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8. Review of Eminem
According to the data taken from Abrams 2010, Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born on October 17, 1972, in
St. Joseph, Missouri . He is the only child of
Marshall Bruce Mathers, Jr. born c. 1951 and Deborah R. Debbie Nelson born 1955. Eminem spent much of his formative years living in a largely black
lower-middle-class Detroit neighbourhood. He and Debbie were one of three white households on their block. Eminem was confronted and beaten up by
African-Americans on several occasions. As a child, Eminem developed an interest in storytelling and aspired to
become a comic book artist
before discovering hip hop
. Eminem heard his first rap song, Reckless featuring
Ice-T , at age nine on the
Breakin soundtrack,
which he received as a gift from Debbies half-brother Ronald Ronnie Polkinghorn. At the age of 14, he began rapping with high-school friend Mike
Ruby, the two adopting the names Manix and MM, which soon morphed into Eminem.
He released his first solo album, Infinite, on local Web Entertainment label in 1996. It failed to garner much attention, but the follow-
up, 1998‟s The Slim Shady EP, so impressed super-producer DR.Dre that he signed Eminem to his
interscope imprint, Aftermath. This album had sold out about 300 million copies and won Emenim a Grammy for Best Album Rap. Then on 2000, Eminem
released his album “The Marshall Mathers LP” which debuted at the top of the chart in 2000 with close to 1.7 million copies sold its first week in stores. Then on
2002 he also released the third album “The Eminem Show”, which is sold over a
21 million in its first week of release and went on to sell over 10 million copies. This
made Eminem became the only artist in history with two diamond certified albums. Eminem got so many awards and certificates because of his good career
in music.
B. Theorictical Framework
In this part, the writer discusses the contribution of the theories mentioned in this chapter in order to answer the research problems in previous chapter. There
are two research problems to be analysed in this research. The first point concerns on
the metaphor on Eminem‟s selected rap song lyrics. While the second points concern on the function of connotation meaning by each metaphor found in
Eminem‟s selected rap song lyrics. Further, in order to analyze the first research problem, the writer applies
the formalist approach, theory of metaphor and theory of metaphor types based on grammatical construction. The writer is going to find the me
taphor in Eminem‟s song lyrics. The answer can be seen through formalist approach. By analyzing the
text, the writer can find out the metaphor which is used in the song lyrics. Then, after finding the metaphor, the theory of metaphor and theory of metaphor types
are applied. In theory of metaphor, Mooij gives explanation about the process of identifying a metaphor clearly. Then in theory of metaphor types, Myers and Sims
classify metaphor types into five types such as: noun metaphor, verb metaphor, preposition metaphor, adjectival metaphor and adverbial metaphor.