"Kim" is a song by American rapper Eminem which appears on his 2000 album The Marshall Mathers LP. The song reflects intense anger and hatred toward his then-wife Kim Mathers and features Eminem imitating her voice, and ends with him killing Kim and later putting her in the trunk of his car. "Kim" was the first song Eminem recorded for the album, shortly after finishing work on The Slim Shady LP in late 1998. He wrote it, along with "'97 Bonnie & Clyde", when he and Kim were having marital problems and Kim was preventing him from seeing his daughter Hailie. Despite its controversial graphic content, it is often highlighted as one of Eminem's most memorable songs. On the clean version of The MarshallMathers LP, this song is replaced by a clean version of "The Kids".
Background
Since meeting in 1989, Eminem and Kimberly Anne "Kim" Scott have had an on-and-off relationship. They had a daughter, Hailie Jade, who was born on Christmas Day, 1995. The couple married in 1999 and divorced in 2001, later re-married in 2006 and divorced that same year. "Kim" is the third song by Eminem about Kim, the first being "Searchin" from his debut albumInfinite and the second being "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" from the album The Slim Shady LP. An instrumental version of the song is played at the start of the music video of "The Way I Am". According to the book Angry Blonde, "Kim" was the first song that Eminem wrote for the Marshall Mathers LP album. He and Kim were not in a relationship at the time when he wrote the song. He was inspired to write a "love song" while out watching a movie. At the time, he was feeling the frustration of breaking up and having a daughter with Kim. He said he really wanted to "pour heart out, but yet, also wanted to scream". When he started writing the song, he thought about tying it into "'97 Bonnie & Clyde", and decided to make "Kim" a prequel to that song. He did the vocals for "Kim" in one take. The mood he wanted to capture was that of an argument that he and she would have had. When Eminem and Kim started talking again, he played this song to her and asked her to tell him what she thought about it. Eminem also said to her: "I know this is a fucked-up song, but it shows how much I care about you. To even think about you this much. To even put you on a song like this". "Kim" was also the only track on the album that Eminem had nothing to do with in terms of production. Eminem is both emotionally unstable and aggressive throughout the entire song, as the song portrays him murdering Kim. The song begins with Eminem in Kim's home. Eminem is talking calmly to their daughter, who is sleeping, and subsequently starts to shout verbal abuse at Kim, which remains a common element throughout the entire song. Eminem sings "So long, bitch you did me so wrong/I don't want to go on living in this world without you" in the hook two times. In the second verse, the setting changes to Eminem and Kim in a car. During the verse, he shouts "There's a four year old little boy laying dead with a slit throat in your living room!". In the album version of the song, the words "four" and "boy" are censored, because of the Columbine High School massacre and its reference to child murder. An uncensored, rare version of "Kim" was leaked onto the Internet, before the massacre and album release, which was titled "Bitch So Wrong", which doesn't censor the words "four" and "boy", but has bad quality and is slightly different from the album version: It doesn't have the intro and outro, smashes are not heard when he says "This couch, this TV, this whole house is mine", the truck's horn is different when he says "What the fuck's this guy's problem on the side of me?!", and rustling is not heard in the woods when Kim is running away from Eminem. The chorus of the uncensored version is also different from the album version, with the album version echoing Eminem's voice, the choruses sound different each time in the uncensored version, but the last chorus is similar to the choruses of the album version. The song continues with Eminem driving frantically through traffic, and stopping in the woods, where Kim tries to run away, but fails. The final verse ends with Eminem slitting Kim's throat, while screaming "Bleed, bitch! Bleed!". The song then ends in a prolonged outro during which the listener can hear a skit called "Mommy", which was released on Slim Shady EP, which was placed before "Just the Two of Us". The skit includes sounds of a dead body being dragged through the grass and thrown into the trunk of a car. This same skit is played as the beginning of "'97 Bonnie & Clyde", indicating the association between the two songs and the direct chronology of events.
Critical reception
The Rolling Stone album review of The Marshall Mathers LP stated that: While Entertainment Weekly wrote that: In 2001, Robert Christgau told Rolling Stone that songs like "Kim" and Ghostface Killah's "Wildflower" employ sexist content in an artful way that offers insight into its pathology, citing them as exceptions to the usual "reflexive and violent sexism" popularized by rap and heavy metal: "he nonsense that 'Kim' advocates the murder of wives who cheat – what an absurdity, and what a disgusting absurdity on the part of people who don't give Eminem credit for being more intelligent than they are, quite frankly." In 2013 Complex ranked "Kim" at #21 on their list of the 25 most violent rap songs of all time and at #4 on their list of the 35 most depressing rap songs.
