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New Jersey rapper and underground rap mainstay Tame One, born Rahem Brown, has died, according to NJ.com and several sources close to him. He was 52 years old.

Tame One rose to prominence in the late ’90s as a member of the trio Artifacts with El De Sensai and DJ Kaos, which held a place of high regard in the so-called backpack rap movement of the era. In addition, he was a prominent member of several other groups including The Weathermen, and released nine solo albums. Tame One was also an avid graffiti artist, paying homage to the artform with his music and distinctive Tame One tag.

According to a Facebook post from Darlene Brown Harris, Tame One’s mother, “The medical examiner says the six pharmaceutical drugs that Trinitas hospital prescribed to him last Friday, combined with the weed he smoked over this weekend…his heart simply gave out. I will not be responding to all the posts for a bit, but the hardest words I will ever post or say is, my son, my heart, is dead.”

Tame One trended on Twitter following the news of his death as rap peers and fans alike expressed their grief and dismay at his passing. It was clear that his influence was widespread and that he will be missed.

It’s nearly impossible to know what Ryan Coogler went through trying to make Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I’ve been calling this movie a miracle because it’s truly remarkable what Coogler has done here. Combining the emotional toll of losing Chadwick Boseman – a friend and collaborator – with the logistical reality of no longer having the lead actor and character for one of the most popular franchises in existence is devastating and, in normal situations, there’s no way it would continue. But Black Panther is not a normal franchise. The importance of this character, coupled with what Chadwick Boseman meant to people … it’s as if sheer will itself got this sequel made. Even though, as Coogler admits, he started from a place where he thought there was just no way he could even attempt to do this.

In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, T’Challa is gone and Wakanda must still move on. The world is now aware of Wakanda’s precious metal, Vibranium, which has created a threat to Wakanda as other nations seek to steal the precious metal, or, in the United State’s case, create a Vibranium detector, which was thought to be impossible. As it turns out, Wakanda isn’t the only place with Vibranium, the underwater city of Talokan has thrived, undetected, for centuries, but now their community is at risk and their leader, Namor (Tenoch Huerta), blames Wakanda and, in exchange for not waging war, he wants the scientist who created the Vibranium detector killed. This “scientist” is a student at MIT named Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), which forces Shuri (Letitia Wright) and Okoye (Danai Gurira) out on a quest to save her.

Ahead, Coogler says Namor was always part of the script, and Boseman was a collaborator on what Namor should represent in terms of Indigenous Meso-American representation. Namor is not a villain. He’s actually got a point during the events of Wakanda Forever, which makes his case compelling. Coogler explains all the intricacies that went into making Namor just right, which he credits to, “a lot of hard work.”

But first, he talks about Chadwick Boseman. I can’t imagine Coogler was looking forward to doing press for a movie that there’s no doubt took an emotional toll on him. And being aware of all that, it did bring some need levity to start off with, when Coogler, at the nudging of his publicist, started out with a joke on me. (Coogler’s publicist (Bebe Lerner) also reps Jason Reitman, and the last time Reitman and I spoke, we spent a probably unhealthy amount of time talking about The Garbage Pails Kids Movie.)

Ryan Coogler: Hey, what’s up, Mike? Somebody asked me to ask you about what you know about Garbage Pail Kids.

Wait, what … was this Jason Reitman?

[Laughs] No, it was Bebe.

Ah, okay, this makes sense now … yeah somehow Garbage Pail Kids comes up every time I talk to Jason Reitman, and then I hear about it from Bebe.

Wow. I remember the Garbage Pail Kids.

But seriously, all things considered, this movie is a miracle. Was there ever a point, right after the terrible news, you thought you couldn’t do it?

Yeah… Yeah, absolutely. I was in shock. Followed by just… deep sadness. You know what I’m saying? It would’ve been that for me, even if I wasn’t spending every waking hour writing the script for the guy for the past several months. But it was amplified by that because I was just in my office for days on end imagining writing words that only he could say. That he would be excited to do and audiences would be excited to see him perform and putting him in situations.

I was having check-ins with him, letting him know what we were going to tackle in the film. He was excited about the potential for indigenous American representation and what that could mean. He always had an incredible insight for how the audience would respond to things. I was excited to get to work with him. Then, when you’re expecting somebody to be around, you don’t take the time to appreciate what they mean to you. It’s one of the more profound realities about our relationships as mortal beings. You know what I’m saying?

I do.

You don’t reflect on what somebody means to you, the space that they occupy in your mind and your heart until you no longer have access to them.

Once you decide, okay, I’m doing this, was everything on the table still? Was there any actual serious thought to recasting? I don’t even know how you could that. What you wound up doing seems like the perfect choice.

I’ll put it to you like this … I’ll put it to you like this: it’s actually difficult to have that conversation with people who don’t know us and weren’t there when we made the first one. I actually understand that, I extend grace to people as best I can because I know that they would never get it. You know what I mean?

Right.

Unless you were there with us for those several hundred days and years, you wouldn’t understand what he meant to us. You wouldn’t understand what he meant to the chosen family that was the people that made that movie. I get it, from a distance, somebody might say, “Hey, why didn’t you all do this?”

To me, it wouldn’t make any sense, but people were saying that was an option and I didn’t get that.

People are prisoners of their own perspectives. Your perspective is all you have. I get it. We were there. We are the ones who made it with him. He was an irreplaceable person, it’s as simple as that. For us, because we came to know him, because we came to know him through the process of creating that work, the two are very much linked for us. Maybe not for other people, but for us it is. To answer the question, was that ever seriously considered? It’s difficult to say if it was ever seriously considered. We considered just about everything, but like I said, I considered not making another one or taking myself out of the picture. We ran the gamut of thoughts, but we wouldn’t make a good movie that way. You know what I’m saying? It’s the truth. I don’t know that we would’ve made a movie at all.

It is weird to switch gears from such a subject like that, but I do have to tell you, the deception of Namor (Tenoch Huerta) is so great in this movie.

How nice of you to say.

I’ve always loved Sub-Mariner and I’ve been reading his books again, just getting ready for this movie. I couldn’t figure out how you’d pull him off because he’s such a blowhard in the comics.

[Laughs] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How’d you do that? Was he always going to be the villain, even before? Actually, I would say antagonist. He’s not even a villain.

Yeah, yeah, antagonist is the correct word, I would say. And he always was. He always was the antagonist in this version, since I signed on to do another one. It was something that the studio was excited about. It was something that Chadwick was excited about. Fairly early into the process, we settled on him building a culture out of Indigenous Meso-American influences. We were always excited about that. Chadwick was excited about that. That was present in that original script that was written before Chadwick passed away. Yeah, how we pulled it off? A lot of hard work. I have incredible collaborators. My co-writer is Joe Robert Cole.

Yeah, I talked to him for the first Black Panther movie.

Obviously, Nate Moore was present, Kyana Davidson was present from Marvel and Kevin Feige and Victoria Alonso and Lou D’Esposito. It was a team effort.

Well, Namor has a point. You can see his point of view. There’s a point in the movie where he feels betrayed by Ramonda and he’s not wrong.

No, no, for sure, for sure. The thing is about Namor, is that we’re consistent. The technical side of what we do is just we’re doing an adaptation, and this character has been around for almost 100 years.

Yeah, since 1939.

He hasn’t been represented in film or television yet. It was like, okay, so what are the things about him that are consistent? He’s got wings on his ankles, he’s got dark hair, he can fly. He’s really strong. He’s very arrogant.

I love the wings. Did anyone try to talk you out it?

No.

Okay, good.

No. I do think that having Aquaman out in the world, in film language, and being successful in the marketplace, I think it was a great bit of indirect guidance for us to lean into the things that made Namor different from Aquaman. Just out of respect to the audience because a lot of people saw that movie. A lot of people love that movie. It was our task to, obviously, put our heads down and blinders on and make our movie, but also have a sense of awareness of what the marketplace might want to respond to, and might be interested in. I think giving people something different, if you can give somebody something good, that’s also unique, I think it’s always better. We wanted to lean into the things that make those two characters different from each other because they have a lot of other similarities in publishing.

For us, it was like, Yo, you got to wear the green trunks. He’s got to have his winged ankles. He’s got to be relatively arrogant. He has to be long-lived. He’s got to be a child of two worlds, not really fitting into either one. He has to be very confident and very dangerous. In the comics, Namor can always back up what he’s saying.

That’s true.

It’s always interesting. He has to be charismatic. Namor, in the comics, is very romantic. He hits on other people’s wives, you know what I’m saying?

I do, he hits on Sue Storm quite often.

Yeah! This character, he had to have all of these things to him, but we’re making a Black Panther movie, so what are our tones? What are our themes? What are the themes that we like to plant our flag in and say, This is what we do that nobody else does? Through that, the cultural specificity comes about. The gray area comes about: this idea of a family drama mixed with a geopolitical thriller, mixed with a little bit of crime film. These are secret societies, in a way, where deals are made eye-to-eye, face-to-face, and nobody else needs to know, and slap that idea of all those things.

And it’s a film about motherhood and the idea that that was his most impactful relationship. Through the story of him and his mom, and her life and her death, that impacted his view of the world. That gave us the other element of Namor in the publishing, its extreme xenophobia. You know what I mean? It’s this idea of, “it’s us and it’s everybody else.” And him seeing the world that way. I thought if we could capture all of those things in this guy and make him someone that you would care about, in a way, then we can have something special. That was what we went after.

Well, you did it.

I thank my collaborators for any success it had. It wasn’t anything on my own.

Well, like I said, with everything you had to deal with, this movie is a miracle. I know it probably took 10 years off your life, but I’m so glad you made it.

[Laughs] I appreciate the empathy, bro. It means a lot.

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Remember when Matthew Perry kicked off his goodwill tour by wishing that all-around good guy Keanu Reeves was dead? That was weird!

In his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir, the Friends star wrote, “Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us?” Perry also revealed that when he found out that his Almost Heroes co-star Chris Farley had died, he “punched a hole through Jennifer Aniston’s dressing room wall… Keanu Reeves walks among us.”

Reeves has been quiet throughout the whole mini-scandal, but an “insider” told Us Weekly, however, that The Matrix star “thought the comments came out of left field. It’s kind of backfired on Matthew anyway, which is why he had to apologize.”

Perry’s apology was more of a bizarre explanation. “I’m actually a big fan of Keanu,” he wrote in a statement. “I just chose a random name, my mistake. I apologize. I should have used my own name instead.” Or, y’know, just not wished death upon one of the few non-problematic male celebrities. Now David Schwimmer will have to think twice before writing that Tom Hanks should face a firing squad in his memoir.

(Via Us Weekly)

Ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, John Oliver went deep on Republican candidates who are locked and loaded to pull all kinds of shenanigans to subvert the results. While there’s always the usual tactics of voter suppression through ID laws and intimidation tactics, Oliver is more concerned with the new spate of aggressive tactics that have been sparked by Donald Trump‘s attempt to overturn the 2020 election up to and including the January 6 attack.

Oliver’s election concerns brought him to Kari Lake, the gubernatorial candidate for Arizona and Meghan McCain nemesis. Like Trump before her, Lake is already casting doubts on the election results in her state before voting has even started. She’s even attempting to subvert the media with a very MAGA statement in her new campaign ad.

“If you’re watching this ad right now, it means you’re in the middle of watching a fake news program,” Lake says in the new TV spot, which Oliver found hilarious and the perfect opportunity for a self-deprecating joke for his own show. Via Deadline:

“If you just saw that ad for the first time on this show, you’re clearly not watching it on a fake news program. You’re watching it because you left the TV on after The White Lotus. That is what is happening right now,” he joked.

Jokes aside, Oliver ended the segment by emphasizing this worrying new post-Trump trend of rejecting the results of a democratic election.

“Everything that we’ve talked about tonight has the capacity to overwhelm our system, making it harder to certify elections quickly, leading to confusion, which sows doubt in the process, and in turn causes absolute chaos,” Oliver said via Rolling Stone. “Which is very worrying given that we’ve all seen what confused but motivated people are capable of doing when they think the process is broken.”

(Via Deadline & Rolling Stone)

The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame 2022 induction ceremony was the Eminem show at Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater on Saturday night (November 5). Em was inducted in the performers category alongside Carly Simon, Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Lionel Richie, and Pat Benatar, but he invited a few other legends to join in on the fun, too.

Eminem began his performance medley with “My Name Is” and “Rap God.” Fellow Rock Hall inductee Steven Tyler (with Aerosmith) sang the “Dream On” chorus of The Eminem Show standout “Sing For The Moment,” and Ed Sheeran fulfilled something of a childhood dream by joining Eminem for “Stan.”

Eminem’s moment continued at the podium, where Dr. Dre formally inducted Eminem and the multi-platinum Michigan legend metaphorically shared the stage by using his speech to shine a light on over 100 hip-hop idols who influenced his legendary career. He even addressed the more ominous aspects of his journey with a touch of Em-specific humor.

“I’m probably not supposed to actually be here tonight because of a couple of reasons. One of them that I’m a rapper, and this is the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. And there’s only a few of us right now that have been inducted in already, but there’s only a few of us,” he said. “Secondly, I almost died from an overdose in 2007, which kind of sucked. Hailie, plug your ears: because drugs were f*cking delicious, and I thought we had a good thing going, man, but I had to go and f*ck it all up and take too many.”

Read Eminem’s full speech here.

Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

On October 28th, Elon Musk tweeted, “Comedy is now legal on Twitter.” On November 6th, the notorious free speech champ, in one of his first moves after buying the cursed social media platform (outside of firing and then reportedly re-hiring a bunch of employees), banned comedian Kathy Griffin for impersonating him.

Griffin used her account Twitter name under Musk’s name and with his photo, tweeting, “After much spirited discussion with the females in my life, I’ve decided that voting blue for their choice is only right. They’re also sexy females, btw.” She added the hashtag “#VoteBlueToProtectWomen” and, in a follow-up tweet, a rocket emoji, alluding to Musk’s SpaceX program. Her account was suspended soon after.

“Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended,” Musk explained, adding that Griffin specifically was suspended for “impersonating a comedian.” No wonder he’s a hit at parties.

But Griffin found a workaround from Musk’s ban: using her dead’s mom account.

Griffin posted a series of angry responses to her suspension from the account of her late mom, Maggie Griffin, who died aged 99 in March 2020. She responded to a flurry of posts about her suspension — including Musk’s joke that she’d been “suspended for impersonating a comedian.”

“I mean… you stole that joke, you a–hole. People have been posting that joke for hours, you hack,” she wrote. “Look, please do a better job running this company. It used to mean something. This is KG btw.”

Griffin repeatedly used the hashtag #FreeKathy — just for others to reply with #pleasefreeusfromKathy.

Musk’s reign as Twitter Lord is off to a great start!

(Via the New York Post)

Eminem has gone from 8 Mile to the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. The 2022 induction ceremony took place Saturday (November 5) at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, and Eminem was among this year’s class of inductees in the performers category with Carly Simon, Dolly Parton, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Lionel Richie, and Pat Benatar.

Dr. Dre inducted Em — nine months after their epic Super Bowl LVI halftime show. Then, Slim Shady stood up to the podium and made sure to single out everybody who ever had an impact on his unprecedented career arc. His speech also touched on his near-fatal 2007 drug overdose, highlighting that his induction was significant not just because he’s one of few rappers to have earned the honor but because he was “probably not supposed to actually be here tonight” at all.

An edited version of this weekend’s star-studded ceremony will be available to watch on HBO come November 19. In the meantime, read a transcription of the speech (via The Detroit News) and watch clips from it below.

“Can y’all hear me? I can’t hear me. Can you hear me?

This sh*t’s crazy. So I wrote some sh*t down tonight that I’m never going to f*cking remember, so I had to read it off the paper and sh*t, but it’s from the heart. I realize what an honor it is right now for me to be up here tonight, and what a privilege it is to do the music that I love, and the music that basically saved my life.

Where’d the man… where did Dre go? The man who saved my life, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. motherf*ckin’ Dre. So I’m going to try to make this as quick and painless as possible. I’m f*cking stuttering and sh*t, I mean Jesus Christ.

So I’m probably not supposed to actually be here tonight because of a couple of reasons. One of them that I’m a rapper, and this is the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. And there’s only a few of us right now that have been inducted in already, but there’s only a few of us.

Secondly, I almost died from an overdose in 2007, which kind of sucked. Hailie, plug your ears: because drugs were f*cking delicious, and I thought we had a good thing going, man, but I had to go and f*ck it all up and take too many. G*ddamn. OK Hailie.

OK, so… hold on, I lost my motherf*ckin’ spot. Paul, did I say… I said drugs were delicious, right? And finally, I had to really fight my way through man to try and break through in this music, and I’m so honored and I’m so grateful that I’m even able to be up here doing hip-hip music, man, because I love it so much.

And they say you won’t work a day if you love your job and sh*t. This part I’m not crazy about? But, OK.

My musical influences are many, and they say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it took a whole genre and culture to raise me. They say success has many fathers, and that’s definitely true for me. So whatever my impact has been on hip-hop music, I never would have or could have done this sh*t without some of the groundbreaking artists that I’m about to mention right now.

And this is a list, man. I put this list together yesterday, and I kept adding to the sh*t, adding to the sh*t, and if I forget anybody, I apologize. But these were my teachers right here.

I’m gonna start with the 2 Live Crew, Tupac, 3rd Bass, Alliance, Apache, Audio Two — Milk Dee, what up! — Awesome Dre, the Beastie Boys, Big Daddy Kane, Big Pun, Big L, Biz Markie, the Notorious B.I.G. of course, Black Moon, the Boogie Monsters, Brand Nubian, Brother J from X Clan, Buckshot, Casual from Hieroglyphics, Chill Rob G, Chubb Rock, Chuck D and Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, D-Nice, Dana Dane, De La Soul — now I’m about a third of the way done.

De La Soul… did I say De La Soul? Def Jef, Del The Funky Homosapien, DJ Quik, Dr. Dre of course, Dre’s from Black Sheep, Ed O.G., EPMD, Fat Boys, Fat Joe, Fu-Schnickens, Gang Starr, Geto Boys, Heavy D, House Of Pain, Ice Cube, Ice-T, the Intelligent Hoodlum, JJ Fad, Jaz-O, Jazzy Jeff And The Fresh Prince, Just Ice, K-Solo, Kid & Play: I’m a tenth of the way done.

King Sun, King Tee, Kool G Rap, Kool Moe Dee, KRS-One, Kwame, Lakim Shabazz, Large Professor, Leaders Of The New School, the one and only LL Cool J — love you bro. Lord Finesse, Lords Of The Underground, Mantronix, Masta Ace, MC Breed, MC Lyte, MC Shan, Melle Mel, Merciless Ameer, Mobb Deep, Monie Love, Nas, Newcleus, Onyx, Organized Konfusion, Outkast, Andre 3000, Paris, Pharcyde, Queen Latifah, Rakim, Redhead Kingpin, Pete Rock and CL Smooth… I’m almost done.

Redman, Roxanne Shante, Run DMC, Salt-N-Pepa, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, Snoop Dogg, Souls Of Mischief, Special Ed, Stetsasonic… now I’m all down to the S’s. Super Lover Cee and Casanova Rud, the D.O.C., the Roots, Black Thought, the Skinny Boys, Tony D, Too Short, Treach from Naughty By Nature, A Tribe Called Quest, U.T.F.O., Whodini, Wise Intelligent and the Poor Righteous Teachers, Wu-Tang Clan, and YZ.

Those were my rock stars, man, and I just want to say, like, those are just a few of the names that I hope will be considered in the future for induction. Because without them, a lot of us wouldn’t be here. I know I wouldn’t.

So that’s all I had to say, man. I know this induction is supposed to be me talking about myself and sh*t, man, but f*ck that. I would not be here without them. I’m a high school dropout, man, with a hip-hop education, and these were my teachers. And it’s their night just as much as it is mine, so thank you.”

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Vladimir Putin’s stubbornly continuing his war on Ukraine even after all signs have pointed to continuing disaster for Russia. Nearly all year long, we’ve heard that joining his army (voluntarily or not) is essentially a death sentence, which is why Putin began recruiting from the most hellish prisons before drafting 300,000+ more troops. Ukraine came into mountains of unplanned firepower because Putin’s soldiers had either died or abandoned ship, and the last thing we heard, there were about 8-10 men in companies, which should regularly deploy while at least reaching the 100-man mark.

Now, The Moscow Times has revealed that an elite unit, the 155th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade, penned a letter to drag the Russian president for treating them as “cannon fodder.” The letter arrives after the unit lost 300 men within days while launching what they called a “baffling” offensive on a Ukrainian village. The publication notes that even “pro-war reporters” cannot understand why this mission happened, given that Russians were reportedly at a “strategic disadvantage” before launching the assault. Here’s more:

“We lost about 300 men killed, wounded and missing in four days as a result of a ‘carefully’ planned offensive by the ‘great commanders’,” the letter said.

It’s grim stuff, given that the loss of life from one mere weekend in Ukraine adds up to more Russian troops lost than during the first Chechen war, way back in the 1990s. This now lends an even more doomed sense of morale for this elite Naval unit, which has been (as Forbes notes) the chief Russian formation in eastern Ukraine since the war began. Putin has insisted that he’s in this to win this, but it ain’t happening.

(Via The Moscow Times & Forbes)

This weekend, Eminem entered the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Predictably and appropriately, it was longtime associate Dr. Dre who was there to induct him. Dre gave an entertaining and moving speech, during which he also made time for some humor.

At one point, Dre joked about Eminem’s history with drugs, saying, “Em would go on to overdose, relapse, and recover not only on his albums, but also in real life. Let me tell you something: this guy goes through a lot of sh*t just to get a concept for a song.”

Eminem addressed the overdose in his own speech, too, saying, “I almost died from an overdose in 2007, which kind of sucked. Hailie, plug your ears: because drugs were f*cking delicious, and I thought we had a good thing going, man, but I had to go and f*ck it all up and take too many. G*ddamn. OK Hailie.”

Read a full transcript of Dre’s speech below (via The Detroit News) and find Eminem’s full speech here.

“OK, let me get serious.

Over 20 years ago, Jimmy Iovine, who is also one of tonight’s inductees and one of my best friends, played a demo tape for me from a guy who called himself Eminem. The first thing I said when I heard it was, ‘What the f*ck did he just say?’ I loved it so much that I couldn’t stop listening to it.

A few days later, Jimmy called me and said, ‘You know he’s a white guy, right?” F*cked me up! The last thing I was thinking about when I was listening was that he was white. It never even crossed my mind. Looking back, I don’t know why it didn’t cross my mind. He certainly didn’t sound like a Black rapper, especially because of what he was saying. I guess it was my ignorance at the time, thinking that if you’re a really good rapper, you must be Black.

Not too long after that, we met for the first time. We hit it off and the next thing you know, we’re at my house working. The first time I put on a beat, he gets on the mic and says, ‘Hi, my name is.’ Boom! And that was the beginning of what became an amazing creative collaboration.

Then came the backlash. ‘Look at him, Dre! He has blue eyes! You can’t sign him!’ There was a massive amount of resistance from my own team and from a lot of people around me: people who had never even heard the music, but didn’t want me to sign him or work with him simply because he was white.

While everyone else around me had their doubts, I knew that his gift was undeniable. His raw, dark, and humorous lyrics coupled with an impeccable cadence stood out from anything I had ever heard before, and he was hungry. Both of us were. We were two artists in do-or-die situations: he was desperate to find a way to feed his family and I was searching for something to sink my teeth into creatively. Each of us was exactly what the other needed and I was willing to bet my entire career on it.

My rebuttal to those naysayers went something like this: ‘He’s going to be the biggest-selling artist on our label.’ Little did I know he was going to be one of the best-selling music artists of all time.

From the moment he introduced himself to the world with The Slim Shady LP, he skyrocketed to the top of the charts and stayed there for 100 weeks while earning a Grammy for Best Rap Album and Best Rap Solo Performance.

Can you believe after promoting violence to little children and killing his daughter’s mother, this guy still had more sh*t to get off his chest?

Well, then The Marshall Mathers LP dropped. On that album alone, his alter ego, Slim Shady, tied me up in his basement, had sex with his mother, and killed his daughter’s mother, again, while proceeding to offend just about every special interest group we have. It clearly struck a collective chord and became one of the fastest selling solo albums in United States history.

Em would go on to overdose, relapse, and recover not only on his albums, but also in real life. Let me tell you something: this guy goes through a lot of sh*t just to get a concept for a song.

But here is Em’s genius, with his incredible wit and wild imagination: he was able to hold up a mirror to White America while also expressing the pain of living through poverty in dysfunctional families devoid of hope. Eminem brought hip-hop to middle America and offered kids who looked like him a way to connect to it.

Hip-hop wasn’t just for Black kids in desperate inner-city circumstances anymore. People of every stripe could have the art form speak to their struggles, too.

Eminem wasn’t just the underdog who broke through the glass ceiling of hip-hop. He shattered it: 220 million albums sold, 13 No. 1 albums, 10 of which all consecutively debuted at No. 1, making him the first artist ever to achieve this. Grammy Awards, an Emmy, and an Oscar. Best-selling music artist of the 2000s. Best-selling hip-hop artist ever. And he doesn’t care about any of that. I care about it more than he does.

What’s most important to him is that he’s earned the respect of his peers as one of the best to ever do it.

Turns out this unassuming white guy with blue eyes from Detroit went from being repeatedly turned down to turning everything we thought we knew about hip-hop on its head while forcing us to confront our own biases, growing not only the genre, but all of us right along with it.

It is my great honor to induct my friend, Eminem, into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.”

There was some sad news this weekend: Aaron Carter, best known for fun singles like 2001’s “That’s How I Beat Shaq” and his 2000 gold-certified hit “Aaron’s Party (Come Get It),” died at 34 years old. This was tough for many to swallow, but especially for Backstreet Boys, of which Aaron’s brother Nick Carter is a member. On Sunday (November 6), the group put on a concert in London and emotionally paid tribute to Aaron.

At the O2 Arena, the group performed 2019 single “No Place” and dedicated it to Aaron as a photo tribute played on screens behind them. After the song, Kevin Richardson noted the tune is “very special to us because that song is about family.” He also said, “We’ve been through highs and lows and ups and downs — we thank you for being with the Backstreet family for 29 years, for all the love. Tonight we’ve got a little bit of heavy hearts because we lost one of our family members yesterday. We just wanted to find a moment in our show to recognize him.”

As Richardson spoke, Nick was clearly emotional and seemingly holding back tears. Nick’s bandmates also each took a moment to give him a hug.

Check out the moment below.