Eminem went deeper on his longtime admiration for LL Cool J, revealing the legendary emcee inspired him to pick up the microphone.
During an interview with D-Stroy and Paul Rosenberg on a special Back to School Shade 45 episode, Eminem opened up about the impact that LL Cool J’s music had on him as a kid.
Em said that LL taught him “everything to do with music,” sharing that his 1985 album Radio changed his life. “When I was 11, that was the first album I had. I got that tape for Christmas, and it was the first full rap cassette I had. I would just play it front to back, front to back, front to back.”
Eminem shared he’d play the album on a boombox, stand beside it, and perform its tracks for passing by cars. The Detroit rapper recalls “I’m BAD” coming out when he was 13, inspiring him to write his first rap, noting it “was just like LL Cool J.”
Em also said as an adult reading LL’s memoir, presumably 1997’s I Make My Own Rules, he discovered the two shared a lot of the same childhoood “struggles.”
Later on in the episode, Eminem reflected on his introduction to multisyllable rap and gave credit to Rakim and Kool G Rap.
"I remember when I first heard multi-syllables, I didn’t really understand that they [were] connecting three and four and five syllables at one time," Eminem said. "So I kinda didn’t hear it until I started hearing other rappers do it."
After becoming more interested in it, Eminem explained how he got better at the art form, revealing that he’d write words and rhyming phrases on a piece of paper and practice doing that until the connections started making sense.
Eminem specifically praised Rakim’s delivery of multisyllabic lines. “He had that delivery and the voice,” the “My Name Is” rapper said. “The way that he said shit was noticeably more complex, but I couldn't figure out why it was noticeably more complex than anything that was out yet.”
“Kool G Rap was great at doing that too,” Eminem continued. “He’d rhyme inside the line, then come back with what they originally started rhyming with.”
Check out Eminem’s full new conversation with Shade 45 here.
