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Before Eminem released the Slim Shady EP, he was unknown outside of Detroit, but this release would change his fortunes. As much as he dreamt about reaching hip-hop’s top table, it wasn’t until Marshall Mathers invented his ‘Slim Shady’ persona that things started to look up for the rapper.

Morphing into the ‘Slim Shady’ character gifted Mathers with a disguise that let him unleash his inner dark side and show a side to himself that he previously kept locked away. Eminem’s life can be split into two halves; for the first part of his life, he was in abject poverty and developed addiction woes before the microphone would offer him a source of escape. And, after discovering, he opened up the second chapter of his book.

Even though he’d been for rapping for years, as a low-level battle rapper, it wasn’t until in 1997 when Mathers cleverly coined his new guise, that people finally caught onto what he was doing. The year before, Eminem had released his debut album, Infinite, however, the record didn’t catapult him into superstardom as he had envisaged, and he had no choice but to stare in the mirror.

After the album bombed, Eminem re-assessed himself, and he returned with a point to prove as ‘Slim Shady’. He later remembered, “After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier. A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. Motherfuckers was like, ‘You’re a white boy, what the fuck are you rapping for? Why don’t you go into rock & roll?’ All that type of shit started pissing me off.”

He had a fire in his belly and needed to prove his doubters wrong. An energised Eminem is not somebody you want to cross, as his doubters soon found out the hard way.

While, initially, it wasn’t a success, and the rapper even later admitted he only sold around half of the 500 copies he had made. However, in a fortunate turn of events, he caught the eye of an intern of Interscope Records at the Rap Olympics. After they scouted him, they passed on a copy of the EP to Jimmy Iovine, who then signed Eminem on the strength of the release.

Eminem didn’t feel sorry for himself when things didn’t go to plan, and instead, he created this mask that he hid expertly behind. His captivating, menacing persona would soon beguile the world, and in a matter of years, everybody would know about the real ‘Slim Shady’.