Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born on October 17, 1972, in Kansas City, Missouri. Eminem spent a good deal of his childhood moving back and forth between Kansas City and the Detroit metropolitan area; when he was 12, he and his mother moved permanently to Warren, Michigan. A fan of rap music from a young age, Eminem began performing at age 14. Although he dropped out of high school and worked at odd jobs for a number of years, his focus remained on his music.Eminem first recorded as half of the Detroit rap duo Soul Intent, and made his solo debut in 1996 with the independent release Infinite. The album was soon followed by The Slim Shady EP—both releases made quite a splash in the hip-hop underground, and soon Eminem was being praised both for his exaggerated, nasal-voiced rapping style and the bluntly controversial nature of his lyrics. Not in the least, he gained notice because of his skin color, and was soon hailed as rap music’s next “great white hope.” After performing in a freestyle rap competition on a Los Angeles radio station, Eminem came to the attention of Dr. Dre, a powerful player on the rap music scene. Dr. Dre signed Eminem to his Aftermath label and began working with the young rapper on a full-length CD that would include many of the tracks from the previously released Slim Shady EP. Eminem’s debut with Aftermath, The Slim Shady LP, was released on February 23, 1999. Driven by the success of the hit single “My Name Is,” the album shot to No. 2 on the Billboard chart within a few weeks. It eventually went triple platinum, and earned Eminem two Grammy Awards, for Best Best Rap Solo Performance ("My Name Is") and Best Rap Album.


Eminem had similar critical and commercial success with his second major release, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), which sold close to two million copies in its first week of release and became the fastest-selling rap album of all time. Critics almost universally praised the album as smart, ironic, and edgy, but as an inevitable result of such wide exposure (especially among young rap fans), the album generated a good deal of controversy for it’s content, which included graphic violence, explicit sexual references, and antihomosexual slurs. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) organized a protest of the Music Television (MTV) network’s support of Eminem during the MTV Video Music Awards, held in September 2000.