People who do not like Eminem — or do not listen to his music — often bring up one particular track: “But what about that horrible song where he kills his wife?!” Well, what about it?
In a new feature for the New York Post, senior entertainment writer Chuck Arnold revisits the creation of “Kim”, Eminem’s most disturbing track, the brutal prequel to “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde” and one of the darkest cuts on “The Marshall Mathers LP”. He brings the perspective of Jeff Bass, the producer who helped shape it, into the conversation.
Jeff Bass talked about the chaotic studio session that birthed “Kim”.
Eminem came into the studio “fucking pissed off” about his ex-wife Kim, who at the time was not letting him see their daughter Hailie. Bass said, “So I came up with this very dark track, and then he literally went into the booth and started rapping about what we hear now on that record… He came up with that probably in an hour”.
The session quickly turned personal: “He was able to get shit off his chest that really bothered him… Obviously, he didn’t kill anybody, but there’s some truth in some of it”.
Interscope was not sure what to do with the result. “They were like, ‘What are we going to do with this? Now you’re pushing the envelope’”, Bass told The Post. Too graphic for the clean album version, “Kim” was replaced by “The Kids” — which only boosted the record’s notoriety.
Bass also revealed that during that period, “We were doing lots of drugs… “It fueled what we were coming up with … We hadn’t admitted yet that we were drug addicts. So to us, this was normal, just getting high, going in the studio, writing all this music, recording the music. Opioids — that was the choice of drug”.
But they were not slacking, working non-stop on material for “The Marshall Mathers LP”. Bass, whose name is on the album production credits alongside Dr. Dre, Mel-Man and the 45 King, recalls: “We would work in the studios for, like, 20 hours a day, and we would just come up with song after song after song after song. We just would keep creating to see what flowed together well on an album”.
Despite the chaos, Bass called “The Marshall Mathers LP” “a piece of history… a piece of work that will just be here in perpetuity, forever”.
And this is the statement anyone can get behind.
