There’s Eminem, Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers and they’re all different

Eminem once lifted the lid of the difference between his three personas which each had their own name.

For a guy who took so much effort to tell us that his name is (what, who, chka-chka) Slim Shady, that’s just one of three ways you know him.

Eminem’s bizarre gift to Elton John
Credit: BBC

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Eminem, Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers are all one and the same, but to the famous rapper, there’s a clear difference between the three as they were each names for one of his personas.

All you have to do is look at his album titles to tell, as he’s made some from the perspective of the different personas.

His second and third albums are titled The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP respectively and each is meant to be from the perspective of a persona.

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic

His fourth was then titled The Eminem Show, while years later he released The Marshall Mathers LP 2 so there’s no real secret here.

The rapper once told Spin magazine that he had three different personas, one for each of his different names, and they all represented different things about him.

He said: “Slim Shady is the name for my temper or anger. Eminem is just the rapper, Slim Shady is the attitude behind him, and Marshall Mathers is who I am at the end of the day.”

Eminem later told Time that basically he’s a guy called Marshall Mathers who has a rap alter ego called Eminem and that alter ego has an alter ego of his own called Slim Shady.

He pretty much says as much in his song ‘Without Me’ from The Eminem Show, singing: “I’ve created a monster, because nobody wants to see Marshall no more, they want Shady, I’m chopped liver.”

Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc

Major fans of his music will pretty much be able to tell which persona he’s performing as in any of his songs, knowing the difference just from the lyrics and performance.

Over the years of his career, there are some songs he’s not so pleased with, including one track he no longer performs.

The 2002 diss track ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ centres around the rapper’s strained relationship with his mother Debbie, but he later released an apology in the form of song ‘Headlights’ where he explicitly said sorry for the previous track.

“That song I no longer pay at shows and I cringe every time it’s on the radio,” is in the tune along with the lyric ‘at the time I was angry’.

The lyrics also say his mum ‘got it the worst’ and that she’s ‘still beautiful’ to him because she is ‘his mum’.