In 2001, on a joint with Jay-Z, Eminem rapped, “I’m a poet to some, a regular modern-day Shakespeare”. Years later, some music professionals reached the same conclusion.
A Shakespearean reading
Vocal coach and singer Beth Roars has built a YouTube audience of more than 1.3 million by analysing the vocal techniques behind some of the world’s biggest songs. She has already picked apart Eminem’s “Mockingbird”, “Godzilla”, and more on her channel. Now, she embarked on “Stan”.
“Today, we use the word ‘Stan’ casually to describe an obsessive fan”, Beth starts her video. “But before this song, this definition didn’t exist. So like Shakespeare, Eminem didn’t just tell a story, he changed language”.
With this, Beth starts analysing “Stan” as a Shakespearean tragedy. She pays attention to the storytelling, the vocal delivery, and “one of the most haunting sampling choices in hip hop history”.
Voice of reason
Turning to Dido’s original vocal, Beth describes her breathy, vibrato-free vocal phrase as representing the calm and peace that Stan cannot find. Moreover, while the story progressed and his emotional intensity climbed higher and higher, the contrast with Dido’s voice became even more hauntingly drastic. And while her voice remains unchanged, it is a sample after all, our perception changes every time the hook comes up.
Three voices of Stan
The mechanics behind that emotional impact is often easy to miss. Artists need extraordinary vocal control to convey the emotion they want the audience to feel. In everyday life, emotion changes our voice naturally. Meanwhile, performers have to recreate those changes deliberately to evoke emotional resonance. The amount of work and skill that goes into it often remains unnoticed. So, Beth Roars took special effort to show how Eminem guided listeners’ perception of the story through his voice.
With the vocal inflections alone, Eminem shows “three different sides to Stan and none of them are particularly healthy”, Beth notes. She points out the shift between downward and upward inflection in Stan’s voice as a tool to show his emotional swings and attempts at false intimacy. Beth draws attention to how Eminem builds aggression through explosive consonants, how a rising pitch indicates a rising emotional temperature, and how the voice contradicts the lyrics, revealing a deeper truth that Stan does not want to admit.
In the final verse, where Stan switched to recording his voice rather than writing the letter and completely unravelled, Eminem indicates this shift in energy by letting Stan shout without getting louder, instead pushing his voice above its natural speaking range.
Dramatic irony
Finally, the last similarity with the English classic Beth pays attention to is the story’s structure. The final verse not only highlights the tragic futility of Stan’s deadly fury, but, delivered in Eminem’s own natural voice, it shows the connection between him and the fan. “Eminem uses his voice for both himself and Stan because it’s as if he can see himself in Stan”, Beth points out. “He’s acknowledging how much luck and circumstance can affect a person’s behaviour and their fate”.
“So, is Eminem the modern-day Shakespeare?” Beth finishes her analysis with the question and answers it immediately. “In my opinion – absolutely”.