He’s won an Oscar, the Grammy awards (for numerous categories) and snatched the crown for Billboard’s Artist of the Decade (2000-2010) and has sold millions of albums worldwide. His lyrical genius is complex to gauge and his expert with the mic cannot be denied to any extent. Yes, we are talking about the one and only, Marshall Mathers better known to the world as Eminem. However, he does have a couple of strange facts from his life you probably never knew about that offer a great deal of insight as to the man that Eminem is. Here’s a list of ten facts about The Real Slim Shady.
1. Eminem: A victim of bullying
As a child, Eminem was so severely beaten by a bully that he passed out in the washroom of his school and stayed in a coma for a while. This happened often on account of Eminem being a white kid in a city where blacks lived in majority.
2. He picked words from a dictionary
So now we know why he’s so good with the lyrics! As a young aspiring musician, before he made it big, Eminem would often ruffle through the pages of dictionaries in order to come up with complex rhymes no one else had.
3. He slept during his Oscar win
Yes, when Marshall won the Academy Award for his song ‘Lose Yourself’, Eminem was not there to accept his award on his behalf. Instead, the white artist was in his Detroit home, dozing off on a couch!
4. He failed the 9th grade multiple times
Not once, not twice but exactly three times! No, we’re not talking about an Eminem award win. We’re referring to the fact that he failed the 9th grade three times before dropping out of High School! Who knew, most of us are probably smarter than Eminem!
5. The very song which inspired him to rap
Yes, our favorite artist’s most cherished inspiration (which prompted him to pick up the mic as well) was ‘Reckless’ by Ice T. Had Ice-T not released that song, imagine a world without Eminem!
6. He’s shy and introvert as a person
Though he has publicly feuded (and destroyed) various musicians with sick, explicit lyrics and a mean flow, Eminem in reality is not the loud mouth we see him as. As a child and something that has caught up to him, the artist was an introvert person as he had to change a lot of houses and as a result, schools as well. Slim Shady never made a lot of friends and mostly stayed to himself.
7. He is scribbling something almost all the time!
Eminem’s lyrics have always inspired admiration and curiosity as to how does someone have so much prowess with the pen? Well, the artist is always scribbling rhymes and jotting notes down; literally! Even after finishing his takes on the 8 mile film set, Eminem would strap on his earphones and start penning rhymes. Something excellent came out of that experiment; the song Lose Yourself!
8. When Dr.Dre met Eminem, he didn’t know the latter was white!
When Dr.Dre played Eminem’s tape for the first time, he was amazed at Marshall’s rhyming skills and without hesitation, booked an appointment to meet the underground artist (at the time). Upon meeting Eminem, Dre, along with everyone else, was shell shocked to find out that Eminem was in fact, white!
9. He was about to die after a drug overdose
Yes, had he not been whisked away to an emergency clinic after a drug overdose in his bathroom, Eminem would have died back in 2006! The artist had overdosed on drugs and had he reached the hospital two hours late, he would have died as his organs were shutting down.
10. He refused to sing at the Oscars
Yes, once he refused to sing at the Academy Awards since they wanted him to sing the clean version of his super hit song Lose Yourself!
