Woe is me! "There goes poor Marshall again, whinin' about his millions,
and his mansion, and his sorrow he's always drownin' in,
and the dad that he never had, and how his childhood was so bad,
and how his mom was a dope addict, and his ex-wife, how they go at it -
Man! I'd hate to have it as bad as that Mr. Mathers claims he had it.
I can't imagine it. That little rich, poor, white bastard
needs to take some of that cash out of the bank and take a bath in it.
Man, if I only had half of it."
Shit, if you only knew the half of it...
and his mansion, and his sorrow he's always drownin' in,
and the dad that he never had, and how his childhood was so bad,
and how his mom was a dope addict, and his ex-wife, how they go at it -
Man! I'd hate to have it as bad as that Mr. Mathers claims he had it.
I can't imagine it. That little rich, poor, white bastard
needs to take some of that cash out of the bank and take a bath in it.
Man, if I only had half of it."
Shit, if you only knew the half of it...
— Eminem, "Evil Deeds"
Most of Eminem's career was caused by Creator Breakdown — his signature Slim Shady alter ego was created as a way to vent his rage as his life and mental health got worse. Eminem claims he uses his raps as therapy, airing his worst feelings and indulging in Muse Abuse that often perpetuates the hurt. Some fans and critics hold that his happier periods tend to produce uninteresting songs compared to when he has something to be angry about - but his most critically abhorred periods also came as a result of breakdowns.
- Slim Shady EP is the result of Creator Breakdown, which occurred soon after the failure of his more noticeably milder debut LP, Infinite. He was broke, had just had a new baby, his relationship with his wife Kim had turned into a Destructive Romance, his debut rap album had flopped (partly because it was derivative and shoddy; partly because nobody wanted to buy music from a white rapper) and his house was getting constantly burgled. After being recruited to the Horrorcore group D12 by his best friend Proof and being told he had to come up with an illing alter-ego, Eminem came up with his Slim Shady character, and began rapping lyrics that were so shocking and disgusting that Proof cornered him after hearing his new act and begged him to tone it down, worried about his friend's mental health. At first Eminem reassured his friends that it was just kayfabe and a way to get attention, but he soon became Lost in Character as other members of the hip-hop community started to treat him like he was the real Slim Shady, giving him recreational drugs (previously he didn't even drink) and encouraging the violent results of his Hair-Trigger Temper. The Slim Shady LP, while continuing with the Self-Deprecation of the Slim Shady character and retaining most of the songs from EP, is lighter in tone than its predecessor because Eminem had been scouted by Dr. Dre by that time and was feeling more optimistic about his future. The majority of the new songs on LP are comedy, like "My Name Is", "Role Model", "I'm Shady" and "As The World Turns".
- The song "Rock Bottom" (which appears on The Slim Shady LP), which describes Slim Shady forced to start killing people due to his humiliating poverty, is especially notable because it was written during a suicide attempt. Eminem had lost his job, broken up with Kim, had been evicted from his house because the housemate he'd been paying rent to had just been taking the money, and was broke, with a new baby he couldn't afford to care for, and just before Christmas/her first birthday. He came up with the idea that "Rock Bottom" would be his suicide note, ate a huge quantity of Tylenol 3s, and then - fortunately - spent the rest of the evening vomiting them all back up due to his poor tolerance.
- Multiple references to Eminem's suicide attempt exist on The Slim Shady LP:
- The final verse of "My Name Is" starts with Slim saying he's too scared to die but engaging in risky behaviour anyway - Eminem, by his own admission, wasn't sure if he'd actually tried to kill himself with his attempted overdose or just didn't care if he died. At the end of the song, Slim allegorises Eminem's terror of death/suicidality by putting on a bulletproof vest, then shooting himself in the head.
- "Cum On Everybody":I tried suicide once and I'll try it again
That's why I write songs where I die at the end - Slim is frequently presented as undead, either a Frankenstein's Monster, a ghost, or "a Mummy with my wrists slit".
- In "Role Model", Slim dies from an overdose and digs himself out of his grave.
- The final song on The Slim Shady LP, "Still Don't Give A Fuck", opens with a spoken monologue where Marshall, in one of the album's few moments of sincerity, admits that he's afraid of death, and he doesn't want to die.
- The Marshall Mathers LP was written after Eminem had just become famous, and discovered that people were blaming him for the Columbine massacre and believing he condoned all of the shock content in his lyrics, while his fans believed exactly the same things but worshipped him for it. Much of the content on the album is Take That, Critics! as a result (down to namedropping Billboard writer Timothy White and beefing with XXL magazine); "Stan", a song about a Loony Fan who kills himself and his girlfriend after not getting a response to his fanmail to Slim Shady, is a love-hate letter to his own Fan Dumb, and "The Way I Am" is an Artist Disillusionment song he wrote in response to being forced to write a hit single that could compete with his Black Sheep Hit "My Name Is". Eminem was also struggling with the fact that his abusive mother tried to sue him for $10m over his use of a fictionalised version of her as the Evil Matriarch of Slim Shady's Hilariously Abusive Childhood on The Slim Shady LP - he responded by accusing her lawyer of being "just aggrivated I won't ejaculate in his ass", with the namedrop censored out due to being a terrible idea.
- The song "Kim", written after Kim had dumped him, is a hateful, disturbing song where the narrator sadistically and maniacally rants to, pleads with, and ultimately kills, his terrified wife (the controversial Black Comedy track "'97 Bonnie and Clyde", which was released earlier, is actually the "sequel" to "Kim"). A live performance of the song caused the real Kim to attempt suicide and file for divorce. They remarried a couple of years after this, then divorced again after six months. The two are now on good terms, and Eminem still regards her as the love of his life, but they will never be a couple again.
- 2002's The Eminem Show was largely written in response to several particular events in his personal life. The first was Eminem's abusive mother bizarrely dropping a diss track against him; the result of this was the excoriating song "Cleaning Out My Closet", in which he describes in detail his child abuse as a victim of her Münchausen Syndrome and declares himself dead to her. The second was Eminem's conviction for assault after pistol-whipping a man he believed his wife was cheating on him with; many songs on the album are about him soul-searching in response to this, in particular his terror that they'll take his kid from him. The third is Eminem's divorce from Kim; several songs on the album are Misogyny Songs dealing with maladaptive On the Rebound behaviour.
- 2004's Encore! falls under this as well. It was recorded as he began his Ambien addiction, and was intended to be his last album before retirement due to him circling a mental breakdown from the stress of being as big as he was. His technical ability on the record is uncharacteristically muted as a result, with slurred lyrics, tortured flows and his signature unrhymable rhymes pushed to breaking point ("oranges"/"pointless"/"torturous"). Em's ability to concentrate had failed him and he was struggling to read his own lyrics sheets, so (while there's some carefully written songs on there, like "Yellow Brick Road" and "Mockingbird"), a majority of the tracks were freestyled, from serious tracks like "Mosh" to goofiness like "Big Weenie". It's worth pointing out that, despite it being the closest thing Eminem ever did to a straight comedy rap album, his Creator Backlash to it was based on it being too Wangsty and self-loathing - a lot of the tracks contain scenes where Eminem attacks his own lines, sobs about his utter uselessness, states he is possessed by the Devil or "Satan-spawn", and satirises his entire career and the worst aspects of his life as playground stupidity, acknowledging the Angst Dissonance. The album is also themed around suicide - a suicide note is printed on the cover of the CD, the skit ends in Slim committing Murder-Suicide, and he would pretend to commit suicide on stage at the end of his live performances while touring his Encore! material.
- Eminem's greatest-hits compilation, Curtain Call, was fraught with calculated attempts at career suicide; Eminem marketed the album in multiple TV appearances in which he told the audience it was terrible and they shouldn't buy it, and the album itself opens with a skit where he screams abuse at the audience before transitioning into what is universally agreed to be Em's worst ever song.
- The album intro track is "FACK", a deliberately awful Bottom of the Barrel Joke song intended to smear his legacy forever.
- The album contains one new single, "When I'm Gone", written during the height of his mental health problems and at a time when his ex-wife had gone on the run to avoid getting arrested for cocaine offenses, forcing him to become the main parent of his daughters - a commitment that meant he could no longer go touring, even if he wanted to. The song starts out with Shady ignoring his family to perform, then turns into a surreal nightmare scenario where his daughter Hailie appears in the audience and confronts him about abandoning his family, causing Slim Shady to kill himself to return to being Marshall. The song asks the listener to remember him after his death.
- By far the least creatively rewarding breakdown in Eminem's career was the era from 2006-2008, after Eminem's best friend, D12 bandmate and tour hypeman, Proof, was murdered. The intensity of Eminem's grief led to him spiralling nihilistically into drug addiction, obesity, and spending all day in bed. He developed a paranoid conviction he was Marked to Die and experienced a writer's block so severe that, at its worst, he could not even rhyme words any more.
- The Re-Up was a label compilation album on which Eminem barely features (in order to give him room to recover mentally), but Proof's death had ramped up his addiction to Ambien, Vicodin and Valium. In addition, he was being stalked by the FBI for rapping that he wanted "to see the President dead" in his 2004 song "We As Americans". His Re-Up work uses a slurred, depressed delivery different to his usual style, and his mental state can be appreciated on "Public Enemy #1", a rap based around a single verse in which he expresses his apparently genuine conviction that the government is trying to kill him.
- His interview appearances during this time are also depressing, alternating between inappropriate and unfunny boasts about having sex with various starlets, reminding everyone about his imminent death, and being too mentally scrambled to follow a conversation. His manager and the rest of his team did everything they could to keep him away from cameras or interview spots.
- He recorded an unreleased album during this time, called King Mathers, made up in part of mean-spirited satires of the snap and Glam Rap trends that dominated in 2007, both of which Eminem loathed so much they gave him little interest in getting back into the hip-hop conversation again. The King Mathers tracks that have leaked have moments of brilliance (including excellent features from 50 Cent and Jay-Z on "My Syllables") but have patchy quality, with things like a track where half of it is made up of Eminem reciting several minutes of dialogue from Superbad in a digitally-pitched-up voice (his depression had led to him obsessively watching the film over and over, multiple times a day). As soon as Eminem got over his issues he abandoned the album, saying it was far worse than anything he could do now he was off drugs, something even the harshest detractors of Relapse and Recovery agree with.
- 2009's Relapse and 2010's Recovery are Creator Recovery albums made after he recovered from his drug addiction, but they both contain his attempts to deal with the mental and physical damage his drug addiction caused him.
- Relapse is a bizarre Lightmare Fuel Horrorcore Concept Album in which Eminem raps as an incarnation of Slim Shady who is an Allegorical Character for drug addiction - a pill-popping Slasher Movie Serial Killer with a weird accent. Notably, the Ambien addiction had left Eminem with enough brain damage that he had to relearn how to rap, which the accents were used to help him do (as it let him force rhymes that would not normally work). It's possible to work out the order in which Relapse's songs were written from the relative complexity and coherency of the rapping. Some music critics consider Relapse to be an exorcism of everything tasteless and nasty about Eminem's music so he can move on to more mature topics - Eminem himself has said that he views Relapse as a necessary step so he could make Recovery.
- "Hello" is a not particularly coherent song about Slim Shady going to parties to sleep with and murder girls so he can get pills from them, but takes a Mood Whiplash turn in the middle to describe him collapsing in his bathroom from a methadone overdose, his misery that his drug days are over, and even a reference to him getting his one-year sobriety coin chip (though he's still murdering girls in the scene).
- "Deja Vu". The track is a rather stark description of his relapse and the effect it had, with graphic descriptions of his addiction logic and his apparent case of pneumonia actually being related to methadone use.
- "Beautiful" - a melancholic track where Eminem reflects on his depression and his increasing doubt over if he can still cut it as a rapper. Eminem started writing it on his first day in rehab, thought it was the best of his writer's block period songs, wrote a final verse for it (notably more lyrical and funny than the other two), and put it on the album as a document of how far he'd come.
- "Old Time's Sake" is an Ode to Intoxication about smoking up with Dr. Dre, but Slim loses control as a result of the weed and starts murdering women.
- "My Darling" is a conversation between Marshall and Slim, presented here in his the Monster form, as the voice of his own addiction trying to persuade him to relapse.
- Recovery is full of inspirational and happy content compared to Relapse, but "Going Through Changes" describes Eminem's depression in graphic detail, including anecdotes about watching the same DVD over and over and binging on food.
- Relapse is a bizarre Lightmare Fuel Horrorcore Concept Album in which Eminem raps as an incarnation of Slim Shady who is an Allegorical Character for drug addiction - a pill-popping Slasher Movie Serial Killer with a weird accent. Notably, the Ambien addiction had left Eminem with enough brain damage that he had to relearn how to rap, which the accents were used to help him do (as it let him force rhymes that would not normally work). It's possible to work out the order in which Relapse's songs were written from the relative complexity and coherency of the rapping. Some music critics consider Relapse to be an exorcism of everything tasteless and nasty about Eminem's music so he can move on to more mature topics - Eminem himself has said that he views Relapse as a necessary step so he could make Recovery.
- The Marshall Mathers LP 2, while itself a Kinder and Cleaner project of Creator Recovery and his happiest album, contains a large amount of lyrics about him looking back over his past self and making fun of himself for the breakdown he had in the early 2000s, portraying himself as a cruel and irresponsible idiot who unintentionally became the poet of a dark time in American white suburban culture. It also contains references to Eminem's hearing loss, which he feared at the time would make the album his last.
- Revival was made during a massive crisis of confidence and something of a midlife crisis, exacerbated by his fear of loss of relevance, fury at the political situation, critics and the hip-hop community shredding his last couple of projects, and a few disasters in his personal life. This resulted in an album where the lead single is a song with no beat about how miserable he is at not being able to live up to his own standards or potential, along with marketing the album by telling people he wasn't sure about its quality and that nobody should feel privileged to hear it. Audiences and critics largely agreed, with many asking him to retire.
- While far minimised compared to most of the above examples, his 2018 album Kamikaze was the result of critics sliming his 2017 album Revival. While he had not been confident about Revival, launching it with a single ("Walk On Water") in which he acknowledged his insecurities, he had intended it as a crowd-pleaser and used it to air his sincere feelings - when it instead pleased nobody and dented his legacy, he responded with a whole album in which he indulged in Copycat Mockery of the state of modern hiphop while savagely dissing every single person of influence who loathed the album. Kamikaze also contains several toxic romance songs which analogise the reception to "Walk On Water" as an emotionally dysfunctional, Compliment Fishing Slim indulging in Self-Deprecation in front of his girl, then getting mad when she agrees with him. Eminem eventually admitted that the reason the reaction to Revival hurt him as much as it did was because it Triggered his memories of his abusive mother insulting the drawings he would make for her.
