To celebrate the 50-year anniversary of hip-hop, the New York Times published a story about the genre in which they interviewed 50 different rappers. Among the interviewees was Eminem, who gave some of the most fascinating insights about his career, and how he compared himself to other top rappers.
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First, the 50-year-old rapper shared who helped mold his rapping style, such as the 1980s mega group Juice Crew, consisting of icons like Kool G Rap and Big Daddy Kane. “I was a sponge,” he said. “I would gravitate towards the compound-syllable rhyming, like the Juice Crew, Lord Finesse, Kool G Rap, to Big Daddy Kane, Masta Ace, Redman, and Special Ed. I don’t even think I understood why I liked it. I had a couple of friends that had to point out to me how many syllables someone was rhyming.”
Next, he began to gush about Naughty by Nature, in particular their emcee Treach. When talking about how impressed he was by Treach, Em said he lost confidence in his own ability.”And then Treach from Naughty By Nature came along and he was doing all that, too—his image and everything, I wanted to be him,” Eminem said. “When the first Naughty By Nature album dropped, that whole summer, I couldn’t write a rap. I’ll never be that good, I should just quit.’ So I was depressed, but that’s all I played for that summer.”
Eminem then shared a similar sentiment about Nas, and recalled how The Source magazine gave his debut album a perfect rating, which amounted to “five mics.” “Nas, too. I remember The Source gave Illmatic five mics,” he said. “I already knew I liked Nas from ‘Live at the Barbeque’ with Main Source, because his verse on that is one of the most classic verses in hip-hop of all time. But I was, like, ‘Five mics, though? Let me see what this is.'”
Em continued by demonstrating how much Illmatic‘s second song “N.Y. State of Mind” motivated him to become a better rapper.
“And when I put it on, And be prosperous / though we live dangerous / Cops could just arrest me/ Blamin’ us/ We’re held like hostages. He was going in and outside of the rhyme scheme, internal rhymes. That album had me in a slump, too,” he said. “I know the album front to back. There were three or four years, maybe, where I kind of dipped out of listening to rap. I was so on the grind in the underground. I didn’t have money to buy any tapes. Every dollar, every dime that I had went to either studio time or to buy Hailie diapers.”
Two years after Nas released Illmatic, Eminem would put out his first project Infinite, and would eventually drop his major label debut, The Slim Shady LP, in 1999, which is one of eight solo albums that are multi-platinum certified. So, while he felt intimidated about what it took to be a rapper before he achieved success, it turns out that the Detroit native certainly had the necessary skills to compete with his legendary peers.
Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for MTV/Paramount Global
