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As pop stars go, Eminem is about as controversial as they come. Despite his phenomenal popularity, his lyrics have been among the most depraved to ever be recorded, particularly those from the early part of his career. Some of his songs, frankly, are harrowing. 

At his most extreme, Eminem, particularly while operating under the guise of his Slim Shady alter ego, has painted tales of profound violence, littering his songs with the most homophobic and sexist language that he could think of. It’s jarring stuff, but, at the same time, there is a sort of cartoonishness to Eminem at his most provocative. He often gives the impression that he is simply a provocateur having fun.

Some of Eminem’s lyrics, horrible though they may be, are extremely funny, but there is, too, a seriousness to some of his more offensive songs. They challenge a strain of American popular culture that sees itself as mannerly and politically correct, taking on both conservative and liberal claims of moral superiority. Eminem, and particularly Slim Shady, embody the worst, most heinous aspects of traditional American culture: its violence, its misogyny, its homophobia. He drops the shallow pretence of manners to reveal the sordid character simmering beneath the surface.

This isn’t to suggest that all of Eminem’s lyrics serve a lofty political purpose, nor that they are all particularly funny. Some of his edgy, provocative songs are plainly horrible and are absolutely open to sharp critique. He has rapped some terrible things that only become worse with age, but, equally, he has also shone a light on the political and cultural mainstream’s hypocrisy and bluster. For good or ill, he has written some of the most vivid stories to ever sear themselves into the public imagination, so, in that spirit, here are five of his most extreme songs ever.

The five most graphic songs of Eminem’s career

5. ‘Stan’

‘Stan’ is such a wildly famous, popular song that it’s kind of easy to overlook how genuinely harrowing it is. Lest we forget, this is a song about a man, Stan, who, following a perceived rejection from his hero Eminem, falls into a drunken, drug-hazed rage. He consequently kidnaps his pregnant girlfriend, ties her up in the boot of his car, and speeds down the highway, before, ultimately, swerving into a river and, presumably, killing her and the unborn child. Given the sound effects used in the song, and the committed way in which Eminem embodies the character of Stan, the experience of listening to the track remains, after all these years, all too visceral.

‘Stan’ was a response to Eminem’s immense surge of fame at the end of the ’90s, when he started to receive increasingly disturbing fan correspondence. He was specifically inspired to write about this when he heard the lyrics of Dido’s track, ‘Thank You,’ which he sampled and used as the song’s chorus. “When I heard ‘your picture on my wall,’ I was like ‘Yo, this could be about somebody who takes me too seriously,’” he explained to Genius in 2015. “So I knew what I was going to write about before I wrote it. A lot of times when I’m writing songs, I see visions for everything I’m writing. This was one of those.”

4. ‘Buffalo Bill’

A reference to one of film’s most notorious serial killers, an Eminem song called ‘Buffalo Bill’ was always going to be a graphic thing. And, sure enough, it doesn’t pull its punches in that regard, immediately opening with the sound of a woman’s screams. The track is as unsettlingly violent as The Silence of the Lambs itself, with Eminem returning to his Slim Shady alter ego and adopting a weird, unnatural accent to tell his tale over a creepy, organ-powered beat. The song is pure horrorcore.

Lyrically, Eminem’s track follows the lead of its title character’s actions in The Silence of the Lambs, that is, it tells the story of a serial killer who skins women. It’s extremely disturbing, reflecting an odd fixation on the mindset of murderers that Eminem had developed around the time he was working on his 2009 album Relapse. “You listen to these people talk, or you see them, they look so regular,” he remarked to The New York Times in May 2009. “What does a serial killer look like? He don’t look like anything. He looks like you. You could be living next door to one. If I lived next door to you, you could be.”

3. ‘Fack’

‘Fack’ is an uncomfortable listen. To be more frank, it’s disgusting. Widely derided as one of the worst songs Eminem has ever released, if not the very worst, it featured as one of three new songs on his greatest hits record, Curtain Call, and it essentially involves Eminem trying to suppress an orgasm. And, given Em’s knack for creating vivid scenes within the minds of his listeners, the imagery is all too clear. Like it or not, we’re all carried along for the ride, as it were. 

Eminem is perfectly aware that so many people hate ‘Fack,’ and he’s had some fun with it. He claimed in 2020 that it was the greatest of all his songs, while he even threatened to write a follow-up to it. And in 2024, as part of the promo for his new album The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), he appeared in a video in which he had a conversation with his alter ego Shady, where they both blamed each other for writing the lamentable ‘Fack.’

2. ‘Kill You’

‘Kill You’ is about as lyrically extreme as it gets, particularly in light of how popular an artist Eminem was when he released it on his third album, The Marshall Mathers LP, in 2000. There’s a bit where he literally raps about sexually assaulting his own mother, before gesturing towards the hypocrisy of a culture that abhors the messaging within his music while, nonetheless, elevating him to fame and featuring him on magazine covers. The track is an extremely distasteful way of pointing out how absurd celebrity culture really is, and it most certainly did not go down well with everyone.

Former Republican Party politician Liz Cheney, for one, spoke out against the song and Eminem’s music in general, lamenting his misogynistic and violent rhetoric. Fair enough, one might argue, but the year after ‘Kill You’ came out, Liz Cheney’s very own father, Vice President Dick Cheney, became one of the prime architects of America’s so-called “war on terror” and its several illegal invasions that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Liz Cheney supported her father’s wars, which is decidedly more violent than any verses spat by Eminem at his most uncouth.

1. ‘Kim’

‘Kim’ technically operates within the grand old musical tradition of the murder ballad, in which a narrative of a killing is told. But, naturally, Eminem’s attempt for his 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP is decidedly more extreme than most. The song bears the weight of his hatred towards his wife, Kim, who, around this period, he felt was trying to keep him away from their then infant daughter Hailie. He takes out his frustration towards Kim in the song, creating a narrative in which, by the end, he murders her. The sound effects are perhaps the most intense feature of the song.

Even Dr Dre, one of Eminem’s most trusted collaborators, admits that ‘Kim’ is an extreme track. “If I was [Kim], I would have ran when I heard that shit,” he told Rolling Stone in 1999. “It’s over the top—the whole song is him screaming. It’s good, though. Kim gives him a concept.” The song was actually written as a prequel to ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde,’ which described Eminem and baby Hailie disposing of Kim’s body together. As a double feature, ‘Kim’ and ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ make for a horrifying listen.