Everyone’s scared of something, whether it be heights or spiders. But some fears are a little more niche than others.Celebrity phobias definitely fall into that category. Take the woman with a Michael Jackson phobia as an example of that.
But it turns out that fearing a famous face isn’t reserved for those of us living outside of Hollywood.
Even celebrities like Billie Eilish get a bit jittery around household names.
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The person she’s afraid of? None other than Eminem.
And he had the perfect reaction to hearing about this.
The Birds of a Feather singer first made the revelation during an interview with Noisey a few years back.
She said: “I was scared of Eminem. My whole life. Always. I, dude, terrified. That dude freaked the f**k out of me. Oh my God.”
Whilst nobody would want to end up on the wrong side of the rapper, a phobia might be taking things a little far.
Once word of this fear got to Eminem, he decided to respond in the only way he knew how – by inserting his response into a song.
In ‘Alfred’s Theme’, he rapped: “Homicidal visions when I’m spitting like this / But really I’m just fulfilling my wish of killing rhymes which is really childish / And silly, but I’m really like this, I’m giving nightmares to Billie Eilish.”
It’s not clear whether or not these lyrics helped soothe Eilish’s fears.
Fans online had a lot to say about the whole situation, with many finding it hilarious.
There were some people who even confessed that Eilish scared them more than Eminem.
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One YouTube user said: “All her music videos are creepy as hell and Eminem’s the one giving her nightmares??!!!”
To be fair, we can’t help being scared of certain things.
For example, there’s people who are terrified of the ocean. Thalassophobia affects approximately nine percent of all adults, and can severely impact some people’s quality of life.
There’s also chromophobia, which is the fear of colours.
One man opened up on TikTok about his experiences with the fear, which has forced him to live in a bedroom completely deprived of colour.
His colour-lacking room features plain white bedding, white furniture and even black-and-white polaroid photos stuck up on the wall. His designer black water bottle sits on his desk alongside a white AirPods case, a black charging stand and various black and white accessories.
Here’s hoping that Eilish can quash her fears of Slim Shady. Maybe a collab would be good motivation?
Eminem once lifted the lid of the difference between his three personas which each had their own name.
For a guy who took so much effort to tell us that his name is (what, who, chka-chka) Slim Shady, that’s just one of three ways you know him.
Eminem, Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers are all one and the same, but to the famous rapper, there’s a clear difference between the three as they were each names for one of his personas.
All you have to do is look at his album titles to tell, as he’s made some from the perspective of the different personas.
His second and third albums are titled The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP respectively and each is meant to be from the perspective of a persona.
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His fourth was then titled The Eminem Show, while years later he released The Marshall Mathers LP 2 so there’s no real secret here.
The rapper once told Spin magazine that he had three different personas, one for each of his different names, and they all represented different things about him.
He said: “Slim Shady is the name for my temper or anger. Eminem is just the rapper, Slim Shady is the attitude behind him, and Marshall Mathers is who I am at the end of the day.”
Eminem later told Time that basically he’s a guy called Marshall Mathers who has a rap alter ego called Eminem and that alter ego has an alter ego of his own called Slim Shady.
He pretty much says as much in his song ‘Without Me’ from The Eminem Show, singing: “I’ve created a monster, because nobody wants to see Marshall no more, they want Shady, I’m chopped liver.”
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Major fans of his music will pretty much be able to tell which persona he’s performing as in any of his songs, knowing the difference just from the lyrics and performance.
Over the years of his career, there are some songs he’s not so pleased with, including one track he no longer performs.
The 2002 diss track ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ centres around the rapper’s strained relationship with his mother Debbie, but he later released an apology in the form of song ‘Headlights’ where he explicitly said sorry for the previous track.
“That song I no longer pay at shows and I cringe every time it’s on the radio,” is in the tune along with the lyric ‘at the time I was angry’.
The lyrics also say his mum ‘got it the worst’ and that she’s ‘still beautiful’ to him because she is ‘his mum’.
