artistic M.O. in nine succinct words: "Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, wives, lives, nuns, sluts."
12. 'Guilty Conscience' (from 'The Slim Shady LP')
Eminem goes toe-to-toe with Dr. Dre as they play the devil and angel, respectively, on a series of characters’ shoulders as they navigate a series of moral quandaries. Em flips the script on his counterpart when he calls out Dre's real life assault on TV host Dee Barnes, an early indicator that Em was a loose cannon willing to go anywhere, however dark, to get a rise out of an audience, and nothing was sacred when he was on the mic.
11. 'Cleanin' Out My Closet' (from 'The Eminem Show')
"I'm sorry mama, I never meant to hurt you," Eminem raps, but he's far from burying the hatchet with his mother, Debbie. He later says, "Hailie's getting so big now, you should see her she's beautiful/but you'll never see her, she won’t even be at your funeral," proving while he may have cleaned out his closet, his feud with his mother was far from over.
10. 'Lucky You' (from 'Kamikaze')
Eminem defends his legacy, laments the state of hip-hop and finds a kindred spirit in Massachusetts spitter Joyner Lucas as the two combine forces on this lightning fast head-spinner. It's the hungriest and most vital Eminem has sounded in years, and shows how much gas he still has left in his tank.
9. 'Rap God' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP 2')
"Why be a king when you can be a God?" Em ascends into the hip-hop heavens on this track where he switches flows about a dozen times and manages to cram so many words into a single song that the Guinness World Records came calling to award him for his tongue-twisting feat.
8. 'My Name Is' (from 'The Slim Shady LP')
Hiiii. The world’s introduction to Eminem, Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers established him as a pop-culture referencing psychopath with serious parental issues who could out-shock anyone and also had a penchant for bizarre, complicated rhyme schemes (“extraterrestrial running over pedestrians”). Looking back, it was a pretty accurate representation of what we would get for the next couple of decades.
7. 'No Love' (from 'Recovery')
Spitting triple-time lyrical homocide, Eminem raps like he's got something to prove, and he takes what could have been a corny sample — Haddaway's "What Is Love," perhaps best known from an "SNL" sketch that would later become "A Night at the Roxbury" — and flips it into something triumphant, towering and chest-pounding. Oh yeah, Lil Wayne, considered by many to be the best rapper alive at the time, is on the track as well.
6. 'The Way I Am' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
So, how did Eminem enjoy the success of "The Slim Shady LP?" "I'm so sick and tired of being admired that I wish that I would just die or get fired," Em raps on this livid track from "The Marshall Mathers LP," which acts as a bitter indictment of fame, the media spotlight and everything that Em thought he had always wanted.
5. 'Kim' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
A disturbing, shockingly violent murder fantasy that is the rawest, angriest song Eminem has ever recorded. (In terms of pure fury, it rivals and perhaps surpasses 2Pac's "Hit 'Em Up.") It also contains Em's most complex, intricate rhymes ever, when he lays out the particulars of a crime scene with an attention to detail that would make Elmore Leonard proud.
4. 'Till I Collapse' (from 'The Eminem Show')
This "Eminem Show" album track has thematic similarities to "Lose Yourself" and an infectious militaristic stomp, and is hammered home by Nate Dogg’s assured chorus. Despite never being released as a single, the song has been streamed over 1 billion times — it's Spotify's most-streamed non-single in history — in part because, among many other attributes, it is a perfect workout song.
3. 'The Real Slim Shady' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
Eminem tweaks the tropes laid out on "My Name Is" and pushes the boundaries even further, in the song that marked his pop peak and cemented him as a cultural force. The references are now dated — wiki Tom Green, he was once a thing! — but "The Real Slim Shady" is Eminem the pop culture rabble-rouser at his best, and the production sounds like Dr. Dre playing "Dr. Mario."
2. 'Stan' (from 'The Marshall Mathers LP')
A tale of demented fandom told from the prospective of an obsessed fan over three increasingly hostile verses and closing with a measured, revelatory response from Em, "Stan" is a triumph of conceptual storytelling and one of Em's most impressive efforts both as a rapper and a producer. It's so successful that "Stan" would become a stand-in, later embraced, for all obsessive fandoms online, and it also helped launch the career of Dido, whose tender "Thank You" forms the unlikely backbone of the dark story.
1. 'Lose Yourself' (from '8 Mile: Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture')
He lost himself. Eminem’s Oscar-winning masterpiece, “Lose Yourself” represents the peak of Em’s artistry and songwriting. Rousing and inspirational, it has become hip-hop's "Eye of the Tiger"; listen closely and you can hear Em taking breaths between each line, the human element which brings it back down to Earth. It all came together in this moment: it continues to be his signature song and one of the most enduring works of the 21st century. Mom's spaghetti hasn't been the same since and never will be again.
agraham@detroitnews.com
@grahamorama