The Real Slim Shady

Premise

• Actress Pamela Anderson's alleged abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, rocker Tommy Lee
• Eminem claims in one line to have murdered Dr. Dre, and that he's locked him in his basement. This was a spin on one of his previous songs, "My Name Is", where Eminem says, "And Dr. Dre said..." then Dre comes on and says, "Slim Shady, you're a basehead."
• Comedian Tom Green's humping of a deceased moose on TV, and his song "Lonely Swedish".
• Rapper Will Smith's brand of commercialized and clean rap music and his VMA acceptance speech where he boasted that he didn't need to curse or kill anybody on his records Eminem first dissed Smith in the music video in Dr. Dre's "Forgot About Dre" when a news reporter asked him questions about the fire he and Dre started and he responded, "Well I was just upstairs listening to my Will Smith CD" in replacement to the middle of Eminem's verse due to the explicit lyrics.
• Eminem mentions Britney Spears
• Christina Aguilera was angered by his claim that she performed oral sex on Fred Durst of the band Limp Bizkit and on Carson Daly, an MTV VJ.
• He also makes fun of the boy band NSYNC when he appears to dance in the video with the "group".. However, Chris Kirkpatrick was unhappy with this, so he called Eminem a "bully", and Eminem attacked him with the song "Without Me".
• He references the Bloodhound Gang's song "The Bad Touch".

Critical reception

Music video

• Two young boys watching the Discovery Channel on television with two rhinoceroses mating, then looking at each other in awe, referring to the 1999 song "The Bad Touch", by Bloodhound Gang.
• Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee chasing each other around a couch and Anderson screaming in front of the camera.
• An obese man in underwear being enslaved by a dominatrix with a paddle.
• A gay marriage is shown and Eminem breaks up the two men about to kiss each other and showing disgust.
• Eminem performing in a private room with all his clones produced from the factory with their heads bobbing to the music.
• Eminem at the Grammy Awards dressed as Britney Spears, along with Fred Durst and Carson Daly pulling a blow-up doll of Christina Aguilera between their seats towards each other angrily until it flies out of the chair.
• A clip from a cartoon of a frog tap-dancing on a turtle can be seen on a TV in the hospital and the viewer laughs at it.
• Eminem working in a fictional fast-food restaurant with an 'Ask Me' patch giving a woman her order and rejecting it because of the onion rings being forgotten, however he gets the onion rings and he spits in them as a form of revenge for her rude treatment of him, and gives the onion rings to the woman to complete her order, which she begins eating as she walks away. The same scene also shows Eminem driving recklessly around in circles in a parking lot in a blue AMC Pacer.

Covers and parodies

• In the UK Queen-musical We Will Rock You the phrase Who is the real Slim Shady appears during an interrogation.
• "The Real Church Lady", a Saturday Night Live parody in "Church Chat" with Dana Carvey
• "The Real Greg Brady", a song written and performed by Barry Williams.
• "The Real Rahim Jaffer", a This Hour Has 22 Minutes parody performed by Rick Mercer and Cathy Jones in 2001 following the incident where one of Canadian Federal MP Rahim Jaffer's aides posed as Jaffer in a radio interview.
• "The Real Sin Savior", by Christian parody band Apologetix
• "The Real Sugar Baby", by Stephanie Beard.
• "Will the Real Slim Shady Please Shut Up", a parody written and performed by a female rapper Emily Ellis, who is frequently confused with Christina Aguilera
• A performance in the UK satirical spoof documentary Brass Eye in the controversial 2001 "Paedogeddon" episode. It features satirist Christopher Morris performing as a rapper, "JLb-8".
• In their song "On Passing Lilac Urine" from the 2001 EP, Editor's Recommendation, Half Man Half Biscuit sing "I'm Slim Shady/I'm the real Slim Shady/the other Slim Shady's gone to play tennis"
• "Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up?", a viral video satire of Mitt Romney, 2012's Republican candidate for President of the United States, his campaign, persona, religious beliefs, gaffes, controversies and public-relations problems. The "rap" featured in this video is constructed almost entirely out of clips of Romney from a wide variety of public speaking engagements and interviews; a number of other politicians, including Barack Obama, fill in the rest.
• "I'm not Omnistrife"/"Nem vagyok Omnistrife", a parody song written and performed by the Hungarian Fekete Dániel posing as Naruto character Hoshigaki Kisame in an animated video

• The song was featured in "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Angry White Boy Polka" on his album Poodle Hat.
• William Shatner performed a spoken word cover of the song during the "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" episode of Futurama prompting Melllvar to exclaim, "He found a way." This is a parody of Shatner's spoken word music album The Transformed Man, as well as his recitation of Elton John's "Rocket Man" at the 1978 Saturn Awards.
• In an episode of Coronation Street, Kirk Sutherland recited the main chorus of the song in order to win the heart of Fiz Brown.
• "The Real Pacers Fans", by Indianapolis, Indiana-based radio station RadioNow 93.1, when the Indiana Pacers were playing the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2000 NBA Finals.
• In the final episode of Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, this was performed by Jerry St Clair impersonating Eminem as part of the Stars In Their Eyes sequence.
• "Seurasaari Rap" featuring Seurasaari Open Air Museum, Helsinki, by Tapio Nurminen. The Finnish-language rap from 2000 deals with the museum, guides, their parties and the tourists.
• ProjectRNL, an Israeli band did a progressive rock cover to this song.
• The song's instrumental was used in The "Drink Wontons" song, a rap song sung in the Nanjing dialect. It became very popular with teenage Nanjingers in 2006 and remains a great example of the so-called Nanjing dialect.

  Awards

Track listing

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Certifications