Eminem Dishes it Out!!!

Dubbed by Rolling Stone magazine as “The biggest rapper in history”, Eminem has been creating both fans and enemies alike ever since he shot to fame after hooking up with the legendary Dr. Dre, a collaboration that has resulted in 80 million albums sold worldwide. Here is a sampling of quotes into the mind of a musician who has been entertaining both whites, blacks and everything in-between since his debut LP titled Marshal. All of these excerpts have been taken from his biography titled "Eminem-The way I am".

“The Beastie Boys’ License to III played a big part for me. Because obviously they were white guys rapping in a predominantly black music form. And they were just fun. One of the best live hip-hop shows I ever saw as a kid was Run-DMC’s tougher than leather tour. The Beastie Boys opened the show, and they brought a big giant dick out onstage. Hip-hop was so live back then. Performance meant everything. If you were wack you’d get booed off the stage. Because hip-hop always keeps it real. Pg. 20

“When I was 18, I was confused about which way to go with life: I was good at rap, but I wasn’t great. I thought I could be better at basketball than I could be at rapping. I was seriously considering a pro b-ball career. I played pretty hard-core for that entire year. There were two courts I used to play at-one where I was the best baller and one where I was the second best, if this one dude showed up. He was taller than me, and he could dunk. Pg. 22

“Vanilla Ice had made it damn near impossible for a white kid to get respect in rap music.” Pg. 22

“Rap was always a pipe dream for me, but rap was all I had. Because really, what was I going to do with my life? I had a young daughter. Kim and I were always either getting evicted or our house was getting shot up or robbed.” Pg. 23

“The name (Slim Shady) came to me when I was on the shitter. Literally, I was taking a shit and the name just hit me. You know, you do a lot of thinking when you’re shitting. Whenever I sit down on the toilet, I have my pen and pad ready.” Pg. 32

“I remember seeing Animal House when I was a kid. I loved that flick.” Pg. 34

“Any chance there was to make money, we’d take it. Sometimes, all I had to do was show my face and maybe do a song or two. Man I remember getting $5,000 to perform one song, which was a ton back then. We were workaholics.” Pg. 41

“Airports are where things got really messed up. I flew coach until The Marshall Mathers LP came out. You don’t know how famous you are until you’re sitting in coach and people won’t leave you the fuck alone and let you sleep.! Pg. 44

“Now don’t get it twisted. I feel blessed. I’ve traveled to places that your average kid from Detroit would never go. I’ve had all kinds of exotic foods, and I’ve spent some quality time with lots of beautiful-and not so beautiful-women. But being famous is fucking insane-there’s no doubt about that. Pg.45

“Well, another problem with that album was that the main sample interpolated in “My Name Is” was originally written by (I was told) a gay activist who’d moved to South Africa, and he was not going to let us use the song unless we changed the line, “My English teacher wanted to fuck me in junior high, only problem was my English teacher was a guy.” I ended up having to change it to “My English teacher wanted to fuck me in junior high, thanks a lot, next semester I’ll be 35,” but I wasn’t happy about it. “
Pg. 48

“Changing the lines and all that was rough. I just did not get it. Coming from where I came from, those lyrics were nothing compared to what dudes used to say to each other in battles. And whatever happened to freedom of speech? But it seemed like a small price to pay to jumpstart my career.” Pg. 49

“The first year that I was nominated for a Grammy, I didn’t even go to the ceremony. There was this separation between the Best Album category and the Best Rap Album category, and I didn’t understand it. Why not just Best Album? Why separate rap music? I ended up winning two Grammys that year, but it still didn’t make any sense to me. At that time, fame was so new to me, and I was thinking, Who even votes on this? I’m not going to this shit. I’d rather go to MTV or BET and get an award there-because its coming from the fans who are actually buying records. I finally went in 2001, because, come on, how ridiculous was it that I kept winning and not being there? Like what kind of asshole am I? At a certain point, yes, I have to respect the people in the industry who respect me and my craft. Time to grow up, Marshall.
Pg. 53

“My performance with Elton John that year-that was history right there. He was so cool to me: he really got where I was coming from and he knew that I wasn’t this straight-up homophobic dude. Elton put himself at risk by performing with me-in terms of alienating his fans who had a problem with me-and I’ll always respect him for that. The gesture helped immensely, and it made me not sweat the fact that there were all those protesters outside wanting me to go away forever.” Pg.54

“No offense to the United States, but European crowds-because they don’t always get acts from the United States-they go nuts. It’s like a special thing for them. Man, I appreciate it. I’ve played in front of like 70,000 people over there.” Pg. 74

“When I was nine years old, this kid who was a little older decided to just beat the living shit out of me in the bathroom at elementary school. Almost killed me. I rapped about that in “Brain Damage,” and some people think I’m making it up, but nope-that shit really happened. My brain was really fucking bleeding out my ear. It wasn’t like I was in a coma, but I was kind of blacking out and waking up off and on for a couple of days.” Pg. 78

“The press probably get this impression of me because in interviews I’m not always bouncing around in a fucking costume, doing voices and acting goofy. But who the fuck is going to be cracking jokes after being asked the same damn questions for the 10th year in a row? And then when you do finally say something offhand, kind of clowning around, that’s the only part of the interview they end up printing. ‘Every morning I suck elephant cock.’ Then the next month you pick up the magazine and on the front cover in big letters is Eminem: Elephant Cock Sucker!” That’s a bad example, though, because, you know, every morning I do suck elephant cock. Right after I floss. Pg. 79

“When my uncle Ronnie and I were growing up together, we used to do prank calls all the time. We would just call up random numbers and say something like, ‘This is your doctor. I’m afraid you have herpes.’ Or. ‘This is the fire department. Your house is on fire.’ ‘You’re pregnant, you’re going to die’, whatever. We were basically trying to be as fucked up as we could. It didn’t really work. We’d come out with something like, ‘You need to stick your fist up your ass,’ and they would just hang up. So prank calling is something I’ve been doing for decades.” Pg. 82

“I’m always doing accents when I’m with my Shady peoples. I think I do a pretty funny British accent-which is nice because it’s one of the few accents that shouldn’t piss anybody off, right, because, you know, who has beef with England? I can do kind of offensive accents, too. I do an okay Middle Eastern cab driver.” Pg. 84

“The studio didn’t want to do it, but I insisted on shooting in Detroit, which is where I shoot a lot of videos and things like that. If I can help in any way to create jobs there I’m all for it. Detroit has been in a shitty financial state for far too long. Pg. 104

“There was some weird shit in 8 mile too. I fought tooth and nail (and won) to get this scene with the horse out of the fucking movie because it made no sense whatsoever. Jimmy gets in a fight with his mother and takes his little sister next door to the babysitter, and then he sits down and starts crying, just thinking about his life and how fucked up everything is. But then he turns around and get this-he sees a horse.”
Pg. 116

“Back then I was living on a main road, Hayes Street, and random people used to come and knock on my door all the time. The first album had gone four times platinum. I finally had some money. I remember thinking, I have a house, I can park in back. It was the first time in my life I’d had a real home that I would call my own and nobody was going to be able to throw me out.” Pg. 124

“I’m 35 years old. I’m a dad now. Once you hit 30, you’re supposed to at least be a half-grown-ass man, you know what I mean? The truth is, a lot of things put me on edge. Even today. It can be something as simple as being asked a million stupid questions, or a rapper who’s not on my level trying to come up by starting beef with me”.
Pg. 132

“Ronnie’s head was gone-and it was an open casket. I didn’t understand that. The man blew his head off with a shotgun-why the hell would you have an open-casket viewing?” Pg. 135

“When Ronnie was seven years old, he burned my grandmother’s house down. When he was 11, he put a hamster in the microwave-it exploded. Pg.135

“I want them (Eminem’s daughters) to go to college. I try to instill educational values in them. But it can be tough when you didn’t graduate high school and your education level is 8th grade. I failed 9th grade three times, and I’m trying to argue with them about going to college?! I just got lucky. I really did hit the lottery. I know that talent plays into it, but there are a lot of people out there with talent. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Dre giving me that chance and if I hadn’t had people like Proof in my life who pushed me, we’d be in a trailer somewhere.” Pg.138

“I’m not going to lie: I’m always going to have questions about my dad. But at this point, I’ve decided that I’ll never have them answered-so fuck it. Fuck him. I’m beyond wanting to know the dude. It takes a real special kind of asshole to abandon a kid. To keep in touch with other family members-like his uncle-but not even get on the phone with a kid who did nothing wrong. There’s just no excuse as a parent to do what he did. I don’t care if they were lost in Alaska or the fucking desert somewhere, I would find my little girls.” Pg. 141

“I started meeting a lot of Chaldean kids, and they became my first real friends. There were a few black kids in there but it was mostly whites and Chaldeans, who are Christian Iraqis settled in Detroit. (Here’s something crazy about Detroit: Saddam Hussein got the key to the city in 1980. He gave a bunch of money to the Chaldean church and he got the key to the city).” Pg. 143

“Sometimes my mom would give me money to buy cigarettes for her. She’d give me four bucks for two packs of Winston Light 100s, and I’d steal the cigarettes and keep the money to buy lunch. I was on the free lunch list at school because we were always on welfare, which is embarrassing. Most of my friends were in the free lunch program, and they will tell you exactly how degrading it was. The worst was if there was a hot chick standing behind you, or one of the football players. I used to be terrified of those dudes because they were bigger than me and they all hung in packs. So you’d get to the front of the line and you’d have to say, “I’m on the free lunch list,” to some old lady who could barely see. She’s got her glasses all crooked and shit. You’d be like “My name is Mathers.” And the old lady, who could also barely hear, would shout, “OH, YOU SAID YOU’RE ON THE FREE LUNCH LIST, HONEY?...I DON’T SEE YOU HERE. WHAT’S YOUR NAME AGAIN? MATHERS? This was the deal at every school I ever went to. So the rare times I could buy my lunch I felt proud.” Pg. 144

“Once you reach a certain level, you’re a target. People will shit on you. Like when they started flapping their lips about a very old tape from when I was a kid saying the N word. I made a song in some kid’s basement years ago about a black girl I was dating, after she broke my heart. That song was never intended to be heard by anyone. It was a bad joke that someone tried to use against me years after the fact. Even though I’d already addressed it and apologized, I still wrote the line in “Yellow Brick Road”: “I was wrong, ‘cause no matter what color a girl is, she’s still a ho.” I would have to be the most ass-backwards racist ever to mean that word in the way that those losers tried to say I was using it.” Pg. 184

“Sometimes I can slip into that kind of zone where I can write really fast. I’ve recorded a lot of songs lately where I get a couple of lines in my head and then start freestyling. But my best stuff is when I actually sit down and take the time to write it out. I don’t ask myself any questions. Most of my songs start from random thoughts. I get a line in my head and then BOOM. That one line ends up leading to an entire song.”
Pg. 194

“Sometimes the ideas don’t go anywhere. I was looking at one of my old sheets that simply says “Criminal individual push.” I have no idea what that means.”
Pg. 195

“I watch a lot of DVDs, and I watch the same ones so much that it pisses off anyone who’s with me. Sometimes I’ll watch a Roy Jones commentary, knowing the fucking commentary by heart, and I’ll start saying it right along with the guy. Roy Jones, Mike Tyson, Ali-I like to go back and study that stuff really closely, study it.”
Pg. 201