When Eminem refused to be Elvis Presley and made even more enemies along the way

Demolishing

had become a necessity for Eminem in 2002. The character or alter ego with which the rapper, real name Marshall Mathers (St. Joseph, Missouri, 49 years old), had risen to fame seemed to have plans of life opposed to their own: built on their first EP,

(1997), and the subsequent album

(1999) as a way of reversing criticism towards the serious and dramatic tone of their debut album,

(1996), Eminem's alternate face functioned as a loudmouthed, satirical, flippant, mocking version of himself, one that kept getting him into trouble…and, let's face it, giving him significant public notoriety.

After publicly insulting pop stars like Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, *NSYNC or the Backstreet Boys in his songs, however, the character – who even had his own cartoon series,

– now threatened to devour him. to the.

"My whole life seemed to be turning into a circus at that time," Eminem reflected a few years ago in an Instagram post.

With his own semi-biographical film on the way, the huge critical and commercial success

(2002), the rapper decided to run ahead and make a public spectacle of his circumstances.

Using the culture of fame to project himself, to the detriment of his character, Eminem thus conceived

, an album whose abrupt release, brought forward to the end of May 2002 by pirate leaks and the rapid spread of recorded broadcasts radio via internet, it is now 20 years.

And whose title, although it could be read as the personal counterpart to

, was mainly inspired

(1998), to the point that the rapper declared that his album "was written by Jim Carrey", the protagonist of that drama where a normal man lives in a great reality television program followed by by millions of people without being aware of it.

With titles as illustrative of the album's self-referential character as the single

Eminem

was looking for an honest twist in the album's lyrics, this time more at the expense of his own dirty laundry and private concerns, even in the political plane, that of the insult to the star system.

“One of the most frustrating things for me was people saying I needed to swear to sell records.

I wanted to show that I'm a solid artist and that I'm here to stay," the rapper said in an interview with

magazine at the time .

Cleanin '

In fact, it worked as a settling of accounts with his own mother, addicted to drugs, who had previously denounced him for his attacks on other songs such as

or

.

Other songs like

or

(with a very recognizable sample of Aerosmith's Dream on) abounded in the confessional nature of the album, also openly critical of the administration of then President George W. Bush, who It would later lead him to be investigated by the Secret Service as a result of the possible threats towards the main tenant of the White House in his letters, an achievement that he would repeat under the presidency of Donald Trump.

Although, of course, the goat always shoots the hill and

, despite its intentions, also contained its own catalog of invectives – some more underground than others – against their peers on the charts.

The song

, without going any further, marked the beginning of his well-known and long controversy with Mariah Carey, with whom the rapper claimed to have had a tumultuous relationship, an extreme initially denied by the voice of

, that he would respond to her publicly and, later, dedicate the song

to her .

The controversy would enter an

years later, when Eminem veiled threats in another song (

, that is,

) with publishing intimate photos of the New York artist.

In 2020, rumors that Mariah Carey would talk about Eminem in her biography worried the rapper, according to

sources , because "she was always his Achilles heel and they had a very toxic relationship."

Finally, Eminem was not even mentioned in the book, although Mariah Carey parodied him last year by appearing disguised as him on TikTok.

Against "Elvism"

A recurring theme that the artist dealt with on

was his status as a white rap star, which also had an important plot weight in the movie

.

In the song

, for example, he pointed out the hypocrisy around the great concern that his lyrics had caused, greater, in his opinion, than that caused by other black rappers because he was listened to by young white men. .

"Hip-hop was never a problem in Harlem, but it was in Boston," he quipped.

And in the song that was previously popularized on his album,

(composed together with Jeffrey Bass and very famous for its base, surely one of the best known in history), Eminem directly addressed his parallels with Elvis Presley, another icon who also went down in history for succeeding in a genre developed by the black population. .

Although Eminem was far from the first white rapper to be famous (in fact, on the cover of his 2018 album Kamikaze, he paid tribute to the Beastie Boys, a white group that succeeded in hip-hop long before him), the discussion about whether the Missouri artist is an example of cultural appropriation has continued even today.

However, many black rap figures have argued that Eminem's case is radically different from that of Elvis Presley: Chuck D, leader of Public Enemy, has frequently spoken of him as an example of a white musician who stands up to

, the syndrome of adopting the music of others without hardly acknowledging its promoters or even being openly hostile and racist towards them.

In addition to collaborating on the album with artists such as Dr. Dre or Nate Dogg, the song

precisely highlights a section that Eminem dedicates to citing all the black rappers who marked him.

"Eminem has earned a pass in the same way that black people, during the days of segregation, had to prove that they were better than the average person to be accepted," said Stephen Hill of Black Entertainment Television in 2002. , praising his technical ability and vocal speed.

With 27 million copies sold,

was the most successful album of 2002 and one of the biggest commercial successes of all time.

Without assuming a break with the satirical style that had catapulted him on

(2000), his previous massive success (and which had also led him to beg the comedian Weird Al Yankovic not to parody him, for fear that he would beat him on the ground and "affect his image and his career"), the beginning 2002's big hit on the table Eminem was also a critical success.

Due to the inclusion of guitars, the journalist Kris Ex, from Rolling Stone, raised the possibility that it was the “best rap-rock album in history”.

The dean of music criticism, Robert Christgau, for his part, said: "It represents a coherent and formally appropriate response to the changing position and role of Eminem, which captures the privileges and alienations that fame produces, as well as the resolution of their worst traumas and the details of their success”.

With a controversy over cultural appropriation much better resolved than his accusations of homophobia (which he tried to counteract that same 2002 using the well-known letter "I have a gay friend" through a collaboration with Elton John) and misogyny, which continue to this day Due to the rapper's refusal to modify his language, Eminem would close a triumphant year by winning the Oscar for the title song of 8 miles, Lose yourself, the first hip-hop song to do so.

However, it would also be the trigger for a stage of decline, where he would become addicted to drugs to support the workload and be able to sleep, and would even disappear from the public scene for a long time and would gain weight until he exceeded 100 kilos. .

Yet another parallel with Elvis, in whose biopic directed by Baz Luhrmann,

Twenty years later, the artist is still in the limelight, despite the fact that his latest works have generated significantly less interest than his first period.

Eminem closed his long dispute with his mother in another song,

, and currently claims to feel ashamed of

.

Although his lyrics continue to annoy the aforementioned (actress Jamie Lee Curtis asked him on Twitter, in 2017, if he had a daughter, in response to a letter where Eminem spoke of murdering her, in relation to an old statement by Curtis about not allowing children listen to the rapper), the artist's recent controversies do not have the same path as before, despite, for example, Eminem's valiant attempts to position himself as the victim of an alleged persecution on TikTok that sought to "cancel" him for his language: data from the hashtag #CancelEminem2021 showed that the majority of users of the alleged campaign were millennials complaining that the new generations apparently wanted to

Eminem.

@eminem “They blame me 4 murdering Jamie Lee Curtis said I put her face in the furnace, beat her with a space heater.”

You have a daughter?

— Jamie Lee Curtis (@jamieleecurtis) February 4, 2017

However, other more flattering data, such as the one billion views that his songs received in streaming in 2021 (to accumulate a total of 11,000 million), are, rather, an indication of what the artist already intuited two decades ago: that his fame is lasting and does not need minor controversies.

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