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Eminem and Debbie Mathers showed that hip-hop is the genre where men come to terms with their mothers | Thomas Hobbs

Most rappers venerate the single mothers who brought them up – but Eminem shockingly lambasted his. Yet even he couldn’t keep up the enmity for long

Turning his rough and tumble childhood in a Detroit trailer park into a cartoonish soap opera where nothing was off limits, in Eminem’s songs Debbie is frequently depicted as a villainous, Nurse Ratched-esque character, while her alleged drug use was something he regarded as ripe for parody. Some felt Eminem’s attacks were the byproduct of a more extreme, Jerry Springer-fuelled era in pop culture, where boundaries were pushed with reckless abandon from everything from Vince McMahon’s muckier, Attitude-Era wrestling shows to the “lads’ mags” on sale at the supermarket. While the road might be rocky and painful memories are likely to be excavated, rappers (and by extension their fans, who feel “seen” by the lyrics) that immortalise their mothers in music tend to walk away with much lighter shoulders.

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