My name is Holly Boson. I’m a Millennial writer, musician and pop critic from England. This is a blog about Eminem that I plan to collect into a book.

Why am I writing about Eminem? The irrelevant backstory is that I got switched onto him during the lockdown and he changed my life. The big reason is, if I don’t, I’ll just have to think about him forever and never get any work done. The other big reason is that I don’t know if anyone else normal is going to write anything about him until after he dies. My goal is pretty much to write about Eminem’s music in such a way that it assumes he’s someone with a high level of focus and control, whose decisions are purposeful and done as part of an artistic project, a thing that is obvious to me but that has been absent from most criticism about him, both the new stuff that calls him a word-drunk washout, and the old stuff that calls him a mentally ill homophobe.

I don’t plan on arguing about where in the Top 5 he belongs because I don’t care. If I’m writing so much shit about one guy he becomes my defacto favourite, but I love lots of other rappers and sometimes think they can do certain things better than he can (though that happens not as often as people pretend like it does, if we’re being honest). I think beyond the level of having your own personal lists, ranking is an insane way to look at art and responsible for everything I hate about being a music fan. If such a thing as a single GOAT did exist, I think it would have to be Lil Wayne, a genius rapper who completely reshaped the whole genre around him at a time when hip-hop was so large that it was unthinkable to think of a figure having that level of influence. But I do think Eminem is a far, far better pop star than Lil Wayne; in fact, I think he’s the best pop star to get big during my lifetime. (Yeah, Taylor, suck it.)

Oh, and for those of you who want my identity markers so you can decide if I’m a good person or not, I am a queer disabled white working class woman. My day job is making chicken sandwiches for minimum wage, I have a pop music production degree from Leeds College of Music which I will never pay the loans back on as long as I live, and I have been living in a constant state of anger ever since some prick threw my coat and bag in the bin in Year 7. My non-musical hobbies include taking medication, playing video games and getting into fights on the internet.