The moment Eminem was viciously booed off stage in 1999
Eminem is about as successful as they come. Not only is he one of the best-selling rappers of all time, but he’s one of history’s best-selling artists, full stop. His shelves are laden with awards, his albums have a remarkable capacity to reach number one in the charts, and today, he is widely considered to be a pop culture icon. All of which is to say that it’s quite wild to consider that, as a younger man, Eminem used to get booed off stage before he made it big, and it almost drove him to throw in the towel.
One of the people who personally witnessed Eminem’s early troubles on stage was none other than Tracy Lauren Marrow, better known as Ice-T. He first encountered the young rapper in 1999, while he was performing on that summer’s Warped Tour. Things, decidedly, weren’t going so well for the young Marshall Mathers, as Ice-T remembered many years later during a conversation with HotNewHipHop.
Ice-T said, “I met Em when he was on Warped Tour and the white kids were booing him. The white kids were throwing shit at him… They didn’t like him because it was a punk rock tour. Now I was out there rapping, they didn’t have a problem with me, or with Black Eyed Peas before Franny. But when he got up there, they felt it was OK to be disrespectful. And I watched him weather that storm.”
Seeing Eminem have to endure an experience as harsh as that, and, more pertinently, to make it through in one piece, demonstrated to Ice-T that this young guy was the real deal. In fact, he later spoke to Eminem about what he wanted to achieve in his career, and his response, while simple, was very telling: “Well, I wanna be around like you and Dre.”
More than a quarter-century on, it’s fair to say Eminem is still “around”. He knew what he wanted, even at that young age, and he bore the determination to see it through. “Way back then, he was concerned with longevity,” Ice-T said. “And he was always a supernatural rapper; he was incredible, but was he going to be able to weather the storm? Now, the white kids love him! But he had to pay his dues. It was funny, though—not funny—but he was getting more tension from the white audience than the Black audience.”
Eminem’s rise seems inevitable today, like it was always destined to happen. But it easily might not have worked out. There’s an alternative universe where all that booing overwhelmed him at the start of his career, leading him to quit for good. That possibility was, as Eminem himself has admitted, genuinely on the cards for a while.
“The first time I rapped in front of actual people that mattered, in a club, I got booed,” Eminem, a contributor to Ice T’s documentary Something From Nothing: The Art Of Rap, recalled of his early days. “And it was very traumatic for me. I just remember it being so fucking traumatic, and I think I went home and I was like, man, I quit.”
That could have been that, but in the end, his determination to overcome the obstacles won out. “And you know a week later,” he said, “a day later, an hour later I got the urge, and I was like, I gotta get up, I gotta do it again.” He did just that.