The confessional song Eminem recorded on the day he overdosed
The Slim Shady LP, Eminem’s second album, is where it all started to click into place for Marshall Mathers. This was where his Slim Shady persona really cohered and took over his music, and it brought him wild levels of success. Eminem, and Slim Shady, were stars.
But for all the high-pitched, hyperactive rapping and cartoonishly violent imagery that Slim Shady offered up on the record, there were also a couple of songs in which Eminem, or, more pertinently, the real-life Marshall Mathers, turned up. The songs ‘If I Had’ and ‘Rock Bottom’ were deeply personal tracks, without the bravado or over-excited giddiness of Slim’s rapping.
‘Rock Bottom’ was a particularly harrowing song, in which Eminem raps about the difficulties of living a life of poverty while trying to raise a child. His daughter Hailey had only been born recently, and, before the success of his Slim Shady persona made him a very rich man, life was tough for the Mathers family.
“My life is full of empty promises and broken dreams / I’m hopin’ things look up, but there ain’t no job openings / I feel discouraged, hungry and malnourished / Livin’ in this house with no furnace, unfurnished,” he raps in the second verse.
Not long before Hailey turned one, Em had been working a kitchen job—a strange thought in and of itself. He failed to hold it down, and he was fired. Now he faced the prospect of not being able to buy his daughter a gift for her first birthday.
“That was the worst time ever, dog,” he told Rolling Stone in 1999, reflecting on this bleak period. “It was, like, five days before Christmas, which is Hailie’s birthday. I had, like, $40 to get her something. I wrote ‘Rock Bottom’ right after that.”
The song was an honest expression of Eminem’s pain during the early stages of his daughter’s life, before fame and riches transformed both of their lives forever. But there’s more to the song than even that.
This “rock bottom” that Eminem hit isn’t just about struggling to buy his daughter a present for her birthday. According to a book by David Stubbs called Eminem: The Stories Behind Every Song, the rapper suffered an overdose while he was recording the track during the autumn of ’97. Right on the verge of superstardom, it all might have ended then and there.
‘Rock Bottom,’ then, captures two moments in which Eminem arguably really did hit rock bottom, be it when he couldn’t afford a gift for his young daughter or when his drug use got the better of him. It’s an odd listen today, in light of the direction we know his life is going to take after the track and the album it features on are released. He will soon become a superstar, and his life will thereafter be defined by profound highs and lows.