Since he began his music career in 1988, Marshall Mathers, better known by his stage name Eminem, has established himself as one of the best rappers of all time. As a global superstar and celebrity icon, Eminem has broken sales records and broke racial barriers in the rap business. Eminem has had a difficult road to go to get to where he is now. When rap was seen as a black-only business, it was an uphill climb for a white rapper to become the best of the best. The reason Eminem is regarded as the greatest rapper of all time will be revealed here.
Eminem’s rap songs generally dealt with subjects from his personal life, such as his marriage and children and his mother’s struggles with substance abuse and alcoholism. He was expelled three times in ninth grade, and in high school, he was beaten and ridiculed. In addition to drug abuse and poverty, he was unable to work. Before he became Eminem, he was a dishwasher at a fast-food joint. Later on, in his rap career, he was awarded the first Academy Award in 2003 for a rap song called Lose Yourself, which was used in his film 8 Mile, which is based on his life, later earning two Grammys for the explosive record.
When he competed in the Rap Olympics and finished second, Eminem became a household name. Dr. Dre, the owner of a music recording firm, listened to his demo cassette of The Slim Shady EP. After hearing it, he was taken aback by what he heard and said it was unlike anything he’d heard in his entire rap career. After its release, the album quickly rose to the top of the charts that year.
Later on, Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP, which broke the Guinness world record as the fastest-selling hip hop album making a sale of 1.3 million units in one week, and the fastest-selling solo album. Over 19 million copies of the Marshall Mathers LP have been sold worldwide, winning the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album and a nomination for Album of the Year.
Due to Eminem’s race and lack of lyrical ability, he was never afraid of failure; therefore, he worked tirelessly to perfect his lengthy rhyming skills. He drew inspiration from his hardships to write some of the most acclaimed songs of all time, which many consider masterpieces.
In the early 2000s, Eminem’s music was trendy, and he is often recognized as Dr. Dre’s best signing on Aftermath Records. He ruled the rap industry with hits like Stan, Lose Yourself, The Real Slim Shady, and more recent singles like Not Afraid, Rap God, and Love the Way you lie. His command of language and his distinctive voice distinguish him from the rest. Unlike everyone else in the industry, Eminem’s brain registers words based on their sounds considerably more strongly than anyone else, which is why he can compose densely layered sequences of phrases that have highly similar sounds.
According to an analysis, his songs had more than 8,500 different words (Rolston, 2009). He is a prolific writer in his own right. In addition to being a “rap god,” he’s also become something of a “vocabulary god” over the years. In 2015, he was named the world’s most lexical recording artist by the Guinness Book of World Records. The way he modulates his voice is incredible. Maintaining a particularly catchy flow or putting in a tongue-twisting rhyme pattern throughout the process is essential. He is the most innovative rapper in the history of the genre. He can rap about anything.
Eminem has been compared to the legendary John Lennon of the Beatles. Alan Light said that Marshall Mathers is emulating John Lennon in the 21st century. For example, both John Lennon and Eminem have been the subject of protests and picketing, and both have made songs about their family, in which they express their love for their children. Only Eminem has done as well as John Lennon in the years since he began using his voice to promote peace rather than only blasting away at litigious family members and other music artists, which is a remarkable achievement. (Alan Light, 2002)
Eminem has set a lot of records and achieved many things, making him a musical icon. Eminem has won 15 Grammy Awards and 17 Billboard Music Awards. He has also won 8 American Music Awards standing out among all rappers in music history to achieve all these awards (Chuck, 2009). Eminem has also broken several Guinness books of world records, his name appearing severally. He first broke a paper in 2000 after his Marshall Mathers album. In 2006 he had the most songs making entries in the US hot 100 chart.
Compared to his closest rap rival Kanye West, he has sold more than 100 million records globally. Eminem was the best-selling artist of the 2000s in any genre, including hip hop. Despite his artistic pinnacle in the past, his albums have continued to be an economic success. He was the first to demonstrate that hip-hop could be successful culturally and financially.
A few years back, he also made a shocking record by recording the song with the most words that year in his biggest hit, ‘Rap God .’Eminem’s album ‘The Eminem Show’ was the best-selling hip-hop album in the United Kingdom in its first week of release. These are just a handful of the many additional accomplishments and records he has amassed throughout his long and distinguished career. In addition to becoming well-known for his humorous but thought-provoking lyrics and rapping style, he has solidified himself as one of the hip hops all-time greatest.
Eminem’s debut into and subsequent dominance of the genre has been contentious, and the rightness or wrongness is still discussed to this day. No right-thinking person would have ever stated that the lack of white presence in hip-hop was an issue. To say he is one of just a few prominent white hip-hop musicians who have sold more than a million albums is a glaring paradox. However, he is unquestionably responsible for giving legitimacy to white rappers.
For more than two decades, Eminem has left a lasting imprint on the hip-hop industry, and his influence continues to grow. You can’t talk about rap music without bringing up Eminem’s name at some point. To be sure, he is one of the most well-liked rappers in the relatively brief history of the genre. His contributions to the development of hip-hop as a mainstream musical form are more significant than those of anybody else.
REFERENCES
Armstrong, E. G. (2004). Eminem’s construction of authenticity. Popular Music and Society, 27(3), 335-355.
Abrams, D., & Chuck, D. (2009). Eminem. Infobase Publishing.
Nisyarkawi, M. (2017). The Stylistics Analysis in The Selected Eminem’s Songs (Doctoral dissertation, Universitas Islam Negeri Alauddin Makassar).
Tompkins, T., & Rolston, C. P. (2009). A quantitative analysis of the factors attributed to debut artists’ gold, platinum, and multi-platinum records: 1999-2008. MEIEA Journal, 9(1), 63-95.
Waldfogel, J. (2012). And the bands played on: Digital disintermediation and the quality of newly recorded music. Available at SSRN 2117372.
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