Three songs you didn’t know Eminem wrote for other rappers

To get a sense of Eminem’s true status as a songwriter, why not listen to his pal Elton John’s thoughts?

According to Elton, a pioneering songwriter himself who happens to have personally known so many of pop culture’s very best and brightest, Eminem is up there with the very greatest of them.

“Eminem is a true poet of his time,” he remarked to Rolling Stone in 2010, “someone we’ll be talking about for decades to come. He tells stories in such a powerful and distinctive way. As a lyricist, he’s one of the best ever. Eminem does for his audience what [Bob] Dylan did for his: he writes how he feels. His anger, vulnerability and humour come out.” 

That is high praise coming from a man who worked with John Lennon, among others, but it goes some way towards demonstrating just how highly appreciated Eminem’s songwriting abilities really are. As for how he manages to do it, the man himself offered some insight on WHOO’S House Podcast towards the end of 2024.

Reflecting on his process, Em mentioned a lesson that he picked up from the Alchemist, who, in turn, had learned it by observing KRS-One work. “Twenty years ago, he told me this story,” he said. “He was like, ‘Yo, you should have seen KRS-One. He was just picking up a book and reading raps off the paper!’ I was like, how does he have that many books? Now I have that many books. I save every book. I used to not. I used to just take a piece of paper if it was sitting on the table, write on it, and stick it in my pocket. Now I keep them in books, so I have bags full of books now.”

With quite so many notebooks filled with lines and phrases, it stands to reason that Eminem has the capacity to write for others, too. While his best literary and poetic works are undoubtedly saved for his own raps, he has nonetheless contributed some great lines and verses to other people’s songs. Here’s a look at a few.

3. Obie Trice – ‘Got Some Teeth’

‘Got Some Teeth’ was the lead single from Obie Trice’s debut album, Cheers, which was released in 2003. It’s a fairly lewd track, describing the rapper’s encounters with different women, complete with stark talk of masturbation, breast implants and venereal disease. It’s difficult to suggest that it isn’t an offensive song.

But who else wrote offensive songs during the early 2000s? Slim Shady. And, sure enough, his fingerprints are all over this one, too, credited, as he is, as one of the songwriters and also as the producer. He even appeared in the video, albeit disguised with a moustache.

2. 50 Cent – ‘New Day’

‘New Day’ was meant to be the lead single of a much greater project: 50 Cent’s sixth studio album, Street King Immortal. Things didn’t play out that way. While the single itself was released, the album, sadly, never made it. It kept being delayed, and, before long, years had passed since its original 2011 release date. A solid decade after that, during the summer of 2021, 50 officially cancelled the doomed project.

So ‘New Day’ exists as a strange sort of thing: a representation of an album that might have been. In any case, fans do have the song itself to listen to, which is something. It was produced by Dr Dre, mixed by his friend Eminem, and features the vocals of Alicia Keys, so that is a solid line-up. Em also gets a song-writing credit for his contributions.

1. Dr Dre – ‘Forgot About Dre’

‘Forgot About Dre’ was the musical equivalent of Dr Dre laying down a marker to the critics that doubted that he was still at the top of his game. The song unambiguously said otherwise. But, interestingly, Eminem, in addition to being a featured rapper, also wrote most of Dre’s lyrics, too. Once you learn that, it’s easy to hear Eminem’s influence over Dre’s more frenetic rapping style throughout the track.

“This is actually one of the few times where the lyrics were written before the track,” Dre explained on the Big Boy TV Hip Hop Podcast Channel. “Eminem actually wrote that. He came in and was like, ‘I got this song I wrote for you.’ So, we had the problem of trying to figure out what the track was gonna be to the lyrics, and it was a little bit difficult because I’m doing it that way. But we made it happen.”