Sometimes, it can be easy to criticise Eminem and poke fun at him, but he’s one of the most important figures in rap history who deserves more respect put on his name.
Jack Harlow recently said about Slim Shady: “I think that shit is still forever immortal and we’re gonna get back to it. We’re a couple years away from everyone reviving that shit as a culture and being like, ‘Look at this shit.”
He added: “Everyone’s gonna pay their rightful respects again. No matter how the production ages to people, he put so much into his words that it immortalised him, even though that shit aged as ‘circus music’ to [some] people.”
It’s not just Harlow who thinks we need to start treating Eminem with more acclaim, and Danny Brown also believes he deserves more praise. In 2013, he spoke about the impact of Shady on him as an artist and highlighted what makes him so great.
Eminem’s rise was meteoric, and it didn’t take him long to go from being an unknown name who was battling it out on the underground rap circuit in Detroit to becoming the most important hip-hop artist alive.
Brown rates Eminem with the best of them, and there’s one album particularly that stands out from Mathers’ collection. In 2013, he opened up to Complex about his love of Shady and made the revelation.
“It would be easy for me to say The Marshall Mathers LP because I listened to that one the most, but I would say the one that hit home to me the most was Encore,” Brown revealed.
He continued: “I was in New York at the time when I heard it and I was doing my whole New York grind going to studios. I don’t know, something about that album made me feel close to home. Every time I heard it—because he had that ‘Yellow Brick Road’ and stuff like that. It was inspiring in some sense too.”
Brown also spoke about the positive impression Eminem left on him when they met and revealed there was instantly a connection between them. He added: “Em just seemed like the coolest guy I ever met. I’ve met a lot of rappers and I’ve met a lot of people and I don’t know—he just felt normal to me. Maybe cause he’s from Detroit too and there was a connection there.”
Listen to Encore below.