The Meaning Behind Eminem’s Vengeful “Kim”

This past week, The U.S. Sun spotted Eminem‘s ex-wife Kim Mathers running a few errands, the first time photos or video had been captured of her in nearly five years. According to The Sun, Kim is actually back on speaking terms with Em after years of public feuding and is also planning to be in attendance for the upcoming wedding of her and Em’s daughter Hailie.

These developments and newly-formed cordiality for Kim and Em are a far cry from what used to be, as their public marriages and subsequent divorces were front page news decades ago. At the height of this years-long drama came “Kim,” the sixteenth song on Em’s third studio album The Marshall Mathers LP (2000).

In the song, Em raps about a fictional, yet abhorrently violent instance where he threatens Kim’s life for cheating on him. Containing screamed ad-libs and aggressive yelling, Em paints a picture of an enraged version of himself and a petrified Kim, unable to reel in the rapper’s frustration.

When discussing the song in his autobiography Angry Blonde (2000), which came out just months after MMLP, Em said he wrote the song as a prequel to his 1999 track “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” which fictionally depicts him killing Kim and running off with Hailie.

“This little media favorite was actually the first official song that I wrote for the album. I had to complete it back in ’98 when the first album was done,” he said in his autobiography. “I wrote this song when Kim and I weren’t together. We were broken up at the time. This was the end of ’98. I remember I was watching a movie one day that inspired me to write a love song, but I didn’t want to make a corny love song. It had to be some bugged-out shit. Though I don’t remember what movie it was, I do remember feeling the frustration of us breaking up and having a daughter all in the mix. I really wanted to pour my heart out, but yet I wanted to scream. So the same day I went to the flick, I went back to the studio and once again walked into a session with the perfect beat already playing. Surprisingly enough ‘Kim’ was the only track on the album that I had nothing to do with in terms of production. [Mark and Jeff Bass] created that track and they had it already for me in the studio. When I started writing the song I thought that maybe I could tie it into ’97 Bonnie and Clyde.’ So I decided to make it a prequel.

“You never would’ve thought but I played it for her once we started talking. I asked her to tell me what she thought of it. I remember my dumb-ass saying, ‘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 in a song like this.’ I did the vocals in one take. The mood I wanted to capture was that of an argument that me and her would have and judging from the attention the media has given this song, you can see that’s exactly what I did… and then some.”

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“Kim” would end up being mixed by Em’s close friend Dr. Dre. However, when Dre spoke about the song in an interview with Rolling Stone, he said he’d be horrified if he were Kim.

“If I was her, I would have ran when I heard that shit,” he said. “It’s over the top—the whole song is him screaming. It’s good, though. Kim gives him a concept.”

Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for MTV/Paramount Global