The rap legend who “terrified” a young Billie Eilish
When Billie Eilish was born in 2001, the mainstream rap scene was ruled by one man alone: Eminem. He’d released The Marshall Mathers LP the year before and was preparing The Eminem Show for the next. He was everywhere around this time.
Eminem would remain a fixture of pop culture throughout the early years of Eilish’s life, with the rapper repeatedly getting into controversial scrapes and generating a lot of fevered discourse. And, as Eilish later admitted during a 2019 interview, his wild Slim Shady persona affected her quite badly as a kid.
In conversation with Noisey, the then-17-year-old star was asked if she preferred Eminem or Childish Gambino as a rapper. Her response was unambiguous: Childish Gambino, “one billion percent.”
That makes sense, to an extent. Donald Glover’s rap persona was a key figure throughout Eilish’s adolescence, when people’s musical tastes generally start to cohere and solidify. But, as Eilish explained, that wasn’t necessarily why she picked Childish Gambino. It was more that Eminem used to freak her out.
“I was scared of Eminem my whole life,” she said. “Terrified. That dude freaked the fuck out of me. Oh my god.”
Childish Gambino, on the other hand, “created me, dude. I don’t even know, that’s crazy. That’s a god. You can’t even put him in a list of other people.”
Eilish’s opinion on this matter did not go unnoticed by Eminem, who’s always on the lookout for ideas to respond to in his music. He did just that, releasing a song in late 2020 that specifically mentioned Eilish’s childhood fear of him.
As part of the deluxe edition of his eleventh album Music to Be Murdered By, Em put out ‘Alfred’s Theme.’ He raps on the track, “But really I’m just fulfilling my wish of killing rhymes / Which is really childish and silly, but I’m really like this / I’m giving nightmares to Billie Eilish.”
It must have been an odd moment for a still young Eilish. After a childhood spent freaked out by the music of Eminem, she’d suddenly found herself immortalised in it forever.