Still, Eminem wired money back regularly for Hailie. But Kim and Eminem’s relationship was in one of its “off” phases, something that seeped into the lyrics of 97’ Bonnie & Clyde and its later partner track Kim. The only problem was Kim and Hailie were back in Michigan. All he had to do was stay in Los Angeles and record that breakthrough debut album in a dingy studio in Burbank. And who the f**k is that?’”Įminem had almost made it. (Yes, such a thing exists.) He didn’t win, placing second, but it was there that he caught the eyes, or rather the ears, of Dr Dre. In 1997, Eminem travelled to Los Angeles to compete in the Rap Olympics. “I wrote Rock Bottom right after that,” he said. “It was like, five days before Christmas, which is Hailie’s birthday. “That was the worst time ever, dog,” he told Rolling Stone. Picture: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images Eminem was fired from the job just days before Hailie’s first birthday.Įminem in 2015. “He told me, ‘Yeah, but it will get me somewhere someday’.” “I told him it was morbid killing your baby’s mother,” Lynn Hunt, another waitress, told The Los Angeles Times. One of them was a dark meditation on killing his partner, lyrics that would go on to form the basis of 97’ Bonnie & Clyde. Sometimes, he would share the lyrics he was working on with his colleagues. “We used to send back orders to him and he’d rap them,” Sue DuPont, a waitress at the restaurant told The Los Angeles Times. Even when he was on the job, cooking, he was thinking of rhymes.
When Hailie was an infant, Eminem worked as a cook at a family restaurant in Detroit to pay the bills, writing rap songs in spare moments.
None of these arrangements lasted for a long time. For a while, the young family moved back in with Eminem’s mother, and then, later, Kim and Hailie bunked with her mother, while Eminem crashed with some friends. Pretty soon, the neighbourhood became too bad to ignore. The pillows, clothes, silverware - everything. “But then he came back again and took everything but the couches and beds. “He left the peanut butter, jelly, all the sh*t out and didn’t steal nothing,” Eminem recalled to the magazine. Once, a thief broke into their house to make himself a peanut butter sandwich. “I went through four TVs and five VCRs in two years.” “The neighbourhoods we lived in f***ing sucked,” Kim told Rolling Stone. The Mathers family was living with Kim’s twin sister Dawn (and her daughter Alaina who Eminem would later adopt) in a neighbourhood Rolling Stone once described as “crack-infested”. Eminem was 23, with an unsuccessful debut album already under his belt. “We try to teach her wrong from right, having been as wrong as we’ve been.”Īt the time, Eminem and Kim were living in Detroit, Michigan. “I’m not as religious as I should be, but we do try and instil it in our daughter,” Eminem once said of Hailie. Their relationship has improved because of Hailie, the couple’s now-23-year-old daughter and one of the driving forces in Eminem’s life. Eminem has even apologised to Kim for being a “bad husband” in the 2017 single of the same name. Ultimately, after marrying, divorcing, remarrying and divorcing again, Kim and Eminem maintain a civil relationship.
The song was written during a time in their affair when Kim wanted to prevent him from seeing Hailie, and Eminem, incensed at the possibility of being separated from the baby he loved so much, spat out the lyrics in retaliation. Back in 1997, when Eminem first wrote the track, it was in reference to his tumultuous relationship with his on-again, off-again long-term girlfriend Kim Scott. That is the voice of Hailie Jade Scott Mathers, Eminem’s then three-year-old daughter.īecause of its subject matter, there is no way 97’ Bonnie & Clyde could have been released today. In the background of the track, as Eminem croons “Just the two of us/Just you and I!” over and over again, a baby girl’s gurgle can be heard. (One lyric reads: “There goes Mama, splashing in the water/No more fighting with Dad, no more restraining order.”) And yet, 97’ Bonnie & Clyde is much more controversial than My Name Is because it is a song about Eminem’s alter ego Slim Shady taking a ride with his toddler daughter to dump her mother’s body in a lake.
It has none of the brash, demanding, look-at-me bravado of My Name Is, Eminem’s most iconic single. 97’ Bonnie & Clyde is probably the most divisive track on Eminem’s 1999 breakthrough rap album.
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