Eminem

Bio

Marshall Mathers is Eminem. He is, by sales, the most commercially successful rapper of the twenty-first century. He has sold over 220 million records worldwide. He has won fifteen Grammys. He has the Best Original Song Oscar for "Lose Yourself." He is also, perhaps less importantly but more interestingly, one of the most technically proficient rappers ever recorded.

He was born Marshall Bruce Mathers III on October 17, 1972, in St. Joseph, Missouri. He grew up moving between Missouri and Detroit. His mother Debbie raised him, after his father left. He attended Lincoln High in Warren, Michigan, where he dropped out in ninth grade. He had been writing rhymes since he was fourteen. By his late teens he was competing in battle-rap circuits in Detroit. The 1997 Rap Olympics in LA, where Eminem placed second, is the moment Dre's assistant heard him and brought a tape back to the studio.

The Slim Shady LP came out on Aftermath / Interscope in February 1999. It sold four million copies. The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) sold eleven million. The Eminem Show (2002) sold ten million. 8 Mile, the semi-autobiographical film, came out in 2002. Lose Yourself, the soundtrack lead single, won the Best Original Song Oscar in 2003, the first hip-hop song to win the category. He was, between 1999 and 2004, the biggest-selling musician on Earth.

The Slim Shady persona is the part that needs flagging. The lyrics are intentionally provocative. They are violent. They are misogynistic. They are sometimes homophobic. Eminem and his defenders have argued, since 1999, that the persona is a character, that Slim Shady is to Marshall Mathers what Sasha Fierce is to Beyoncé, that the writing is a kind of meta-commentary on what white-rap-anger looks like. The critics who have not been convinced by this argument have called Eminem one of the more reactionary mainstream artists of his generation. Both readings are still in play.

He spent the second half of the 2000s in opioid addiction. He nearly died of a methadone overdose in 2007. Recovery (2010) is, partly, the album about getting clean. He has stayed clean. He has continued to record. Music to Be Murdered By (2020) was a number-one album. The Death of Slim Shady (2024) was the recent commercial confirmation that he is still, in his fifties, the most-listened-to legacy rapper alive.

Em's technical accomplishments are real. His use of internal rhyme, multi-syllabic rhyme, controlled breath, and pure speed ("Rap God," 2013, broke speed-rap records that have not been matched) is the upper bound of what a technically virtuosic rapper can do with the form. Other rappers, when asked who the most technically gifted MC is, regularly say Eminem. The records back it up.

He is, in 2026, fifty-three years old. He still records. He is still, by basically every metric you can think of, in the top five rappers of his generation.