Eminem/Trivia

• Beyond the Impossible: Eminem has found rhymes for "oranges" in the song Business! Set to blow college dorm room doors of their hinges, oranges, peach, pears, plums, syringes (vroom vroom) Yeah, here I come. I'm inches away from you.
• Breakaway Pop Hit: "Lose Yourself" was this for 8 Mile. Though 8 Mile was not obscure, "Lose Yourself" completely outstripped it. It won Eminem an Academy Award (the first ever for a hip-hop song), remains his best-selling single, and was ranked at #166 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs of All-Time.
• Colbert Bump: Pleasant English singer/songwriter Dido went global after Em sampled part of her "Thank You" for "Stan".
• Creator Backlash: He became so sick of "My Name Is" that after a while, he would only play snippets of it at his concerts - often stopping the song to declare that he was sick of it.
  • The first single from Recovery has the lyrics "Let's be honest, that last Relapse CD was "ehhhh" / Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground." Also on Recovery in "Talkin' 2 Myself" he states that Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushing them out". Even more harsh is "Cinderella Man", where he says "Fuck my last CD, that shit's in my trash!"
• Creator Breakdown: Eminem even lampshades this in Relapse.
• Executive Meddling: The Marshall Mathers LP was 100% complete before Eminem was forced to add one more track, per request by the Interscope Records execs. They wanted a Spiritual Successor to the zany pop anthem "My Name Is" for the lead in radio single. As we all know, the result was "The Real Slim Shady". The song's intent is quite obvious, since it doesn't sound like anything else on the entire album. Interestingly enough, Eminem went through a mountain of writer's block to reach that point, and he let out his surmounting frustration with the vitriolic (though excellent) "The Way I Am". According to Em, his displeasure with being typecast by the higher ups fueled a brief feud between him and Interscope, which nearly got him kicked off the label.
• Old Shame: Infinite and the songs with racial slurs on them that were uncovered qualify. On the topic of Infinite, Eminem explained that he hadn't really found his own style yet (Slim Shady is completely absent from the album), that he sounded like a Nas wannabe, and that it felt more like a demo tape that got released than a proper debut album. And about the racial slurs, he's apologized about them, and even made a song on the Encore album, "Yellow Brick Road", that discusses them.
• One of Us: He seems to be a big comic book fan, and has even appeared in The Punisher. He also loves South Park and Donkey Kong.
  • In his short about going back to high school, he's seen hanging out with nerds, wearing a big Superman costume and questioning the owner of the comics store about various superheroes.

Eminem: Bruce Banner! Bruce Banner; he's having sex...and he gets angry.
Owner: ...oof!

• • And he loves Hey Arnold!