Brain Damage - Intellectual

Em actually puts a twist on the his real life story, seeing as he was attending Dort Elementary in Roseville, Michigan at the time (a school he only spent four months attending); Making it out to sound like he was in middle school instead.

The change was most likely made due to the simple fact that “Junior High” rhymes well with “afternoon you die.”

Statistically, it’s widely considered that young men who grew up in poverty without their fathers end up not making a significant difference in their life for themselves.

They usually turn to gang culture, criminal activity, or even violence. This is due to the effects of growing up in instability, broken homes, & having a community that doesn’t foster a good environment for their growth.

However, as many men have done so, Eminem has disproven this statistic by becoming one of the BEST rappers ever to have lived. His first album which this song is on has an astonishing record of over 14 million copies as of last year.

His albums that would follow would sell even more, solidifying him as a highly successful entertainer in general. By making the choice to focus on his passions, he ended up working with Dr. Dre, who both saved AND changed his life. He helped changed the lives of other rappers such as 50 Cent. He’s worked with so many celebrities in the music industry.

So the last portion “but everywhere I go, they keep playin’ my song.” Is true.

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This is the moment in the story where you realize most of what he was saying was just hyperbole or completely made up. However just because his principal didn’t actually beat him up and his mom didn’t actually knock his brain out of his head, it doesn’t mean they didn’t make his life difficult for him.

Shady’s behavior was apparently written off as a result of sniffing glue and such. This song shows however that it was more of a result of bullying and being treated poorly.

It could also refer to Debbie Mathers' pregnancy. Em’s mother Debbie did drugs while he was in the womb, and this may be an allusion to him being born already under the influence/addicted.

Ornery means: bad-tempered or difficult to deal with.

He feels this way all the time due to the disrespect he gets on a consistent basis.

It’s easy to miss the fact that Em has rhymed (or come very close to rhyming) the supposedly unrhymable word “orange” with “door hinge”, “four inch”, “storage”, and “foreign”. He also fits “juice” into the rhyme scheme (loose, screws, booth, tools).

The fact that rhyming “orange juice” with 4 words is only a sidenote here is a testament to his storytelling abilities. Em admits that he enjoys employing technical devices like this in an interview.

A callback to the beginning of the song where Eminem likens himself to Frankenstein’s monster, inferring he’s the product of the bullying and abuse he was subjected to by his Bailey and his mother, respectively.

Eminem grew up in the predominately black inner city of Detroit, so he was often picked on specifically because he was white (“honky” is a racial slur against white people).

As detailed in a 1982 lawsuit filed by Eminem’s mother on behalf of her son, D'Angelo Bailey assaulted Marshall on numerous occasions. The official document states that young Marshall had suffered multiple aliments as a direct result of the bullying, including but not limited to:

Bruising
Multiple wounds
Lacerations
Nausea
Abnormal sleepiness
Anti-social behavior
Nightmares
Cerebral concussions
Loss of consciousness

Eminem also spoke about Bailey in a Rolling Stone interview:

Motherfucker used to beat the shit out of me,“ Eminem says. "I was in fourth grade and he was in sixth. Everything in the song is true: One day he came in the bathroom, I was pissing, and he beat the shit out of me. Pissed all over myself.

Eminem’s daughter was born December 25, 1995, when Em was 23, but Em had stress in his life well before having a child.

Ever since Tupac dropped “Dear Mama”, bad mouthing your mother has pretty much become taboo in the rap game. But as much as Em respects Tupac, they differ when it comes to this topic because Em isn’t afraid to use one of the most insulting words you can say to a female to describe his mother.

And this isn’t even the worse thing he (lyrically) does to his mother! On the next album, he rapes her.

Despite the sweaty palms, he makes no mention of weak knees, heavy arms, or vomit on the sweater, so he can’t be that nervous.

Describing what he looked like as a young kid

Marshall wanted nothing to do with this bully, so he faked an illness in order to be sent home early. Appendicitis is actually a pretty good choice since the appendix is located inside your body, but he reveals that he doesn’t know anything about the injury when he says “they could burst”; there is only one appendix.

Via Rolling Stone:

During recess one winter, Em taunted a smallish friend of Bailey’s. “D'Angelo Bailey — no one called him D'Angelo — came running from across the yard and hit me so hard into this snowbank that I blacked out.” Em was sent home, his ear started bleeding, and he was taken to the hospital.

And via documents obtained by The Smoking Gun (emphasis ours), this same incident resulted in “intermittent loss of vision in the right eye and intermittent loss of hearing, according to Eminem’s mother.

Eminem’s mother, Debbie Mathers, told RS that her son had a cerebral hemorrhage and was in and out of consciousness for five days. Em added:

“I remember waking up and saying, ‘I can spell elephant.’”

Bailey corroborated Em’s recollection of the incident in the same Rolling Stone feature:

“Yeah, we flipped him right on his head at recess. When we didn’t see him moving, we took off running. We lied and said he slipped on the ice.”

Eminem was bullied a lot during his childhood. deAngelo Bailey was one of the bullies that made his life miserable. Along with a group of kids at Dort Elementary School, Bailey used to terrorize the young Eminem.

The “eighth grader” detail may be a little off, possibly just to better fit the rhyme scheme. Em told Rolling Stone that “Brain Damage” was based on true events:

Motherfucker used to beat the shit out of me. I was in fourth grade and he was in sixth… deAngelo Bailey — I’ll never forget that kid.

Marshall’s mother, Debbie Mathers, filed a lawsuit against the school district in 1982 for allowing her son to be abused by Bailey and other bullies. Later in 2003, Bailey filed a lawsuit against Eminem for defamation, but the case was dismissed by the judge, who, to better explain her ruling, wrote a 10-stanza rap at the end of her paper.

One common defense mechanism animals use in order to avoid being attacked and/or harassed is known as apparent death, aka “playing dead”. The behavior isn’t as commonly used by humans, but in this situation, Marshall actually felt as if he needed to use this technique now that both D'Angelo Bailey and the principal alike wouldn’t stop ganging up on him. After all, a big motivation for bullies to continue targeting their victim(s) despite the consequences is the simple fact that they’re getting a reaction out of it. The idea behind “playing dead” is that you eliminate the reaction to the attacks and/or harassment and pretend that you’ve already surrendered so that the fun of harassment is gone. Although it took a painstaking five minutes, it was totally worth it to Marshall as they finally stopped and he would subsequently plot his revenge in the next lines of the verse.

On a side note, not receiving oxygen for a long time to your brain can also cause severe, sometimes irreversible brain damage. In order to avoid being beat further, Em holds his breath, which consequently leads to even more brain damage.

Up to now, it looks like the teacher just didn’t want to get fooled by a student trying to skip. But this reveals that everyone is against him, from the school bullies to the teachers. Sorry to break it to you Em, but it gets worse. He blames this him-against-everyone treatment growing up as to why he is eager to lash out at everyone.

In real life, “[Eminem’s] mother actually sued the local school board for failing to sufficiently protect her child” in 1982.

By Eminem’s standards, this verse has been pretty low key as far as swears go. But then he breaks out the c-word and f-word back-to-back once he goes back home. Even when he was getting beat up at school he didn’t swear as much as he did to his mom at home.

Also, note how many of the words in this line ends with the letter K: fuck, took, stuck, back. This could be seen as an example of consonance.

This is the first line where it is clear that he is just in “Slim Shady story-telling” mode, and isn’t trying to depict real events.

Lines like this were why D'Angelo Bailey’s defamation lawsuit was dropped. He claimed that the song falsely portrayed him. But the judge’s ruling was:

The lyrics are stories no one would take as fact.
They’re an exaggeration of a childish act. Any reasonable person could clearly see that the lyrics could only be hyperbole.

“Or stole my seat in the lunchroom and drank my chocolate milk Every time you tipped my tray and it dropped and spilt I’m gettin’ you back, bully, now once and for good I cocked the broomstick back and swung hard as I could And beat him over the head with it ’til I broke the wood Knocked him down, stood on his chest with one foot Made it home later that same day”

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In this line, Eminem is stating the terrible things his bully, D'Angelo Bailey, did to Em as a kid. This would spark a lot of attention on social media eventually making it’s way onto court when Bailey later tried to sue him for a million dollars.

Em also uses clever lyricism as he utilizes the harmful things he went through and turns it into rhymes, such as milk, spilled, good, could, wood, foot, day, and gray.

A lot of the symptoms of brain damage are similar to those of drugs. Em wasn’t kidding when he said everyone used to think he was on drugs

Eminem went into a coma when he was young after getting hit by a bully, so this was the perfect way to start the song. Here we can hear the conversation in the operating room.

Eminem is a huge fan of Redman and he has cited Reggie as an influence before. This doctor scene is reminiscent of Redman’s “Time 4 Sum Aksion” video in which doctors try to medically help the deranged Brick City native.

The “results” that Em is talking about is the birth of Slim Shady and Em’s constant anger. The cause was the constant bullying.

1000 volts is the electrical value used to electro-shock people back to life. It is true that he was beat up and put in a coma – it isn’t just a Slim Shady tale of exaggeration. But he does take an actual story from life experiences and spins it in a creative way to make it seem worse.

The “neck with bolts” is a reference to Boris Karloff’s portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster in the 1931 film Frankenstein (a creature who was also “brought to life” with the use of electricity):