We'd give Em a cassette of the songs we'd worked on all day. The work ethic was relentless. The Slim Shady LP was cut in just two weeks of studio time. The Slim Shady LP was a polarizing body of work: a white boy from Detroit with a penchant for horrorcore raps and disturbingly graphic depictions of hyper-violence, but it was his sprawling vernacular, multi-syllabic rhyme schemes, and cartoonish flow that had rap. Eminem’s major-label debut was released on February 23, 1999, and the world was introduced to his alter-ego.
Dre and Jimmy Iovine, the album features production from Dr. Recorded in Ferndale, Michigan, following Eminems recruitment by Dr. It was released on Februby Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records. “I just remember he was knocking them down, like he was killing the songs as they were coming to him.”The Slim Shady LP is the second studio album and the major-label debut by American rapper Eminem.
I wasn’t one to run up on him like, ‘Since you made it, I made it.’ Nah. When Em got the deal I was sending music over to Mark and Jeff Bass hoping they were just gonna give it to Em like normal because that was the regular thing. I got jerked,” he says, laughing.“So this is the first time I’ve ever told this story because I never felt comfortable telling it before. So while I didn’t directly work on ‘The Slim Shady LP’, because of that moment it felt like I did.”So why did Denaun not work on the album if he was so instrumental in getting Em signed?“I got robbed. So he turns to me and he says, ‘Well you’re the reason we’re here.’ And I couldn’t believe it. He did ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ and he did ‘Low Down, Dirty’.’ So this person was name checking all the shit that Dre had heard that made him wanna sign Em.
Other than ‘Guilty Conscience’ with Dr. Think ‘Role Model’ and the lyrics: “ I’ll strangle you to death, then I’ll choke you again/And break your fucking legs ’til your bones poke through your skin.”Full of ‘did-he-really-just-say-that?’ moments and harsh reality raps, what helped the album stand out the most was Em’s extreme sense of humour.Outrageous at the best of times – on ‘I’m Shady’ he spits: “ My baby mama’s not dead, she’s still alive and bitchin’/And I don’t have herpes, my dick’s just itchin’/It’s not syphilis, and as for being AIDS-infested/I don’t know yet, I’m too scared to get tested” – you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to a Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase collaborative stand-up album.The first track Royce Da 5’9” and Eminem ever recorded together was ‘Bad Meets Evil’, which later also became the name of their rap duo. And this is something I don’t even think Marshall was aware of but I know he was getting jerked around by them too so it doesn’t matter now.”The one credit Denaun did get on ‘The Slim Shady LP’ was as pre-producer and drum programmer on ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, but even then his name was spelt incorrectly within the album’s inlay – it read ‘Denine Porter’.“They just put it on there like that, I had nothing to do with my own credit,” he says, holding his head in his hands.While great music can prick up your ears and touch the soul, most of ‘The Slim Shady LP’ can hit you in the face like a sledgehammer. I kinda got left in the wind when it came down to that because I wasn’t there and Mark and Jeff were in control. I heard a lot of nuances that resembled things I’d sent over, so I was like, ‘Wait a minute!’ So I just stopped sending shit.
“He was like, ‘We feel like we wanna put the song on the album. And that’s precisely why Dre wanted it on the album.“Em told me he and Dre were going through the songs for the album,” Royce remembers. It was just a song that two underground kids did together.”A witty back and forth with complex wordplay and explosive punchlines that hears them rhyme “Vietnamese people” with “Steve Seagal,” ‘Bad Meets Evil’ was an early introduction into what Eminem and Royce’s lyrical tag team was capable of. We weren’t doing anything with it. “This was before the internet and shit so it was really just a song that we were probably riding around in our neighbourhoods playing for people.
From that moment I knew I had to change everything. I got a glimpse into something that nobody else had and it made me wanna be a better producer. “It felt like I was the one who was rapping with Dre. With a clever narrative that felt like it could have been written for a rap version of ‘Tales From the Crypt’, for Denaun it was the production and actually hearing it for the first time sitting in a car with Em back in Detroit that stirred his creative juices and inspired a change within himself.“My whole life changed in that car,” says Denaun.
Then sprinkled somewhere in-between there were names like MC Serch of 3rd Bass, Everlast of House of Pain, Milkbone, Cage and a few others.Today there’s a never-ending list of white rappers that no one even blinks an eye at it’s the norm now. Of course there were The Beastie Boys, who before Eminem were probably the most credible, and at the other end of the scale you had pop-leaning manufactured acts like Vanilla Ice and Marky Mark. And my beats got better just from listening to that one song just one time, I’ll never forget it.”Aside from blowing the doors off of Hip Hop and expanding its reach commercially, something else ‘The Slim Shady LP’ did – for better or worse – was open the door for other white rappers to enter the game without coming under as much fire as those that came before Em.For a very long time rap was mostly a spectator sport for caucasian fans, there weren’t many white rappers who were accepted within the black art form.
He was the trailblazer, the one who went first. But Eminem is the reason they exist. Whether it’s G-Eazy, Machine Gun Kelly, Mac Miller (R.I.P.), Asher Roth, Jared Evan, Brother Ali, Slug of Atmosphere, there’s a long list that goes on and on.
It was bigger than 3rd Bass and Vanilla Ice and Everlast, and all the others that came before him. He opened the door for every white rapper period. “He changed the way people looked at a white person in the genre.
His stories are so vivid you feel like you’re experiencing them with him. He became a storyteller for white people and changed the way everybody looked at their own lives.”It’s not possible to dispute Denaun’s comments regarding Em’s storytelling abilities. Em took the art of what hip hop was and turned it into his thing, right? So it wasn’t as if he took it and abused it, what he did was he took it and made it his own.
That’s why they call it a classic because that shit can come out in any era and it would still be amazing.“Sure people would be a little more sensitive but they’d stream the shit out of it. But would he get away with it and be as successful doing so as a new artist releasing his debut album today, in a world where everyone seems to be a lot more sensitive and has a platform to share their opinion thanks to social media?“Of course he would, man!” Royce says, literally laughing out loud. Signed to Aftermath via Interscope Records, a label known for supporting controversial artists such as Marilyn Manson, 2Pac and Nine Inch Nails, he shook things up and turned the discord meter all the way up to 11.He was young, restless, relatable, anti-establishment in a Sex Pistols kinda way, and someone who regularly challenged societal norms.
With the internet and everything, if he had a camera in his face all the time he’d be bigger than he is now. The climate nowadays would eat that shit up. But back then he was a jokester all day.
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