The artist Elton John called “one of the best lyricists ever”
Elton John never stopped being a fan of music. Throughout his time in the spotlight, John has been committed to having his finger on the pulse of whatever is going on at the time, whether that’s giving heaps of praise to legendary acts like The Beatles or calling Phoebe Bridgers’s album Punisher one of the best albums that he’s ever heard. At the dawn of the 2000s, something different was coming along.
Having come off some of the most impressive runs of work in his career, with The Lion King and the re-write of ‘Candle in the Wind’ for Princess Diana’s funeral, John’s world was shaken up by a random rapper from the streets of Detroit named Eminem. After the massive success of his movie 8 Mile, Marshall Mathers quickly turned into one of the most sought-after musicians in the world, with a crude sense of humour and lyrics that churned more than a few stomachs along the way.
Despite some of the controversial things he said about homosexual people, John always saw the talent hidden underneath the wifebeaters and bleached blonde hair, telling Rolling Stone, “Eminem is a true poet of his time, someone we will be talking about for decades to come. As a lyricist, he’s one of the best ever. Eminem does for his audience what Bob Dylan did for his: he writes how he feels”.
Once Eminem started to make the rounds of MTV, fans didn’t like what they saw at first, with parents being absolutely appalled by this deranged man writing songs about being abusive towards his girlfriend and his troubled home life. Instead of cleaning up his act even further, Eminem doubled down on The Marshall Mathers LP, making some of the most graphic bars of his career.
Despite having some of the most offensive material at the time, that kind of edge gave John the inspiration to play with him at the Grammys, duetting with him on the song ‘Stan’. When asked why he would want to be linked to one of the most controversial artists at the time, John respected his artistry, saying, “I have always admired Eminem’s thinking. I wanted to appear on the Grammys with him, despite the nonsense about him being homophobic. If they didn’t have the intelligence to see his intelligence, that was their problem”.
‘Stan’ also marked a turning point in Eminem’s songwriting. With John replacing Dido for the live broadcast, Mathers laid out his heart on the song, expressing his concerns about a fictional fan that got so obsessed with meeting him that he ended up taking his own life along with his girlfriend, whom he had taped up in the trunk of a car.
As graphic as it might have seemed, the rest of the world learned that even the most violent artists have a heart, which played out on his next record, The Eminem Show, with songs like ‘Sing For the Moment’ talking about rising from some of the harshest situations to pave a way to something better. Just like Dylan, Eminem also flipped the script, going in new directions with varying degrees of success in the future.
John has also continued his friendship with Em through the years, remarking that “Eminem has the balls to say what he feels and make offensive things funny. That’s very necessary today when irony is becoming a lost art. There aren’t many people in the world with talent that awesome”.
