Cameron Sheldon
Sunday Music
Discovery 4/1/12
For this
week’s music discovery, I will be discussing the successful rapper Marshall
Bruce Mathers III, who is also known as Eminem. Eminem was born in 1972, in
Detroit, Michigan. He is the best selling artist of the 2000s, and Rollingstone
Magazine called him the “King of Hip Hop”. Eminem success has totaled to 90
million albums sold worldwide.
Eminem had
a relatively rough childhood. He didn’t do well in school, in fact he dropped
out of school when he was 17, his family was constantly on the move and he had
to struggle with his uncle’s suicide in 1991. After struggling to find
popularity on the streets of Detroit, Mathers found his voice by creating three
enormously popular albums named The Slim
Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, and The
Eminem Show. Eminem was awarded Grammys for all three albums. Before all of
that though, Slim Shady (an alter ego of Marshall Mathers) released a mildly
successful album called Infinite and
struggled with drug and alcohol abuse which led to a failed suicide attempt. By
then, Eminem’s music was starting to decline in quality in my opinion, of
course. I believe Shady’s best work is on those first four albums.
In the year
2002, Eminem starred in a very successful movie called 8 Mile. The movie describes the life of an average white rapper
growing up in Detroit trying to make a career in rap music. The movie is not a
biography of Eminem’s life, contrary to popular belief, but it’s considered to
be semi-autobiographical. One of Slim’s most popular songs, Lose Yourself, is featured in this movie.
Eminem is
my favorite rapper because of his sudden rise to fame after dealing with family
and internal troubles. All though I disapprove of some of his explicit and
women-degrading lyrics, I respect Eminem for his artistic ability and unique
style. Some of my favorite songs of his are Lose
Yourself, The Real Slim Shady, and
Without Me.
Cameron Sheldon
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