Eminem’s daughter has a rare accolade: a record nobody has broken since 2002. She is the youngest person to enter the R&B chart. And just like Beyoncé, she improvised her lyrics on “My Dad Gone Crazy”.
A viral Beyoncé quote
Recently, a new social media trend has swept across the internet celebrating, and sometimes mocking, the spontaneity with which creators often approach their tasks. It is based on a 12-year-old quote from Beyoncé. Back then, she released Self-Titled, an accompanying piece for her album Beyoncé, in which she talked about creating the project, letting listeners in on her life and the work that usually stays behind the scenes. Being a young mother, still nursing, she set up a studio at home, bringing in the best songwriters and producers, to make the most of the little time she had to get back to creating music. This is what she https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b1loWJfxaAabout creating “Partition”, arguably, one of her raunchiest songs: “I’m in a studio, and I hear this beat, and I hear this bass line. It has snaps. Two tracks, very simple. It reminds me of Too Short, E-40. It takes me to when me and my husband first met…”. And then she moves to the part now remixed in thousands of videos: “I didn’t have a pen and paper. I got to the mic. I’m like, ‘Oh, press record. Ah, ah, ah, driver roll up the partition, please’”.
It happened to her, too
Hailie hopped on the trend with the video that uses this line and captioned it with “When I ran up to the mic at 6 years old and said ‘I think my dad gone crazy’”.
This video blended the social media fad, personal story, and cultural history.
A moment caught in time
However, the reality was a little bit more complex than a six-year-old could realise.
Eminem explained in the 2004 interview with Toure that Hailie was running around the studio, saying in her high-pitched voice, “Somebody please help me! I think my dad’s gone crazy!” However, he did not let her run up to the mic; she was a six-year-old, and he was working. Although Hailie used to spend a lot of time with him in the studio, there were boundaries.
Yet this time, it was different. “Instantly, that locked in with a beat we’d made the day before”, Eminem recalled. “I went to my house, and I had her go in the booth and say it. When she opens up, she’s just like her dad in a lot of aspects. I just told her what to say, and she nailed it, the first take. It almost was scary, to where I had to slow it down”.
Eminem never intended to turn Hailie into a child star. On the contrary, he did whatever he could to give her a normal childhood away from the spotlight. Still, they shared this one song together.
“When she gets old, she can grow up and say, ‘My dad put me on the song. My dad sings songs about me, my dad put me on the song. My dad put my name everywhere’”, Eminem later said.
The song took off even before Hailie grew up. While “My Dad Gone Crazy” was never released as a single from The Eminem Show, it made it to the charts. The song peaked at No. 64 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and spent 7 weeks on the chart.
It earned Hailie a Guinness World Record as the youngest artist ever to chart an R&B hit – a record she still holds today.