The Eminem album likened to Quentin Tarantino: “This next level of art”
Eminem is 12 albums deep into his illustrious career that has proven to be unfiltered, with one of his earliest albums compared to the work of Quentin Tarantino. Slim Shady released his third album, The Marshall Mathers LP, in 2000, which featured bold lyrics about his rise to fame and the public’s criticism of his music.
Mike Elizondo, who played the keyboard and guitar on the album, sat down with The Independent and likened the project to Tarantino films such as Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs due to their shared graphic nature.
“I felt like Marshall was part of this wave with Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs,” said Elizondo, who helped produce ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and ‘Bitch Please II’ featuring Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit and Nate Dogg. “This next level of art with incredible graphic imagery that Marshall had the ability to paint. Love it or hate it he was obviously very skilled at the stories he was telling.”
Eminem has never shied away from the topics he discussed on The Marshall Mathers LP. Whenever people accused him of being a certain type of person, he just ran with the idea. “If you think I’m an asshole, then I’m gonna show you an asshole,” he told Spin. “If you call me a misogynist, I’m a misogynist. If you say I hate gay people, then I hate gay people … People started calling me shit, so I just became whatever they said I was.”
Just like Tarantino has been spotted in Eminem, people have also recognised hip-hop in Tarantino. Singer/actor Jamie Foxx, who starred in 2012’s Django Unchained, once described the acclaimed director as a creative in hip-hop.
“Quentin Tarantino is a hip-hop artist,” he told Collider. “I told him, ‘You’re hip-hop!’ You keep seeing surprises, and a clip here and there, because Quentin is hip-hop. A hip-hop artist will drop a single, leak something over here, and drop something over there ‘cause he knows it’s hot. He’s on the spot with the way he does things.”
Kanye West once said that he came up with the idea for Django Unchained, but Tarantino denied his claim. “There’s not truth to the idea that Kanye West came up with the idea of Django and then he told that to me, and I go, ‘Hey, wow, that’s a really great idea. Let me take Kanye’s idea and make Django Unchained out of it.’” he said on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “That didn’t happen. I’d had the idea for Django for a while before I ever met Kanye.”
He continued, “He wanted to do a giant movie version of The College Dropout, the way he did the album. So he wanted to get big directors to do different tracks from the album and then release it as this giant movie – not video, nothing as crass as videos, it was movies, movies based on each of the different tracks.”
Years ago, Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, revealed that Tarantino had been contacted about directing the 2002’s 8 Mile movie. However, Tarantino was in demand around that time, filming 2003’s Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2004’s Kill Bill: Volume 2. “We reached out to [Tarantino] — he was so popular then,” he told Vibe. “But looking back, his movies are so stylised; I don’t think that would’ve worked with this subject matter.”