Marshall Bruce Mathers III (born October 17, 1972), known professionally as Eminem (formerly stylized as EMINƎM), is an American rapper, songwriter, and record producer. Eminem is among the best-selling music artists of all time, with estimated worldwide sales of over 220 million records. He is credited with popularizing hip hop in Middle America and is critically acclaimed as one of the greatest rappers of all time.
Eminem‘s global success and acclaimed works are widely regarded as having broken racial barriers for the acceptance of white rappers in popular music. While much of his transgressive work during the early 2000s made him hugely controversial, he came to be a representation of popular angst of the American underclass. He has been influential for many artists of various genres. After his debut album Infinite (1996) and the extended playSlim Shady EP (1997), Eminem signed with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment and subsequently achieved mainstream popularity in 1999 with The Slim Shady LP. His next two releases, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) and The Eminem Show (2002), were worldwide successes and were both nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year.
After the release of his next album, Encore (2004), Eminem went on hiatus in 2005, partly due to a prescription drug addiction. He returned to the music industry four years later with the release of Relapse (2009) and Recovery was released the following year. Recovery was the best-selling album worldwide of 2010, making it Eminem’s second album, after The Eminem Show in 2002, to be the best-selling album of the year worldwide. In the following years, he released the US number one albums The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013), Revival (2017), Kamikaze (2018) and Music to Be Murdered By (2020).
Tupac Amaru Shakur better known by his stage name 2Pac and, later, by his alias Makaveli, was an American rapper, songwriter, and actor. He is widely considered one of the most influential rappers of all time. Much of Shakur’s work has been noted for addressing contemporary social issues that plagued inner cities, and he is considered a symbol of activism against inequality.
Shakur was born in Manhattan, New York City, but relocated to Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and then the San Francisco Bay Area in 1988. He moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to further pursue his music career. By the time he released his debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991, he had become a central figure in West Coast hip hop, introducing social issues to the genre at a time when gangsta rap was dominant in the mainstream. Shakur achieved further critical and commercial success with his follow-up albums Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z… (1993) and Me Against the World (1995).
