Background and Production
Eminem, born Marshall Bruce Mathers III, began rapping at age fourteen. In 1996, his debut album Infinite, which was recorded at the Bassmint, a recording studio owned by the Bass Brothers, was released under their independent label Web Entertainment. Infinite achieved little commercial success and was largely ignored by Detroit radio stations. The disappointment from this experience greatly influenced his lyrical style: "After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier. A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. Motherfuckers was like, 'You're a white boy, what the fuck are you rapping for? Why don't you go into rock & roll?' All that type of shit started pissing me off." After the release of Infinite, Eminem's personal struggles and abuse of drugs and alcohol culminated in an unsuccessful suicide attempt.
The disappointment of Infinite inspired Eminem to create the alter ego Slim Shady: "Boom, the name hit me, and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it". Slim Shady served as Eminem's vent for his frustrations, and in 1997, he released the extended play titled The Slim Shady EP on cassette, vinyl, and CD (The vinyl and CD versions were all released at the same time as the cassette). During this time, Eminem and his girlfriend Kim Scott lived in a high-crime neighborhood with their newborn daughter Hailie, where their house was burglarized numerous times. After being evicted from his home, Eminem traveled to Los Angeles to participate in the Rap Olympics, an annual nationwide rap battle competition. He placed second, and the staff at Interscope Records who attended the Rap Olympics sent a copy of The Slim Shady EP to company CEO Jimmy Iovine. Iovine played the tape for record producer Dr. Dre, founder of Aftermath Entertainment. Dr. Dre recalled, "In my entire career in the music industry, I have never found anything from a demo tape or a CD. When Jimmy played this, I said, 'Find him. Now.'" Eminem and Dr. Dre subsequently began work on his major label debut album The Slim Shady LP.
Eminem desperately tried to contact big producers such as Dr. Dre to do production work on the album but with no luck. Instead, he used his friends such as D12, Soul Intent, DanDaMuthaphuckker, and D12 DJ, DJ Head, his mentors the Bass Brothers produced some songs and his friend from D12 Bizarre introduced him to local rapper/producer Hush, DJ Kearney and James Kearney (brothers) would do some production work as well.
Read more about this topic: The Slim Shady EP
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