A "Stan" eventually became internet shorthand for an obsessive fan of something or someone.
In "Stan", the titular character mentions the common Urban Legend about "In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins, namely that it is about a situation where Collins saw a man drowning with another man deliberately choosing not to save the drowning man, and then Collins singling out the latter when playing a concert. The fact that Stan mentions this urban legend as though it were fact, despite the common knowledge that it is pure myth, rather neatly ties in with the same way that Stan perceives Eminem's Slim Shady persona to be truth ("See everything you say is real, and I respect you cos you tell it"), rather than pure fiction.
The lyrics mistakenly call the Phil Collins song "In The Air of the Night", but that might be Stan's error rather than Eminem's - Phil Collins probably isn't his usual music taste, and he might just know / like the song because he was fascinated by the urban legend. Also, at this point in the song, rather than writing from his room, Stan's recording an audio tape while driving on a combination of alcohol and pills, so he's probably not in a position to pull out his phone and look up the correct title.
In the music video for "Cleanin' Out My Closet", Em's parents never show their faces to their camera; they always have their backs turned or have the camera too low. This could possibly mean that this is open-ended and that you can interpret anybody's faces on them.
Perhaps what Em was burying in that same video was all of the stuff he cleaned out of his closet.
In "Bad Meets Evil" from The Slim Shady LP, his song with then-friend Royce da 5'9, the end of the chorus goes "See you in Hell for the sequel." Afterwards, they had a lengthy falling out. Once their mutual friend Proof died, they patched up their issues. Cue their joint album Hell: The Sequel releasing on June 13, 2011.
Given how long it took Em and Royce to get around to making it, one can say we saw the sequel in development "hell".
There's a realization that Eminem never cursed in "Mockingbird" because he was directly speaking to his daughters.
Until the very end where he figuratively covers the girls' ears and speaks to anyone in the audience that wants to speak ill of them...that they'll have HIM to deal with.
The last line of "Rap God" has him declaring: "Why be a king, when you can be a god." Come January 2020, he drops the song "Godzilla", which basically shattered "Rap God"'s words-per-second record. Considering that one of the Red Baron names of the namesake Kaiju is "King of the Monsters," Em basically up-ended that last line.
In "Puke" on Encore, Slim sings about the inconvenience of his Embarrassing Tattoo dedicated to his ex-wife - "my next girlfriend, now her name's gotta be Kim... shi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-i-it". On the first song on Relapse, the following album, Slim reports having had a great time partying last night in which he shoved "a flashlight up Kim Kardashian's ass". Kim Kardashian is also the first girl he sexually harasses in the lead single off the album, "We Made You". So (in whatever order you come to the album), his next girlfriend did have the name Kim.
The bowdlerised radio edit of "My Name Is" replaces the opening lyric "Hi kids, do you like violence?" with "Hi kids, do you like Primus?" - that Shout-Out may have just been chosen because the band's name neatly fits the rhyme scheme, but notably one of the most well-known Primus songs is called "My Name Is Mud". In addition, "My Name Is Mud" is from the point of view of a murdering sociopath, which kind of suits the Slim Shady persona.
Stan from The Marshall Mathers LP. Not for the listener, but for the Eminem character in the song. Upon getting a letter from the eponymous Stan, Eminem writes a response back to him. Near the end (and for the character's fridge horror, keep in mind that the events of the song have already concluded while Eminem is writing the letter), Eminem writes this:
I seen this one shit on the news a couple weeks ago that made me sick Some dude was drunk and drove his car over a bridge and had his girlfriend in the trunk, and she was pregnant with his kid and in the car they found a tape, but they didn't say who it was to Come to think about, his name was... it was you Damn…
And the video has, while Eminem is writing this, Stan flash in the windows of the train, watching him....
One line that Stan says, saying "He (Stan's brother) likes you more than I do". Now, having seen how bad Stan's obsession with Eminem was, imagine how bad Matthew's could be....
Does this count as Ascended Fridge Horror, considering "Bad Guy" from The Marshall Mathers LP 2?
What exactly was Eminem burying in the "Cleanin' Out My Closet" video?
A body, from what's implied, albeit what could be presumed metaphorically
Imagine what was going through Kim's head when she heard "Kim".
You don't have to. She flat out admitted in an interview in 2007 that she heard the crowd at a live show shouting "Bleed bitch, bleed!" and immediately went home and tried to kill herself.
In "Cold Wind Blows" from Recovery, which was released a year before Hell: The Sequel, there's a few lines where God tells Slim Shady that He will send him to Hell if he does not change his ways. Apparently, he didn't.
"My Name Is" is considered to be one of Eminem's most lighthearted songs, a laid-back Black Comedy"I Am" Song about the antics of a drug-crazed Heroic Comedic Sociopath which doesn't have a great deal of continuity between each punchline. However, the third verse, which at first glance seems to just be about Slim's invincibility, actually describes Slim being suicidal but too scared to go through with it and hoping for death through his actions. ("I'm not ready to leave, it's too scary to die/ I'll have to be carried inside the cemetary and buried alive/ Am I coming or going? I can barely decide. I just drank a fifth of vodka - dare me to drive?" [...] "I lay awake and strap myself in the bed, with a bulletproof vest on, and shoot myself in the head.") Mathers attempted suicide a couple of times not long before The Slim Shady LP - while his music is known for its dark and cathartic themes, it's still surprising to hear him working out his feelings on his own suicidality in one of his silliest and most omnipresent songs.
Eminem has actually attempted suicide in Real Life.
In "My Darling", Marshall insists "Slim is just a bottle of hair bleach and vodka!". This references how Slim isn't really anything other than Marshall when he's blond and drunk, but also creates an implication of the two substances being mixed in the bottle - e.g. Slim is the version of Marshall who drinks bleach. (He already wrote about a woman killing herself by drinking bleach in "My Fault".)
