Most people think Eminem’s story started with The Slim Shady LP in 1999. His raunchy, provocative, problematic rapping stuck with fans, especially when paired with Dr. Dre’s cool, gruff demeanor. Beyond being a white rapper who didn’t sound like Vanilla Ice, his vivid horrorcore, biting satire, and dark humor also set him apart early in his career.
However, Em didn’t exactly stumble upon Dre and Aftermath to become a big star. Before he was Slim Shady, he was just camping in Bass Brothers’ studio making his first album, Infinite. If that doesn’t sound familiar, you’re not alone. Eminem himself quipped in his book, The Way I Am, that it sold “maybe 70 copies.”
But the Detroit legend admitted that Infinite was really just a testing ground for the kind of artist he wanted to be. Naturally, that meant wearing influences like AZ and Nas on his sleeve. If it were up to him, he probably wouldn’t have released it.
“Infinite was me trying to figure out how I wanted my rap style to be, how I wanted to sound on the mic and present myself,” he recalled in his biography. “It was a growing stage. I felt like Infinite was like a demo that just got pressed up.”
Eminem Released ‘Infinite’ Way Before He Conquered The World as Slim Shady
Reviews at the time and long after the fact were pretty cold towards Em. In a ranking of his albums from Complex, writer Rob Kenner argued that Eminem’s singular style hadn’t been developed yet and that he “plays it safe lyrically.” “The real problem here is the record’s intention. Lacking a creative center of gravity, The Infinite come off very much like the work of an indie label trying to keep the lights on,” he wrote.
Those kinds of responses radically changed how Eminem approached his music. “On [Infinite] you can hear the pain and the woes of just growing up and being poor and having a baby on the way… I started taking all the feedback and started throwing it back in my music,” he told Vanity Fair in 2004 (via The Guardian).
“‘Yeah, I am white trash, I am whatever you’re gonna say about me.’ Somehow started taking the disadvantages and used them to my advantage. I reached a point where I stopped caring what people thought about me. And the second I stopped caring, people started caring about me,” Eminem continued.
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The post Revisiting the Lost Eminem Album That Sold ‘Maybe 70 Copies’ Ahead of ‘The Slim Shady LP’ in 1999 appeared first on VICE.
