Eminem is a chatterbox to beat the band on his Genius annotation page! I don’t know much about Genius, but apparently artists discuss their own catalogs in the Annotations series, and amazingly, the reclusive Eminem just participated. So much good stuff there! I love his thoughts on how competitive he is with himself, on rhyming as many syllables as possible, inter-lines, throughout an entire song.
I liked what he said about “Sing for the Moment”:
“This is where I was dealing with critics who didn’t understand why people were identifying with me. I realized I was becoming like the rappers that I looked up to as a kid. I identified with and loved LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. I felt like if everybody didn’t understand their music, it didn’t matter — they were speaking to me. So that’s what I was trying to make people realize on this track. I may not be shit to you, but there’s a kid in fucking Nebraska, or somewhere, that I’m talking to. I don’t care if you’re listening, because he’s listening. That’s who I’m directing my material at.”
When he sang that live (when I saw him), the sound of 30,000 people singing along, to every single lyric, was profound. Indescribable.
