Credit: Alamy

Most rappers don’t really need to worry about the record books when making their greatest songs. If anything, most emcees can just hope to keep the good vibes going when they are telling their stories or deliver the harshest one-liners that they’ve ever laid down when it comes to their freestyling. Although Eminem was known to have a silver tongue for years before ‘Rap God’, one of his most intense flows actually ended with him cementing himself into hip-hop history.

Granted, Eminem needed to have a few creative reinventions before even getting back to that Slim Shady persona. Sure, those first three records (discounting Infinite) are all classics, but the minute Encore arrived, it felt like Slim gave a huge middle finger to everybody who expected him to deliver a quality album.

Despite having a few cringe-worthy lines and the occasional bar that made you question his sanity, there were also a handful of projects where he seemed to be trying too hard to balance himself out again. Relapse was fine, but it almost went too macabre for some people, and Recovery ended up going in the exact opposite direction by making songs that felt like they were meant to be in the background of sports promos.

For every critic talking shit, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 shut most of their asses up. With the help of Rick Rubin, Em finally made the kind of veteran album that most of his fans could be proud of, including a follow-up to one of his biggest hits on the track ‘Bad Guy’. Although songs like ‘The Monster’ and ‘Berzerk’ were decent pieces of Em’s flavour of pop, ‘Rap God’ held nothing back when it came time to flow.

After a few decent verses, the breakdown of the song is the kind of superhuman rapping that most people didn’t realise was possible. There have been many people trying to match Em’s intensity on the track all over the Internet, but it’s hard to rap that fast when most people can hardly hear it that fast.

Although Eminem was just looking to make a decent jam and wow people with how many words he could put into one verse, he actually managed to get the Guinness Book of World Records’s attention that year as well. Earning the distinction of the “most words used in a hit single”, Em walked away from the mic with 1,560 words said throughout the track.

Given how his last few records played out, that would become both a blessing and a curse going forward. Sure, people can just pick up an Eminem project just for the novelty of hearing him rap fast, but as if to compensate for how many lines he puts into everything, projects like Revival and Kamikaze made for some of the worst rhymes anyone has ever come up with, featuring such sage lines as “just shit on my last chick because she has what my ex lacks”.

While Eminem has since toned it down with the endless stream of bars on his albums, that hasn’t stopped him from still growing in the occasional clunker when it comes time to get busy. ‘Rap God’ earned that distinction for a reason, but has such an accolade been awarded yet still felt like a loss?