On Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson, Eminem faced the question about how he became who he is now and the conversation went to the very early days of him finding his way in hip-hop.
Marshall, who started writing rap when he was 12-13 years old was not very confident and needed a friendly push to start putting his songs out there:
I had a weird trajectory. I was afraid early on, like 15-16 years old. I was afraid to go to any clubs or anything like that to say my raps because I felt like I wasn’t good enough yet. So I had to get to a certain spot. I was just making songs and one day I got a call from my boy Proof and he was like, “Yo, you need to come up to the Hip Hop Shop”. And I was like, “What is the Hip Hop Shop?” And he’s like, “Yo, just come to the Hip Hop Shop. Write something, come up here”. And Proof…, we came up rapping together but he would kind of go do his own thing and then I I’d be working at factories and stuff like that and Proof was out there on the grind and he started making connections and then he met J Dilla from Slum village and a lot of the early Detroit hip-hop that was exploding onto the scene. Proof was such a part of that and I got a chance to… When I went to the Hip Hop Shop I was like, “What the fuck?” He was like, “Yo, I’ll clear everybody out, I’ll have like ten people and you rap in front of them and if they don’t like you they’re gonna tell you they don’t like you. If they do like you and they fuck with you, you know…” So I went there, I said a rap, I got some people jumping around and shit and I was like, “Okay, this might be it for me”. And then that’s when we start having battles at the Hip Hop Shop. We was having a battle every two or three months but every Saturday I would make sure that I didn’t have to work till four o’clock because I was going to the Hip Hop Shop every Saturday. So for me in the early twenties, it was St. Andrews Hall on Friday night, Saturday – Hip Hop Shop, Tuesday – Ebony Showcase. That’s what happened, I started battling. In the Hip Hop Shop, the first battle that we had there I won it. Proof was taking names and he was putting them in a hat, like, if you want to sign up to battle you just put your name in the hat, he picks a name and picks another name. It would be like Bizarre vs. B-flat. And then they go at it. And it was me vs. whoever. I remember one time I battled Kuniva who was in my group D12, but we weren’t a group yet.
Watch the video below:
