Credit: Wikimedia

Eminem is celebrated as one of the best rappers of all time, but he started out the same as any other musically minded kid. That is, he was a fan of the greats who came before him.

But unlike most music fans, Eminem grew up and became a great himself—and that came with benefits. There was the money and adoration, of course, although those are double-edged swords, but crucially Em’s status as a rapper meant that he ended up meeting all of his musical heroes. He was among them now.

But even though Eminem holds his own alongside hip-hop’s legends—and even though he’s been one himself for more than a quarter of a century now—there’s still a young fan in there somewhere, and he thinks it’s bizarre when he finds himself among this esteemed company. He admitted as much in a piece he wrote for XXL in 2022.

“The strangest and probably the greatest thing that’s happened to me over these past 25 years,” he wrote, “in a professional sense was getting to meet all my heroes. All the MCs who inspired me coming up.”

The amazing thing is that one of those inspirational MCs happens to be a man who would come to be Eminem’s greatest collaborator. “It took me a long time to get over meeting Dre,” he admitted. “When he walked into the room at Interscope, I was like, What the fuckin’ fuck? This is really happening?”

But beyond Dre, there were plenty of other figures who Eminem looked up to and, through his own success, managed to meet: Treach, Redman, Kool G Rap, Big Daddy Kane, Masta Ace, Rakim. “I wouldn’t be here without all of them,” Em wrote. “That’s where I got my whole inspiration from.” He also admitted to still getting “really fuckin’ weird and freaked out inside when I talk to LL Cool J.”

Em was studious when he was growing up, and, by his own admission in the piece, he studied these rappers carefully. He learned from them and applied their lessons to his own developing craft.

“Kool G Rap would put fuckin’ ten words in two lines and it would rhyme, and they would fall right into each other. I studied that,” Em wrote by way of an example. “He said, ‘A letter to you suckers, each and every one of you duck muthafuckas / Your girl puckers her lips, so I stuck her.’ He just said a sentence, but five things rhymed in there.”

But for all his studying and desire to learn the craft of rapping, Eminem remained a straight-up music fan. He just loved listening to songs from the best. “Rappers like D.O.C., Tupac Shakur and Biggie. Those were all my influences,” he noted. “I would never be anywhere near where I am today if it wasn’t for them.”