It drives me crazy to see anyone say they don't like rap/hip-hop, but they do like Eminem. He's everything that's wrong with hiphop. So here it is, a thread to share why you can't stand Slim Shady. For me, as a Hoosier (Indiana native), it goes all the way back to when he first got his contract. See, we had a contender, too. His name is Russ Johnson, AKA Rusty Reddenbacher, AKA Choc Surreal. He got a regional name as a singer with the amazing band Birdmen of Alcatraz. Later, after they broke up, he left rock and went hiphop full-time with the Mudkids. Check em out online, if you can. We're quite proud of him, and always have been. He's the kind of MC that is becoming all too rare in hiphop these days.. the kind that LIKES the live show. He's not trying to make bank off an album, he's out there doing shows, all the time. When he says he's freestyling, it is. Other people come to a battle, and flip the same rhymes right off their album, but Russ can take any topic from the crowd, and just start flowing. It's great. He's a positive MC; he'll talk a little trash, but it IS a battle. He doesn't get half as dirty as most of the MCs out there. He's definitely the last MC to make race an issue. Anyway, so once upon a time, as Snoop Dogg's popularity was slipping, Dr Dre went looking for some new talent. He held a competition, and announced that the winner would get a record deal with him. Enimem was there. So was Rusty. Round after round, the two advanced. In the end, it was just the two of them, and even then, it was a tie. Eminem finally won in the tiebreaker round. You know what he said to my man Russ? "Now you get to go back to Naptown and tell everybody you got beat by a honkie." Tsk tsk tsk.. Right off the bat, making it racial, like it's inherently so much easier for a black man to come up with good rhymes? Talking to Russ as if he cared that Eminem was white? I have many many more issues with Eminem, but I think that incident really showed what kind of person he is.. that he'll ignore history; that he was NOT the first publicly recognized GOOD white rapper (see: Beastie Boys, House of Pain) and create issues that weren't there, in order to try to build his OWN name up. Discuss.