Battling is and will certainly remain one of Eminem’s biggest passions. You can feel a certain nostalgy in his words when he recalls Rap Olympics in 1997:
“I remember right as I started peaking, before I got signed, like getting a name, doing the [1997] Rap Olympics-that was the fun of it. The battling, the competition, the going back and forth with friends and new people I’d meet and new M.C.’s and trading rhymes with each other.”
Being myself engaged in some amateurish freestyle battles, I perfectly know that the greatest beauty of emceeing is in matching words and similar syllables and playing with them. Also, using words as strong weapons in order to make your adversary look weak or ridiculous will reveal your hidden power as an emcee.
The beauty of rapping mainly lies in the beauty of rhyming: words are like clay that you will shape the way you want to. Once your words are shaped, you are ready to disarm your enemy.
The flame Marshall felt for rhyming at the time he wrote Infinite is still present: his most powerful songs like Mosh reflect his impressing gift in handling the English language.
Paul Rosenberg summarizes the way I feel about Eminem’s sophisticated rhyming style:
« When I used to get these songs from him, the thing I really loved and knew people were going to love about him was that he would write a song and you would say, “I can’t wait to see what he’s going to say next.” Like two seconds later-“Oh my God, did he just say that?” I would just hang on every word. That, combined with the amount of syllables he would rhyme in conjunction with each other, and carry it over to the next line, it was just crazy. That’s when you really fall in love with him. »
(Paul Rosenberg)
Step into Marshall’s rhyming universe and you will see that Paul Rosenberg’s statements are