Eminem (Rewind): Taking His Shot, Pulling a Glock, and Facing the Real Slim Shady

On a single Saturday in 2000, Marshall Mathers assaulted two separate men with a pistol and fought with his wife outside a nightclub, resulting in lawsuits and charges that hung over the completion of his original trilogy of albums. For that one day, the rap persona Slim Shady had escaped into the real world. How had Slim Shady come to be, and why had he gotten out?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:12Jake Brennan?

  All right, welcome into another rewind episode of DisgraceLand here in the Halloween season, if being October. We are rewinding our Eminem episode, originally released back in May of 2019. DisgraceLand, the podcast, was just over a year old at that time. And I remember my interest in Eminem was less about sort of the, you know, the true crime, if that's what you want to call it, aspects of his career and some of the quote-unquote trouble that he got into, and more about the horror core side of the music that he made. I found it fascinating. I felt like it bookended the Big Lurch story that we told a few months prior to

• 2:54Jake Brennan?

  this, definitely in conversation with each other, these two stories. And as interested in Eminem as I was at the time, I did not count myself an Eminem fan, and I said so in the intro to this episode. I said that Eminem, in the device about the Mellotron and great music and all that, I said that Eminem did not make great music. And I believe that was the first artist where I kind of went off script there and got negative. However, since then, I am partially, I guess, in response to all the hate mail I got from the Eminem fans, I reconsidered Eminem's music and I truly understand what a great artist and singular artist he is. Fantastic lyricist, hip-hop vocalist, producer, songwriter, pop star, whatever

• 3:39Jake Brennan?

  you want to call him, he's all those things. And here he is in DisgraceLand. DisgraceLand is a production of Double Elvis.

• 3:57Jake Brennan?

  The stories about Eminem are insane. He killed and then buried the corpse of his wife, in his lyrics, anyway. Under the guise of a psychotic alter ego he created named Slim Shady, whose lyrics set off an avalanche of criticism from the media and cultural elites. He feared no man or woman, real or imagined, and he took no shit, not even from his own mom, who eventually sued him. He was fueled by darkness and raised in the shadows of a once great symbol of American hard work and hustle, Detroit, Michigan. He fought his way up, out of the city's hip-hop underground, and fought off violent attackers along the way. Charged with beating down rival musicians, pistol-whipping his wife's lover, and in

• 4:41Jake Brennan?

  general, for lowering American standards of decency, Eminem made... Hold up, for real, I don't like Eminem's music. I've tried. It does nothing for me. I don't even feel nostalgic for it, but in a way, I do respect Eminem as an artist, for risking it, for putting it all out there. And I definitely respect his hustle. But at the end of the day, his music, it ain't my bag, so I can't sit here and tell you with a straight face that he made great music. He made... music. Some of the most compelling music ever made. Unlike that music I played you at the top of the show, that wasn't compelling music. That was a preset loop from my Mellotron called Trailer Park Safari MK2.

• 5:24Jake Brennan?

  I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Angel of Mine by Monica. And why would I play you that specific slice of UK girl group cover cheese? Could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on February 23rd, 1999. And that was the day Eminem released the Slim Shady LP, introducing America to one of the most disturbed, popular musicians of all time, a musician who would eventually need no introduction, but would become reliant on an ever-necessary straw man to compel and inspire him to create. On this episode, pistol-whippings, murderous revenge fantasies, Slim Shady, straw men, and Eminem.

• 6:09Jake Brennan?

  I'm Jake Brennan, and this is DisgraceLand.

• 6:39Jake Brennan?

  Out of nowhere, squealing tires, rustling, squeaking sneakers on the floor, and then the piece, hard, steel, and in his face. Doug Dale stared down the barrel of the gun, up past the sight and the thumb on the hammer. He locked into the gaze of his assailant. He was unmistakable. Those diamond cutter blue eyes were just as intense in person as they were in the paparazzi pictures and in the music videos. The eyes, the gun, the shaky shouting, they all belonged to fellow Detroit native Marshall Mathers III. Eminem to the Billboard charts were his third album. The self-titled Marshall Mathers LP had debuted a month previously and immediately broke the record for fastest-selling album of all time.

• 7:24Jake Brennan?

  But this wasn't the Marshall Mathers who Doug Dale had come to know growing up in the Detroit hip-hop scene. And this wasn't the Eminem that the world was currently getting to know through his wildly popular brand of hip-hop. No, this sketchy dude with the 9mm semi-automatic pistol, the shaky voice, and the faraway look in his eye was none other than Slim Shady. The loose cannon persona Eminem had invented to give a voice to his most violent and unstable fantasies. Slim Shady was also the most successful musical alter ego since Siggy Stardust. Slim Shady, the deranged trickster, was an unstable danger to himself and others, but only lyrically, in theory, anyways. But right now, with the barrel of his gun jammed into the face of Doug Dale,

• 8:09Jake Brennan?

  things weren't looking so lyrical. Doug tried to make sense of what was happening. It was a Saturday afternoon, early summer, the perfect day to finally trick out the sound system on his ride. He was in the parking lot of the Detroit Record Shack in Royal Oak, watching the techs do their thing, when Eminem came around the corner. Doug noticed, of course, it was Eminem, musical rival to Doug's employers, the insane clown posse. Doug said nothing, just turned back to the techs wiring his truck, and then, before he knew it, Eminem had his piece stuck in Doug's face and looked to have gone full tweak. His hand on the pistol was steady, but his voice shook. "What did you say to me?" This wasn't beef. The shit Eminem and ICP talked on records was one thing.

• 8:54Jake Brennan?

  This was not that. This was real. This was dangerous. But when the audio techs poked their heads out from the car to see what was going on, Slim Shady shrank from the unwelcome attention and split. Eminem tried to forget the incident, but it was impossible. What he remembered most clearly wasn't the rage or the adrenaline, or even the reason he pulled the gun in the first place. It was the look in Doug's eyes over the gun's sightline. That look said one thing. "Come on, man. You're better than this."

• 9:27Jake Brennan?

  Mr. Mathers, the judge's voice was loud, commanding. Eminem pulled his thoughts out of the past, away from Doug Dale at the other end of his gun. He scowled and looked up toward the judge, Denise Langford Morris, who called the court to order for his sentencing. He had pled no contest to carrying a concealed weapon, a felony, as well as to a misdemeanor charge, brandishing a weapon in public, knowing full well that with the no contest plea, the judge could serve him up five years in state prison. Eminem and his attorneys hoped the fact that he'd left the gun empty would be enough to warrant a sentence of probation instead of prison. His contrition was real. Prison scared the hell out of him.

• 10:09Jake Brennan?

  Eminem was on trial for brandishing a weapon, but it felt like he was on trial for something else, for corrupting America's youth. He had been targeted by Tipper Gore's lobby of concern trolls, the PMRC, aka Parents Music Resource Center, and the editor of Billboard had issued a whole column scourging Eminem as exploitative and toxic to American culture. And now he had offered himself up on a silver platter, living down to their expectations, playing the perfect straw man. So if they were going to make an example of him, it was now or never. For all the culture warriors who wanted to see the infamous Eminem tried for corrupting America's youth, this was their chance. It didn't matter to them what actually happened or how real his contrition was.

• 10:53Jake Brennan?

  The judge patted a big stack of papers by her side and spoke. "Mr. Mathers, this is just a sample of all the free advice I have received from citizens around the country. It seems everybody has an opinion as to what I should do with you." Stoic as his expression was, Eminem couldn't help but flush with embarrassment. Imagine that, people, ordinary people, people he didn't know, taking time out of their ordinary lives to write to this judge with suggestions on how to punish him. Him, or who the hell was he, and why did they care? And did the judge just say, "Just a sample"? Look at that stack. Who had time for this? Didn't people have better shit to do? Judge Langford Morris pulled one sheet from the top and began to read.

• 11:37Jake Brennan?

  "Please sentence Eminem to write a song with clean lyrics." Laughs burbled up from the audience in the courtroom. And the judge pulled another and read, "Throw the book at him, Your Honor. Eminem deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life. Throw away the key." And the laughs stopped. Eminem felt rage. It hit him like a kick to the gut. It was familiar, almost comforting. And here was the hate he knew was lurking out there. It reinforced one of his guiding principles in life, that people sucked. The judge looked down at M from the bench. "I assure you, Mr. Mathers, this is far from the worst punishment offered. The words, pissy, condescending as fuck, and a word well, judgy. And they hit him low, made him sick to his stomach.

• 12:22Jake Brennan?

  She was looking down on him, literally, high up on her bench. He took her taunting verbal hits, and he was nine years old all over again. But instead of being seated in the courtroom, he was curled up on the tiled floor of the school bathroom with a schoolyard bully beating the piss out of him. He didn't remember the moment that his head had been shoved into the steel urinal handle. He just remembered the ringing sound afterward, and then the smell of the floor, half piss, half ammonia. Then, the punches, the kicks. It wasn't even the physical pain he remembered, it was the humiliation, how unnecessary it was, reduced to a piss-soaked punching bag." The judge gave America more time in her court and read another letter.

• 13:04Jake Brennan?

  "Mr. Eminem needs to have his mouth washed out with an old-fashioned bar of soap." Somehow, innocent as this one was, this was the one that pissed him off the most. It was so lazy. Where was the piss, pardon the pun, where was the passion? Come on, America, you're better than this. But Eminem swallowed it. He endured every insult, quietly, stoically. But inside, the one and only Slim Shady did unspeakable acts to that concerned, letter-writing citizen with that seemingly innocent bar of soap. Eminem felt Slim's violent urges transform into an itch to write in his notepad, and he controlled himself.

• 13:46Jake Brennan?

  Across the courtroom, down the barrel of a different kind of gun, Eminem felt the balance of power level between his eyes and the woman holding his fate in her hands. "So, Mr. Mathers," said the judge, "what should we do with you?"

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• 15:20Jake Brennan?

  Marshall Mathers didn't know what to do with himself. Christmas was coming. It was also his daughter Haley's first birthday, and it was winter in Detroit, and he was basically homeless. He bounced from couch to couch, from his mom's trailer to Kim's place or to Kim's family's place. But now Kim's was out. They were fighting again, and Kim was even threatening to keep him from seeing Haley on Christmas. Making matters worse, his manager at Gilbert's Lounge, the local diner where he was a dishwasher and sometimes line cook, was threatening to cut his shifts again. Whenever he was at work, Kim and his mom kept calling the restaurant line incessantly, demanding to speak with him about whatever it was that happened to be pissing them off at the moment.

• 16:05Jake Brennan?

  It was becoming a real problem. Add it all up, and presents for his daughter were not looking likely. Merry fucking Christmas. Which is why he snuck in through the back, hoping not to be seen. He was late again, but only because he took the bus. He was at a warehouse show late last night, pushing copies of Infinite LP he'd cut with local producers, the Bass Brothers. But no luck, so he took his lumps and indulged in sleeping late, and ended up missing the first bus. But if the second bus had been on time, that wouldn't have mattered. And why was he already making excuses to the shift manager in his head? Fuck this noise. Marshall hustled through the tunnel to the kitchen.

• 16:49Jake Brennan?

  He passed his favorite waitress, Jen, on her way to the floor with an order. She winked at him, and he hushed her with a finger to his lips as they crossed. He ducked into the cook line, tied his apron, and sidled up to his friend Mannix, who had hooked him up with this diner gig and had a basement studio where they messed around with beats. "Yo, how was the show last night?" Mannix didn't miss a beat, but Marshall wasn't in the mood. He just wanted to forget his garbage life and failing record, lose himself in the job for a minute. Mannix read his sour look. "You staying with your mom again or something?" Marshall, already going by Eminem, shrugged. He pulled his first order ticket. Mannix shrugged too. He knew better than to try to engage Marshall in a conversation when he was in a bad mood.

• 17:33Jake Brennan?

  He turned to the grill just as their manager poked his head in from the tunnel. "Hey, Marshall, can I talk to you for a minute?" And there it was, the other shoe dropping. Finally, M met Mannix's gaze, sang with his eyes. See, as he walked to his doom. Fired, a week before Christmas, of course. The sad part was, he didn't even blame them. He was missing shifts again, pushing the new record, and Mom and Kim called the restaurant at all hours demanding to talk to him. Up until then, it had been a good year. He'd worked hard, 60-hour weeks for Haley. But it had all come to this, getting fired.

• 18:16Jake Brennan?

  He dragged himself, dejected, exhausted, to his mother's trailer. But when he reached for the door, a wiry, wild-eyed punk burst out, rammed him in the gut with something heavy, and knocked him back onto the crabgrass. He heard a thud and cracking glass, then the punk was tussling with him, rolling him over into the dirt. Adrenaline flooded his system. Eminem felt the fight rise up, surpassing the dejection. He felt alive, and with a sharp kick, he separated from his attacker, looked up and saw the thief clearly for the first time, all skin and bones minus a few of the usual teeth. He was nothing but a scarecrow. "Tweaker, piece of shit," Eminem screamed. The thief's battering ram had been Eminem's mother's TV, which now sat broken at the

• 19:00Jake Brennan?

  bottom of the trailer steps. Just another junkie robber. This shit was practically weekly now. Once he'd come home to find the trailer emptied out, everything gone except the bed. Earlier in the year, Kim's scraped-together college savings fund for Haley, just a few hundred dollars, had been stolen from her place. And the scarecrow caught his breath, saw the broken TV, and panicked. He took a few erratic paces around the debris.

• 19:27Jake Brennan?

  Eminem saw his chance. He sat up and felt his head swim. The exhaustion, the adrenaline. He could barely tell what was real and what wasn't anymore. But he lunged forward, grabbed the biggest shard of glass from the broken TV that he could. Their eyes met over the makeshift blade, cutting the hand of the man wielding it more than anything else. But even through his hide, the tweaker could see in those diamond-cutter blue eyes that this guy had nothing left to lose. He was a man who had hit rock bottom. And Eminem saw something in this scarecrow attacker's eyes, too. He saw the kind of desperate, hollow man he could become if he didn't figure his shit out. He'd wind up just another Slim in Shady criminal. The tweaker held up his jittery hands and slowly backed off into the darkness.

• 20:11Jake Brennan?

  Eminem held his snapped expression until he was sure he was gone. Only then did he turn back to the trailer door. Inside, he assessed the damage. Drawers and cabinets emptied, everything scattered around the floor. The day's mail was still on the kitchen counter, looking like nothing had happened. On the floor, court documents. His half-brother Nate had been taken by Social Services almost a year ago. His school had accused their mother of instability and abuse. Someone had tossed out the phrase "munchausen by proxy", and now she was fighting to bring Nate home. Maybe they were all sick, one way or another. But at least for a few hours, Marshall could be sick on his own, in his way. Nobody around here treated anybody else like a human being.

• 20:55Jake Brennan?

  Not his mom, not his girlfriend, not his job. The closest person he'd got to tonight was the raggedy-ass robber. The only way to feel like a real person was to lash out. He could feel his jangling nerves, his unleashed fury. The whole maelstrom of pain and passion inside him expand out into the empty space of the trailer, giving him at last at least the small room to breathe. Suddenly, he really needed to take a shit. Hold up. This is true. Eminem claims the concept of Slim Shady came to him well. Well, you know, laying a log cabin, as Eminem calls it on the Marshall Mathers LP, too. Sitting on the throne like Fat Elvis, he busted out his notebook and started scrawling random lines into it, page after page after page.

• 21:39Jake Brennan?

  After that first exhale of solitude, now he was breathing all the grit and grime of the world back in, literally, and transforming it into lyrics. On his Infinite LP, he had mostly wrapt about his impending fatherhood, his love for his at-the-time unborn daughter, the warm and fuzzy stuff. But even that was fueled by darkness and trauma. His burning rage towards the deadbeat dad he hadn't known growing up, the man who had created and then abandoned the Mathers family. Fuck that piece of shit. He would do better. But on Infinite, Em had already begun to develop a character called the Backstabber, who reveled in Marshall's darkness and trauma, ate that shit up, a sort of Evil Bugs Bunny, Groucho Marx as a slasher movie villain.

• 22:23Jake Brennan?

  Alone in a trailer in the last light of 1996, that character blossomed fully out of Marshall Mathers' inner demons. Slim Shady was born.

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• 23:33Speaker 05

  We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

• 23:39Jake Brennan?

  Another underground show, some industrial district just south of the airport. He was so sick of this grind. This time was different. It was October 1997, and Eminem was taking one last desperate swing at making it in the rap game. This wasn't Detroit, this was Inglewood, the Proud Bird nightclub. The airport to the north was LAX. Em had bit the heads off of all the MCs back home in rap battles by this time last year. He'd vanquished all comers and got the Infinite LP produced off of it. And it turned out none of it mattered. He swore last Christmas he'd get real for Hayley, go straight if he had to. But in his heart, he felt only despair at the thought, and it gave him the creative breakthrough he needed.

• 24:21Jake Brennan?

  Now, here he was, still pursuing rap god fantasies. The Rap Olympics was the underground battle tournament to end them all, located deep in the belly of West Coast hip-hop, organized by a group called The Rap Coalition, which sought to develop rap talent without traditional label exploitation. The best freestyle MCs from around the country had been invited to roast each other in improvised verses, in head-to-head round-by-round matchups, for the official prize of $500 and a Rolex watch. But the real prize was hidden in plain sight, right there in the audience that swarmed with hip-hop tastemakers and the assistance of every A&R rep in Los Angeles County scouting the scene for the next big thing. Eminem had finally accepted that there was no white trash Barry Gordy waiting for him

• 25:06Jake Brennan?

  back in Detroit. He didn't live in the gleaming motor city of decades past. This was the 90s. He was one of the forgotten men of flyover country now, just another scarecrow, a strawman. Getting ahead meant a bigger city or bust. Eminem had no time and even less money. Success was his only option, failure was not. Hell, the night before he hopped the plane here, he'd been evicted from his shitty place. He broke in anyway and slept on the cold floor. One more night. Going back home meant going back to the trailer with Mom and Kim. Fuck. So it was now or never, all or nothing, one night only, one last chance.

• 25:48Jake Brennan?

  With his viciousness elevated by his new Slim Shady persona, he advanced to the first round like a knife through butter. With each cutting punchline that he spat out, he thought back to his hellish past year. A night last winter, staying with Jen, his waitress friend, he performed "97 Bonnie and Clyde For," the Eminem tune he'd written where he and his daughter Hayley get rid of the corpse of his wife, Kim, and go on the run together. Jen was no fan of Kim's. She understood where Eminem was coming from emotionally, and there was a reason he was staying with her, but still, she found the misogyny of the punchline disturbing. Slim Shady was someone she didn't recognize. Yet here in LA, just as he had seen happen in Detroit over the years, when these overwhelmingly

• 26:31Jake Brennan?

  black crowds saw what his flow could do, he became the hot-hand underdog, despite the color of his skin. Maybe to them, he was a carnival act, a freak show, but he was also the best. He dominated round two. He remembered returning to the job at the diner one last time. Jen and Mike put in good words, and money coming in meant seeing Kim and Hayley again. So he walked up to the service entrance where his line-cook friend Manix was smoking out back with another local rapper, Buddha Full of Rhymes. Manix must have played the basement demo of the track "Rock Bottom" for Buddha because Buddha said, "Em, why are you talking all this guns and rape bullshit? That ain't you." Fuck Buddha, my life is trash enough as it is. I gotta be me and my rhymes, too?

• 27:14Jake Brennan?

  Buddha understood Slim Shady after that. So did the crowd as Em entered round three. By this time, the West Coast crowd was going wild for the Midwest kid with the bars. Who was this dude? Some of them took a free copy of Em's Hail Mary mixtape, the Slim Shady EP. And backstage, Slim himself was focused solely on the win. Round four was a formality. He didn't even have to think about it anymore. He was unconscious, the words just flowed. He unleashed a hurricane of feeling, and he had finally figured out how to stay in the eye of the storm and reap the whirlwind. But the closer he felt to the win, the less he felt like Marshall Mathers, and the more he felt like Slim Shady for real.

• 27:57Jake Brennan?

  He was so damn deep. Fuck it. If he didn't win, he would just snap, actually become a murderous criminal. That's what all or nothing is, right? If he left all of himself onstage, what else could he be afterwards, except Slim? Slim Shady would be all that was left. Round five, the final. He was willing to go that far now, and this moment would be the test. It was clear in the moment that Eminem had won the night on points. Nobody had seen the likes of him before, and that had to count for something. But somehow, as if to taunt him with success and then snatch it away, he lost the final round. Second place, the best loser. As the crowd milled around and filed out, Eminem curled up in a corner of the room with

• 28:42Jake Brennan?

  a wet cloth over his head, looking like a boxer who lost on a standing eight count. So close. He was lost in himself again, confronting the life ahead of him, scraping by, dealing with Mom, dealing with Kim. It was more daunting than the mic had ever been. "Hey, you got robbed tonight, man. You got a tape? My name's Dan." Eminem peeked out from under the cloth and saw some dude smirking in his face. Fuck this guy. He just wanted to be alone. He offered Dan his EP anyway. "Here." And when Marshall Mathers flew back to Detroit, he was convinced it had been all or nothing. He was a failure, chapter close. But back in LA, Dan, with his copy of the Slim Shady EP that Em had handed out, knew he had something special.

• 29:27Jake Brennan?

  He dutifully delivered it to his boss Jimmy Iovine, chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Interscope Records, who made sure it landed on the workbench full of similar mixtapes in the garage of his newest business partner and former top producer at Death Row Records, Andre Young, aka Dr. Dre. And there it sat, for months, waiting patiently to go off like a bomb.

• 30:12Jake Brennan?

  John Guerrero looked into the frosty blue eyes of Kim Mathers as they pulled back from a kiss, only to see growing panic in her face. Something was off. Before he could turn around, what felt like the butt of a pistol, what could just as well have been a cocked fist, cracked across the side of his head. "You fuck my wife, I'll kill you!" screams Slim Shady. But in Guerrero's rattled brain, the sound came from anywhere. "You fucking lunatic!" Kim screamed and launched herself at her estranged husband. The gun clattered clumsily to the ground and into the sight of the rest of the 2:00 AM crowd outside Hot Rocks, a neon-stained bar in a dance hall in Warren, Michigan. Screams erupted. Everyone scattered. They ran and ducked out of the parking lot, women

• 30:55Jake Brennan?

  falling out of their halter tops, men ogling them, others shielding them from the threat of the spinning pistol. Someone called the cops. But all the while, Kim and Marshall just screamed past each other in passionate but impotent agony. John Guerrero, six foot two, a bouncer by trade, stumbled to his feet with a hand to his head. How did this little bastard get the jump on him? The sidewalk was suddenly painted in siren lights, and soon Kim and Marshall were in cuffs on the pavement.

• 31:24Jake Brennan?

  It was only a few hours since Slim Shady had pulled the same gun on Doug Dale from ICP, and two years since Eminem had been plucked from obscurity to record with Dr. Dre. Between those two events, everything and nothing had changed. The turning point came a few months after his star turn at the Rap Olympics. Some say Dre heard Eminem freestyle on morning radio when hunting for the tape. Some say the tape had fallen behind Dre's workbench and he only found it again in an act of fate. However it happened, Dr. Dre heard Eminem and called him. And once the pair met in the studio, it was just like it had been that night in the tiny bathroom of the trailer, or the night at the Inglewood Club. All his passion was channeled effortlessly into a stream of consciousness creativity.

• 32:07Jake Brennan?

  Two weeks of non-stop studio sessions produced a 20-track record, custom-built to scandalize mainstream America from pearl-clutching C to shining C. After all, Eminem was a freestyle battle rapper by trade. His most finely honed skill was sizing up an opponent, anticipating his vulnerabilities, and then letting the rhymes flow with intuitive grace, bobbing and weaving, cutting and slashing, exposing himself to abuse just so he could go for the jugular. And with Dr. Dre mixing his beats across the board, his most unlikely dreams coming true before his eyes, who was his opponent now? America itself, the America that he created and then abandoned him, just like his deadbeat dad. Eminem's toxic Looney

• 32:50Jake Brennan?

  Tune act Slim Shady was just that, an act, but it was born from a real primal scream aimed at his family, his country, and his straight-laced hypocrisies. The result was both high and lowbrow. Ancient Greek Sigmund Freud meets Beavis and Butthead by way of Dr. Dre, and voila, a multi-platinum album.

• 33:12Jake Brennan?

  The Slim Shady LP officially dropped on February 23, 1999, but by then, the video for the debut single had already taken over MTV for a month. And what better introduction to Slim Shady than the single called "My Name Is?" And the Slim Shady LP would remain on the Billboard 200 chart for the next 100 weeks. If Eminem chose the American establishment as his last best rap battle target, the establishment responded like some dumbfounded choke artist, sputtering on the mat in shock like Michael Spinks on the wrong end of a Mike Tyson uppercut. America was knocked the fuck out.

• 33:53Jake Brennan?

  In less than a year, M and Dre dropped a sequel album, born in another two-week studio session fueled by weed, ecstasy, and an already steady diet of pharmaceuticals to manage anxiety and insomnia. The result was the Marshall Mathers LP, named for the man's real and most vulnerable persona. The album debuted in May 2000 to 1.76 million sales in its first week, setting a record for fastest-selling album of all time by a solo artist. A record that stood for 15 years until Adele's "25" was released in 2015.

• 34:28Jake Brennan?

  M's battle rap strategy had worked better than he knew. He had become the vessel through which America aired its dirty laundry. But the pressure of that role put Eminem in a perverse position. He spoke to and for legions of ignored and disaffected kids, which tapped into a seismic force in pop culture, which attracted the kind of unhinged fans portrayed in his iconic track "Stand." For all that had changed, the money, the new house, so much of the passion and pain behind Slim Shady's creation remained the same or got worse. Strangers broke into his house, extended family came out of the woodwork looking for money. When you use your whole life as a launchpad to the stars, you can't go home to scorched earth. Slim Shady's portrayal of his mom as crazy, neglectful, and abusive

• 35:13Jake Brennan?

  had provoked a defamation lawsuit from his own mother. And though he and Kim had gotten married in the rush of increasing fame, their relationship was as twisted and tortured as ever. It hadn't helped that on the Slim Shady LP track Bonnie and Clyde '97, Slim Shady took infant Haley on a beach trip to dispose of Kim's body while explaining the situation to Haley in baby talk. And things were looking even worse after the prequel song "Kim" off the new album depicted Slim strangling Kim to death with lyrics like "bleed bitch bleed." Unsurprisingly, Kim was considering a divorce. Too famous to go out in public, paranoid that everyone viewed him as Slim Shady, it was only a matter of time before Marshall lost control and Slim escaped into the world for real.

• 36:02Jake Brennan?

  The judge stopped reading the letters and set the stack aside. It had been another year, another album in development, talk of a movie about his life. But behind the scenes, more family drama, all these gun charges, the threat of jail. He felt like he was back at the diner getting fired again, just a schmuck watching all he'd accomplished fall back to nothing, powerless. But when the judge let him off lightly and only gave him probation and community service, a calm fell over him. He was respectful of her stern tone. His only comment to the media gaggle on his way out was that "The judge and the court treated me like any other human being," which really was all that Eminem ever wanted. The real danger of Slim Shady was that he was a gory, public dissection of Marshall

• 36:47Jake Brennan?

  Mathers performed by Eminem. All the pent-up rage of a life spent scraping by in the gutter, all those times he'd been ignored or written off before he'd ever opened his mouth, every dehumanizing memory, freshly dug up and spewed back at all his enemies with a twisted joke and a smile. But now, he had looked down the barrel of the gun and had a moment of clarity. Unleashing Slim Shady had brought him all the success he'd ever imagined, but he could never lose himself in the role of America's scapegoat again. He didn't need a straw man to battle anymore, because battling himself would be more than enough work. Marshall Mathers, underneath it all, knew any other alternative would lead to disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is DisgraceLand.

• 37:39Jake Brennan?

  DisgraceLand was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a DisgraceLand All-Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com/membership. Members can listen to every episode of DisgraceLand ad-free. Plus, you'll get one brand-new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com/membership for details. Rate and review the show and follow

• 38:21Jake Brennan?

  us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook @disgracelandpod, and on YouTube at youtube.com/atdisgracelandpod. Rockerola.

• 38:32Jake Brennan?

  He's a bad, bad man.

• 38:36Jake Brennan?

  All right. Thanks for checking out this episode on Eminem and DisgraceLand. Hit us up, guys. 617-906-6638. Voicemail and text @disgracelandpod on the socials. Let us know what you think of Mr. Marshall Mathers.

• 38:50Speaker 06

  I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcast, the true crime comedy podcast all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest.

• 39:02Jake Brennan?

  Ooh, I scam them.

• 39:03Speaker 06

  What?

• 39:03Jake Brennan?

  I could talk to you for an hour.

• 39:05Speaker 06

  You're a generational yapper, like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.