"Stan" is released

Why it matters

"Stan" came out November 21, 2000, as the third single from The Marshall Mathers LP. The 45 King produced. Dido sings the chorus (sampled from her 1999 song "Thank You"). The song is structured as a series of letters from an increasingly disturbed fan named Stan to Eminem, escalating to a final scene in which Stan, after Eminem has not written back, drives himself and his pregnant girlfriend off a bridge. This is the song that put the word "stan" into the English language as a noun for a particularly devoted fan. The Oxford English Dictionary added the word in 2017. The Eminem-Dido combination created one of the few rap singles of the 2000s that both pop radio and rap radio could play without modifying. "Stan" is a five-and-a-half-minute narrative song, which most rap songs are not, with a clear three-act structure, a final twist, and a self-implicating ending where Eminem realizes the news story he just saw was about Stan. The song peaked at #51 on the Billboard Hot 100 (the album cut, not edited for radio) but #1 in the UK and most of Europe. You have used the word "stan" as a verb. Eminem put it there.