FEATURE:
Groovelines
Eminem (ft Dido) – Stan
___________
WHEN deciding which track…
to include for this feature, I wanted to focus on one that has a lot of relevance now. It was controversial when it came out in 2000 – I guess it is still courting a certain amount of controversy! The Marshall Mathers LP is an album that I really like, though it has attracted some debate as to whether it is Eminem playing a character when he sings of violence against women and messages of homophobia. Is it what he really thinks, or is it just a persona? Whilst I suspect that it is part of his act, Eminem has always been accused of sending out the wrong messages. Stan is a track that went to number-one in the U.K. Featuring a memorable vocal sample from Dido, Stan is a song with such immersive and vivid lyrics. Before moving along, Wikipedia provides some background to the song:
“Stan" is a song by American rapper Eminem featuring vocals sampled from British singer Dido. It was released in October 2000 as the third single from Eminem's third album, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000). It reached number one in 12 countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, and Australia.
Dido's lyrics are a sample of the opening lines of her song "Thank You". The 45 King-produced track also uses a slightly modified break from "Thank You" as its base sample; both songs were released as singles in late 2000. "Stan" has been called one of Eminem's best songs and is considered one of his signature songs. Rolling Stone magazine ranked "Stan" 296th on its list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song was also listed 15th on VH1's list of the greatest hiphop songs of all time and named in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
The song was nominated for multiple awards, including Best Song at the MTV Europe Music Awards, Video of the Year, Best Rap Video, Best Direction, and Best Cinematography at the MTV Video Music Awards. It won Best International Artist Video at the MuchMusic Video Awards. In April 2011, Complex magazine put together a list of the 100 greatest Eminem songs and ranked "Stan" second. The eponymous character's name gave rise to a slang term that refers to overzealous, maniacal, overly obsessed, entitled fans of a celebrity or personality; the term has since been included in the Oxford English Dictionary”.
Today, a ‘stan’ is someone who is a huge fan of something. Maybe a bit obsessive or overly-keen, it refers to the title character of the Eminem song who worships his idol. He writes to him and, when he doesn’t get a quick response, he gets angrier and eventually murders his girlfriend. It is a track that grows darker and more unsettling. I feel The Marshall Mathers LP warrants new respect, as it’s a masterful album filled with tremendous, accomplished and confident songs. GQ marked twenty years of Stan last year. It was interesting hearing why Eminem decided to write the song and what legacy it has now:
“Stan” is turning 20. The song first appeared on Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP in May 2000, but wasn’t released as a single until 21 November, topping the UK charts the week before Christmas. “Stan” is still considered Eminem’s masterpiece as a songwriter and storyteller and it all started, oddly, with the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow romcom Sliding Doors. Producer Mark “The 45 King” James heard the song “Thank You”, by an unknown English singer-songwriter called Dido, on a TV commercial for the movie and heard sampling potential. He taped it off the TV, severed the depressive verse from the consoling chorus and fashioned it into a hip-hop loop. In “Thank You”, Dido is singing about a bad day that’s about to be turned around by love; in James’ eight-line loop, she is describing a grey, damp purgatory of one bad day after another.
James’ track ended up on a tape of potential beats that Eminem played in his car one day. One of Dido’s lyrics, “Your picture on my wall, it reminds me that it’s not so bad,” brought to mind the fans who had descended on him after the success of his 1999 debut, The Slim Shady LP, writing unnervingly intense fan mail and besieging his Detroit home. What if the picture on the wall were not of a lover but a celebrity? What if the song were the internal monologue of a tormented fan? He could see the whole story unfolding like a movie in his head. “A lot of times when I’m writing songs, I see visions for everything I’m writing,” he later told the lyrics website Genius. “This was one of those.”
Eminem was thinking of the danger posed by fans (Madonna and Björk were two of the stars whose violent stalkers made the news in the 1990s), but also of the tendency of fans and journalists to take lurid lyrics too literally: Marilyn Manson had absurdly been blamed for inspiring the two students who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in April 1999. The song could be Eminem’s corrective to listeners and critics alike: don’t get carried away. “It’s kind of like a message to the fans to let them know that everything I say is not meant to be taken literally,” he told MTV at the time.
Running to almost seven minutes, “Stan” was the ideal centrepiece for an album inspired by the head-wrecking experience of instant fame and notoriety but Eminem didn’t see it as a hit. “When I was writing it, I just thought, ‘Whoa, people are going to get sick of this because it goes on for so long,’” he told Genius. In fact, both the tense narrative and Dido’s career-making hook proved irresistible. What’s more, the song made critics who had been ambivalent about Eminem’s trollish provocations think again. When Elton John took Dido’s part in a performance at the 2001 Grammy Awards, he not only drew a line under the rapper’s juvenile use of homophobic slurs but gave him the blessing of classic rock. “Stan” showed the world that the obnoxious class clown had real depth, with the literary critic Giles Foden going so far as to compare him to Robert Browning, “the Victorian master of sly irony”. Eminem never made a track as eerily perfect again and he knew it, frequently referencing “Stan” on later albums. In the 2013 sequel “Bad Guy”, Stan’s younger brother Matthew takes his revenge. On 2017’s “Walk On Water”, Eminem recovers from a bout of insecurity by reminding himself: “Bitch, I wrote ‘Stan’.”
By then, the character was firmly embedded in the language of pop and internet culture. The rapper Nas made Stan into a generic noun when he insulted Jay-Z in his 2001 dis track “Ether” (“You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pussy, a stan”), but the word didn’t really catch on, as both noun and verb, until the social media-saturated 2010s, and only entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017: “an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity”. It’s often assumed to be a portmanteau of “stalker” and “fan”, although it’s not clear if that was Eminem’s intention or just a neat coincidence. Strangely, “stan” was for a few years used benignly and with pride, as if Eminem’s song had never existed. Think of phrases such as “We have no choice but to stan” or “We stan a true queen.” A 2014 Atlantic introduction to “stanbases” had a typically jolly, winking tone. Obsessive fandom had been ironised, but there were always fans whose behaviour was more sinister and it was only a matter of time before they came to the for”.
I am going to end up with a feature from American Songwriter. They did a feature looking behind the song on its twentieth anniversary. Although some were shocked by Stan and felt that it would encourage young listeners to mimic the lead character or enact some of the threats, it is a masterclass in narrative songwriter, filled with twists and turns:
“The final product is a memorable piece of work; Eminem’s sense of time and syllabic accent, and his emotional delivery, make this song remarkable. But the words also stand on their own on paper, with a sense of rhyme and meter that put him among the greats of both music and straight poetry. To wit: Dear Slim, I wrote you but you still ain’t callin’/I left my cell, my pager and my home phone at the bottom/I sent two letters back in autumn/You must not have got ’em/It probably was a problem at the post office or somethin’/Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy when I jot ’em. Writer Giles Foden compared him to legendary English poet Robert Browning in The Guardian of London, a comparison that would no doubt freak out some 19th century Browning fans.
“Stan” spawned an award-winning video that is now legendary. Featuring Dido, the eight-minute video was heavily edited by most outlets for both length and language. The video helped make “Stan” a worldwide hit that changed the face of pop music and hip-hop. Eminem’s lyrical artistry here transcends any genre; this is more than hip-hop or alternative hip-hop, and more than just pop. And it’s still relevant 20 years later.
PHOTO CREDIT: Interscope Records
These accolades might be a little hard for some people to take. From those who consider Eminem vulgar and tasteless, to people who think he’s a homophobic misogynistic jerk at heart, there’s always going to be a critic. But the lyric of “Stan” isn’t just the work of somebody who managed to get in the zone for a couple hours or just had a good day or is even channeling something from an unseen source. Art like this comes from somebody who clearly has given his life to his pursuit, and has walked the walk while others talk the talk. A piece of work like this, where every syllable and nuance is as perfect as it can be, is rare and inspirational and doesn’t come often or easy. Ninety-nine percent perspiration, indeed”.
I know that Eminem has had a difficult relationship with the press through the years. He is one of the greatest rappers of his time. The Marshall Mathers LP might stand as his towering work. In terms of his songwriting and delivery, there was nothing like it in 2000! The album still sounds impactful and hugely moving over twenty years from its release. The Marshall Mathers LP has been reappraised. Whilst one cannot ignore all of the lyrics and more controversial content, you have to respect the musical ambition and accomplishment! Since its release, The Marshall Mathers LP has been ranked as one of the best albums ever but a number of magazines/sources. A sensational song from a remarkable album, Stan is named for a modern-day phenomenon. More importantly, it helped turn Eminem into a superstar; one of the greatest songwriters of the time. There is no doubting that Stan is…
A true classic.