Eminem’s longtime manager Paul Rosenberg has confirmed that the portmanteau behind the Detroit rapper’s signature song “Stan” was a “happy coincidence”.
Fans have speculated for years over whether the artist born Marshall Mathers, 52, deliberately blended the words “stalker” and “fan” when coming up with the name for the obsessed fan in his 2000 single, “Stan”.
Over the years, the word has become part of the lexicon when describing overzealous or obsessive fans of famous musicians, actors and other celebrities. In 2017, it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, which noted that it could be used as a noun or a verb.
The lyrics to the original song tell of an obsessed fan growing more and more upset that Eminem isn’t responding to his letters, eventually accidentally driving his car off a bridge with his pregnant girlfriend (played by Dido in the music video) tied up in the trunk.
Rosenberg explained the title’s origins while speaking to The Independent alongside Emmy-winning director Steven Leckart ahead of the limited release of a new documentary Stans, which he produced with Mathers.
“[Mathers] says that it was coincidental,” he said of the “Stan” portmanteau. “It was just the name that rhymed with ‘fan’, and he just created it based on that. So that was a happy coincidence.”
Rosenberg, 52, signed Mathers in 1997, when the rapper was 24 and had just released his Slim Shady EP. “Stan” was released as the third single from Eminem’s third album, The Marshall Mathers LP. It famously samples Dido’s song “Thank You”, which late producer The 45 King was inspired to use after seeing it featured in the 1998 film Sliding Doors.
“I didn't realise at the time how impactful [‘Stan’] was going to be, and certainly didn't think 25 years later we'd be sitting here talking about a film we made based on the song,” Rosenberg said.
“When I first heard it, I felt like one of the most interesting things about it – especially back then in the pre-internet days, was [thinking that] people would for years question whether this was a real story, or parts of a real story.”
Rosenberg pointed out that it was “jarring” due to the uncertainty over whether “Stan” was inspired by a real-life fan of Mathers: “Was there really a fan like this, and did something like this really happen?”
He continued: “What I didn't think about back then is just the vision that Marshall had at such an early stage of his career to be able to write a story that was so perceptive about fandom – when he was really just sort of still getting started – and to do it in such a fantastically meta way. You know, this is a guy who is a star writing about fandom, but specifically writing about a fan of himself, right? Which was, you know, just so brilliant.”
The Dido sample, which loops the first verse with the lyrics, “But your picture on my wall/ It reminds me that it's not so bad,” apparently reminded Mathers of his own hero worship of artists such as LL Cool J.
“It made him think about him coming up and putting up pictures of his heroes on his wall,” Rosenberg said, “and listening to their music and absorbing the feelings [of] imagining what these people are like and what their lives are like. That's where the inspiration came from. Like, ‘I can't believe that I'm in a position now where people are thinking this about me, because I spent so much time thinking this about others.’”
In the same interview, Rosenberg explained how he and Mathers had been approached on several occasions by producers or studios hoping to make an Eminem documentary.
“Marshall never really wanted to do something that was a standard or traditional ‘look back at my career’-type of documentary – he thinks it’s been done to death, but also feels like that’s something you do when you’re at the end of your career,” he said.
“I just kept thinking about ways to do something unique, that people would enjoy [and that] wasn't traditional. So obviously, throughout the time working with Marshall and being at his shows and being around his fans, we realised that there were a lot of interesting people we had met with unique stories.”
Instead of pointing the camera at Mathers, who still appears in the documentary, the team instead began interviewing superfans, such as Zolt Shady, whom Rosenberg described as “such a unique and interesting guy”. One woman had Eminem’s face tattooed 22 times on her body, while another spent 10 years working in the same diner Mathers once did – in the hope she might one day see him walk in.
“I was more intrigued about [the premise of ‘Stans’] than if it had been the other way, because, I think there is just a glut of [documentaries] out there that are super straightforward,” Leckart said. “There's no risk to them – they’re awesome, I watch them all the time, but as a filmmaker, to get to do something different… yeah, I was very excited.”
Rosenberg said the “most surprising” thing for him in making the documentary was how much Mathers’ fans had connected to him through his music “in so many different ways”.
“I didn't expect it to be quite as heavy and emotional,” he said. “I probably could have anticipated that, but I thought we would get some interesting stories from some interesting people… and it [turned out to be] stories about the impact that his music had on them, in a profound and deep way. I think it made the film have more depth than I anticipated, and that I think the audience is going to expect.”
Stans is launching in cinemas worldwide and exclusively at AMC Theatres in the US for one weekend only from Thursday 7 August.
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