How RZA was first introduced to Eminem’s music in the mid-1990s
Before Slim Shady became a cultural phenomenon, Eminem was struggling to find his way as a rapper. His sound was lacking in something, and it took some time to figure out what. But even at this point, before he’d fully cohered as an artist, his skills were such that he caught the attention of the RZA.
“I went to Eminem’s first album release party,” RZA revealed on the Flagrant podcast recently. “I was probably the only East Coast motherfucker in there, bro. It was in LA.”
Eminem’s first album was Infinite, released in 1996 and widely considered to not have been of the same quality as what was soon to follow. Slim Shady didn’t exist yet, and, while Em clearly had talent, he hadn’t quite found a way to fully express it.
Infinite was undercooked, which Eminem himself has acknowledged. In the biography on his website, Em noted that the album was like a “demo that just got pressed up.” He was still experimenting, and that showed.
The album wasn’t a commercial success. Em sold copies of it on cassette tape and vinyl from the back of his car, and he once claimed to have only sold about 70 of them. Others have disputed this claim, suggesting that more copies were in fact sold, but, regardless, it’s certainly true that the album wasn’t earth-shattering.
That said, Em’s style at the time was enough to capture the imagination of RZA, who had already become a rap legend in his own right as the leader of the Wu-Tang Clan. He’d been visiting a housing complex in Los Angeles called Oakwood Apartments, where some Wu affiliates were living in at the time. Eminem, too, was staying there.
“Eminem was there at the Oakwood, and he met some of my younger Killa Beez,” RZA recalled. “They met Eminem back in those days, and they told me about him, ’cause they would get to cyphers. I went to the album release. I just went.”
This was not the Eminem that would soon take the world by storm, but RZA still knew he was listening to someone good. “Lyricists recognised him immediately,” he said of the developing rapper.
Following the failure of Infinite, Em went through a period of soul-searching. It is during this time that he began to develop his Slim Shady alter-ego, which duly added the spice that his music needed. The rest is history.