Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century: No. 12 — Eminem

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. We’ve already named our Honorable Mentions and our No. 25, No. 24, No. 23, No. 22, No. 21, No. 20, No. 19, No. 18, No. 17, No. 16, No. 15, No. 14 and No. 13 stars, and now we remember the century in Eminem — a singular force in early 21st century pop culture whose impact continues to reverberate today.

At the peak of the TRL era in popular music — a turn-of-the-century period dominated by bubbly teen-pop stars and punctuated by furious nu-metal rockers — the biggest artist of all was actually a late-20-something rapper from Detroit. Eminem, who seemingly went from underground battle-rapper to omnipresent superstar by the end of his first week on MTV, reached commercial heights and levels of popular exposure as a solo artist that only the defining the stars of pop’s ’80s golden age (and certainly no prior MC) could previously claim.

It couldn’t last, and it didn’t — with Em’s run as a culture-defining superstar flaming out sooner than anyone likely would’ve predicted. Eminem himself has lasted, however, remaining a commercial fixture and a high-level rapper since retooling at the turn of the 2010s, rarely quite as central to pop culture as he was during his all-consuming first few years of the century, but always a factor on the charts and in the conversation.

By the year 2000, Eminem was already close to a household name, thanks to his breakthrough major-label debut The Slim Shady LP and its lead single “My Name Is.” The wisecracking, s–t-stirring and mercilessly catchy mission statement explicitly introduced him to America as every parent’s worst nightmare — with Em ending the first verse by claiming that God (or, in the song’s radio edit, his iconic producer, label head and mentor Dr. Dre) “sent me to piss the world off.” That breakout hit only reached No. 36 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it made him an immediate MTV sensation with its cartoonishly comedic music video, featuring the artist portraying pop culture figures ranging from shock-rocker Marilyn Manson to impeached president Bill Clinton (and all eight stars of The Shady Bunch).

Ironically, it was Eminem’s extremely anti-pop energy in his early days that made him the perfect pop star for the moment. The early ’90s had been largely been defined by Seattle-based grunge and L.A.-based G-funk, but by the late ’90s, those genres had largely run their course in the mainstream, and their sonic and thematic heaviness was largely replaced by upbeat, kid-friendly, occasionally brilliant megapop that nonetheless left a lot of still-pissed-off young folks desperate for a darker, more skeptical alternative. Out of that hunger came the rise of rap-rockers like Korn and Limp Bizkit, as well as the inner-turmoil-driven hip-hop of DMX — all of whom would be present at Woodstock ’99, a bad-vibes festival of such historic proportions that the negative energy ultimately manifested in literal flames that engulfed much of the fest. The world was clearly ready for a rapper like Eminem, a (peroxide) blond-haired, blue-eyed, angry young white man who combined the youth-galvanizing outsider appeal of the nu-metalers with the intensely personal rhymes of DMX, also with a healthy dose of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s bratty humor and cultural commentary mixed in.

That potent blend would reap immediate blockbuster returns with the release of Eminem’s first album of the new century, 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP. Led by “The Real Slim Shady,” which doubled down on the “My Name Is” formula with even funnier and ruder results (and reached No. 4 on the Hot 100), the album sold an unthinkable 1.78 million copies in its first week — then second to only the 2.4 million moved by *NSYNC’s No Strings Attached months earlier, and to this day the highest-selling single week for a rapper in the Soundscan era. The album also drew mostly rave reviews from critics, impressed with Eminem’s verbal dexterity, storytelling chops and ability to take on a wide breadth of topics and perspectives in his music, and even earned a Grammy nomination for album of the year and a win for best rap album, first of Em’s 15 career Ws at the awards. The praise for Eminem was hardly universal, however: His R-rated language and subject matter and tendency towards extreme violence in his lyrics — especially towards women, including his real-life then-wife Kim — made him public enemy No. 1 among American parents, and arrests for separate altercations in back-to-back days that June raised public concerns that he was dangerous even beyond his rhymes.

While questions about the album’s more misogynistic content were absolutely fair to ask, the criticism over its violent content took on a somewhat unfair tenor due to it coming during a particularly sensitive cultural moment over the subject, following the tragic 1999 massacre of a dozen students at Columbine high school at the hands of two of their classmates. In the aftermath, much of the public blame for the shooting was placed at the feet of shock rockers Marilyn Manson (who the shooters were reportedly fans of, though the idea of them being cult-level devotees has since been debunked) for supposedly inspiring the catastrophe — an artist-blaming panic that Eminem also felt the brunt of in 2000, as Lynne Cheney (wife of soon-to-be-VP Dick Cheney) brought up the album’s lyrics on the senate floor, calling it “astonishing to me that a man whose work is so filled with hate would be so honored by his peers.” (Eminem mentioned Manson on the album’s “The Way I Am,” positing that those pointing fingers should take accountability themselves: “They blame it on Marilyn… Where were the parents at?”)

Equally pervasive in the public discourse at the time was discussion about Eminem’s use of anti-gay slurs on Marshall Mathers — occasionally in such explicitly malevolent contexts as the “Criminal” lyric “Hate f–s?/ The answer’s yes” — and his efforts to explain himself at the time (“[The f– word] has nothing to do with sexual preference. I meant something more like a–holes or d–kheads,” he said in response to GLAAD’s criticism of him) mostly landed flat. The backlash over the album’s homophobic content did lead to one of the most iconic moments of that cycle, when he teamed up with the openly gay pop and rock legend Elton John for a performance of its third ingle “Stan” — whose chilling account from the perspective of an obsessed fan was so unforgettable that its title ended up becoming common parlance to refer to all overly invested pop fans — at the 2001 Grammys, which ended in an embrace between the two artists. (Though some remained unmoved by the gesture of allyship, the pair have remained good friends in the decades since, with Sir Elton even revealing that the rapper got him and his husband diamond-encrusted sex toys for a wedding gift in 2017.)

While criticism of some of the album’s more inflammatory content ranged from the thoughtful to the histrionic, all of it served the purpose of making Eminem not just the biggest star, but the most unavoidable topic of conversation in early 2000s pop culture. His famous performance of “The Real Slim Shady” at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards — in which an army of white-teed, peroxide-blond Eminem clones stormed New York’s Radio City Music Hall — resonated not only because Em had already inspired so many followers, but because he was so unavoidable at the time it felt like there may as well have been hundreds of him running around simultaneously. And it wasn’t just on his own songs: Eminem also stole the show as a featured guest and hype man on Dr. Dre’s back-to-the-old-me 2000 hit “Forgot About Dre,” and as the lone guest on Jay-Z’s universally acclaimed 2001 masterpiece The Blueprint for the late-album highlight “Renegade” (which he also co-produced with Luis Resto, a burgeoning skill of Em’s he’d make greater use of as the decade went on). He also released Devil’s Night with his old Detroit rap crew D12, now signed to Em’s Interscope imprint Shady Records, which topped the Billboard 200 and generated a top 20 Hot 100 hit in “Purple Hills” (or “Purple Pills” on the non-radio edit).

As central to pop music and pop culture as Eminem was throughout the first two years of the 2000s, it simply shouldn’t have been possible for him to get any bigger. And yet, 2002 marked another leap forward for the superstar: In May, he released The Eminem Show, which followed Marshall Mathers back to the top of the Billboard 200, with over 1.3 million sold in its first full week of release. The album spawned his third straight classic culture-slapping lead single in the pulsing fake-superhero theme “Without Me,” followed by perhaps his most vicious diss track yet — tellingly, about his own mother Debbie Nelson, who’d previously sued him for defamation of character over lyrics in “My Name Is” that alleged heavy drug use on her part — in “Cleaning Out My Closet,” with both singles reaching the Hot 100’s top five. Like its two predecessors, The Eminem Show drew rave reviews, with critics particularly praising Em’s self-awareness and incisiveness on songs like the stomping “White America,” where he aptly proclaims, “Let’s do the math/ If I was Black, I would’ve done half.”

But the main event of his 2002 was still to come. In November, the Curtis Hanson-directed drama 8 Mile was released, starring Eminem (in his first major film role) as the Detroit trailer park resident, factory worker and aspiring battle MC Jimmy “B-Rabbit” Smith. Em was clearly playing a loosely fictionalized version of himself, but the steely intensity of his star turn was well received critically, and his captivating performances in some of the movie’s battle scenes gave him the electricity of a young Sylvester Stallone. Most crucially, his character came with theme music that was even better than Rocky Balboa’s: “Lose Yourself,” the seize-the-day jock jam that essentially tells Rabbit’s story (and seems to play in his head throughout the movie), became Eminem’s most ubiquitous hit; while previous singles of his were more impactful on MTV than on radio, there was no chance the latter could be able to resist a pop song this accessible and enormous. It topped the Hot 100 shortly after the movie’s release — his first No. 1 on the chart — and stayed there for 12 consecutive weeks, easily his biggest hit to date, and maybe the first Eminem song you didn’t even really even have to be an Eminem fan to love.

This was Eminem’s peak — and one of the highest of any pop artist, in either this century or the last. But in many ways, it was also the end of his run on top. In 2003, The Eminem Show continued to spin off medium-sized hits (the gleefully chauvinistic “Superman,” No. 15; the Aerosmith-sampling “Sing for the Moment,” No. 14) while Eminem mostly focused on production work for the likes of Jay-Z, his Shady signee Obie Trice and even the late 2Pac. For perhaps the first time in four years, Eminem was not the culture’s most ubiquitous rapper, though he still got to take partial credit for the guy who was: 50 Cent, who he signed to Shady the year before. Eminem appeared on two tracks and co-produced five total on his new protégé’s blockbuster debut LP Get Rich or Die Tryin’, released that February, with Get Rich going on to be the year’s best-selling album, a huge secondhand win for Em.

But by the time he was ready to resume recording his own next solo project, Eminem seemed a little lost. After D12 scored its first top 10 hit with D12 World lead single “My Band” — a light-hearted look at Eminem’s outsized role as the group’s frontman, with Em playing the clueless lead singer role to perfection — he returned in September in “Just Lose It,” the lead single from his own upcoming Encore. The song peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100, but confounded fans and critics alike with its outdated Michael Jackson and Pee Wee Herman references, sexually confused chorus (“Yeah, boy, shake that ass/ Oops, I mean girl/ Girl, girl girl”), recycled hooks from “Without Me” and “Superman,” and relatively limp beat. After three straight game-changing lead singles, “Just Lose It” was an extremely puzzling release — and Encore was full of similarly wheel-spinning tracks for Em, where even he seemed unsure of what he was trying to do. (It did contain a few more-focused highlights, including the Martika-sampling “Like Toy Soldiers,” which recapped all the beef Em had gotten embroiled in on both his and his crew’s behalf over the past couple years, and the George W. Bush-protesting “Mosh,” which made him perhaps the only U.S. pop star bold enough to literally say “f–k Bush” in the midst of GWB’s 2004 re-election campaign.)

Encore still debuted at No. 1, with a sky-high first-week total of 710,000 copies sold (in just three days of release, with the album’s release date being moved up to counteract online leaks). But Eminem himself seemed dissatisfied with the project — he’d eventually dismiss it outright as a miss — and once its promo cycle was over, he ended up mostly disappearing from the public eye for a few years. He scored another two top 10 hits with the foreboding “When I’m Gone” and Akon-featuring “Shake That,” both from his Billboard 200-topping greatest hits collection Curtain Call, but that set’s title pointed (again) to the idea that he was toying with the idea of bowing out of music altogether. Eminem had rapped about drug use his entire career, but during the recording of Encore his pill usage (as he would later recount) had spiraled into full-blown dependency. That addiction and associated depression would get worse in 2006, after Eminem’s D12 bandmate and best friend since childhood DeShaun “Proof” Holton was shot to death in a tragic club incident.

Following a nearly fatal overdose in 2007, Eminem went sober in 2008 — and began work with Dr. Dre on his comeback album, Relapse. Released in 2009, and led by his third Hot 100-topper in the Dre and 50 team-up “Crack a Bottle,” the album had all the hallmarks of an athlete returning from injury and still getting back in game shape — the entire set carried a serial killer theme that he didn’t quite seem ready to totally commit to, and the singles were relatively weak, with Em trying out some new vocal tics and inflections that he’d later express regret over (and his rhymes still a little rusty). The comeback effort topped the Billboard 200 and sold over 600,000 copies in its first week, and contains a couple moving moments of true introspection in “Deja Vu” and “Beautiful” — but today, it represents (along with Encore) a low period in Eminem’s career, for both his fans and for himself. On Em’s his next album, he even basically asked his listeners to allow him a do-over, rapping on “Talkin II Myself,” “Them last two albums didn’t count/ Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushing ’em out.”

Luckily for Eminem, he would get that do-over attempt with that next album, 2010’s Recovery, and he’d make the most of it. Now fully clean, he was hungry and refocused in a way that he hadn’t been since The Eminem Show — and the results were immediate, as the set’s lead single, the anthemic perseverance ballad “Not Afraid,” debuted atop the Hot 100, his first No. 1 since “Lose Yourself” in 2002. Recovery followed in June, and though the set divided critics with its more somber tone and greyscale production — Dre only co-produced one track, the late-album cut “So Afraid,” with more contemporary collaborators like Boi-1da and Just Blaze handling the brunt of duties — the commercial response was massive, as it debuted at No. 1 with 741,000 copies sold and ultimately ended 2010 as the Year-End Billboard 200 No. 1 album. The set also scored a second Hot 100-topper with the seven-week No. 1 “Love the Way You Lie,” an amour fou team-up with fellow megastar Rihanna that became something of a linchpin hit for the second phase of Eminem’s star career.

Though Eminem seemed to be starting a new chapter with Recovery, his next album would take him back to the beginning of the century: The Marshall Mathers LP 2. Leading off with the “Stan” sequel “Bad Guy,” the set featured Eminem sounding like he was having fun for the first time in a long time — getting loose over classic rock on songs like the fame-bemoaning “So Far” (Joe Walsh’s “Life’s Been Good”) and the block-rocking lead single “Berzerk” (Billy Squier’s “The Stroke”), and breaking Guinness records with his lightning-quick spitting on the viral “Rap God.” (That song also revisited the Marshall Mathers era by courting accusations of homophobic content — criticism Eminem has continued to cultivate in moments throughout his career — which he responded to by reasserting that his words were not meant to be interpreted literally: “I think people know my personal stance on things and the personas that I create in my music.”) MMLP2 was another huge success for Eminem, selling 792,000 copies in its first week, earning his best reviews in a decade and spawning his fifth Hot 100 No. 1 with a second smash Rihanna collab, “The Monster,” further confirming the early 2010s as something of a second renaissance for Eminem.

Eminem’s next album would come in 2017 with Revival, led by a long pre-release rollout that included his much-hyped first team-up with Beyoncé, “Walk on Water.” Both the album and the single underwhelmed expectations; Revival debuted atop the Billboard 200 — every new Eminem album this century has — but with mixed reviews and only about a third of MMLP2‘s first-week numbers, while the ponderous “Walk on Water” debuted and peaked at No. 14 on the Hot 100. He seemed to sense that he had done the album few favors with the extended walk-up to it, so he came back the next year with the surprise release Kamikaze, spawning a top 10 hit in the Joyner Lucas-featuring “Lucky You” — one of the first real examples of Em extending his arm to the next generation of rappers — and getting a better reception from fans and critics for its more inspired, focused rhyming. (As of Kamikaze, Eminem’s approach to music has clearly prioritized demonstrating his still being a top-tier MC above all hitmaking concerns — with him even saying, “If I had a choice between being the best rapper or making the best albums, I’d rather be the best rapper” — which makes perfect sense for an artist born from the battle rap circuit.)

The most social media attention Eminem got in the back half of the 2010s was actually for a pair of non-album cultural moments. At the 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards, he again entered the political protest realm by using his cypher performance to decry then-president Donald Trump with an a cappella performance titled “The Storm,” even calling out some of his own fans in the process: “And any fan of mine who’s a supporter of his/ I’m drawing in the sand a line, you’re either for or against.” (Em would later rap that the move “practically cut my motherf–kin’ fanbase in half,” but continued to stand by his anti-Trump stance.) Then, in 2018, he engaged in his first celebrity beef in some years with then-rapper Machine Gun Kelly, who he had issues with dating back to a 2012 comment MGK made about Em’s daughter Hailie, and who he called out again on Kamikaze‘s “Not Alike.” This time, Kelly responded with a full dis track: “Rap Devil,” which drew enough media and streaming attention to also become his biggest unaccompanied Hot 100 hit, reaching No. 13. Eminem responded with the vicious “Killshot,” which outperformed “Rap Devil” by reaching No. 3, and largely ended the on-record back-and-forth.

In the 2020s, Eminem has continued to perform well commercially, with loyal, reliable fan support that ensures that he’s not as vulnerable to the changing tides of popular music as most other veteran rappers (or artists of any genre) are. His 2020 album Music to Be Murdered By marked his 10th No. 1 album and spawned a top five hit with the posthumous Juice WRLD teamup “Godzilla,” while this year’s The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace) revisited Eminem’s most classic era and many of its most memorable characters for a (supposedly) final time. The “Without Me”-echoing, Steve Miller Band-sampling lead single “Houdini” has been Em’s biggest hit since “The Monster,” debuting at No. 2 on the Hot 100 and receiving a VMAs-opening performance in September that saw him recreating the Slim Shady Army from his epochal “Real Slim Shady” performance at the century’s beginning, a nice full-circle moment for the rapper and his longtime supporters.

It can be a little tough to size up Eminem’s legacy in pop stardom — which, aside from some unfortunate gaps in the 2000s, has essentially spanned the entire 21st century so far — because whatever Eminem has accomplished in the years since is always going to be held up against those first three years where he was on top of the world in nearly every conceivable way, and it’s inevitably going to pale in comparison. While Em has put up impressive stats and released a lot of good music in the years since, the greatness of his early run still ensures that any retelling of his story, or nearly any ranking of his best albums, songs or moments, is going to be impossibly weighted towards that initial era. The numbers Eminem put up in those years were jaw-dropping, but his impact also went far beyond them; like Taylor Swift’s more recent run of dominance during her Eras Tour, you probably had to live through it to totally understand just how all-consuming it was.

But while Eminem may have never been quite able to match the impact of his own early-2000s run in his later career, neither has any other rapper. And even if younger listeners may have trouble comprehending Eminem as one of the truly great and dominant pop stars of the 21st century, they can see it in the unmistakable importance he’s had on some of their own favorite artists in the next generation. That rangers from vividly introspective rappers like Juice WRLD and Mac Miller to line-crossing provocateurs like the early-days Odd Future crew to verbal technicians like Kendrick Lamar and Logic to singing pop stars like Ed Sheeran and The Weeknd — all of whom bear Eminem’s imprint, and all of whom have specifically cited him as an inspiration. They don’t all look (or sound) exactly like him, but the prophecy from the 2000 VMAs still essentially came true: an army of Slim Shady acolytes really did take over the world in the 21st century.

Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back on Tuesday when our No. 11 artist is revealed!

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