GettySince the 1990s, when Eminem doggedly worked his way onto the circuit, his music has inspired generations.
Among them was a young Ed Sheeran, growing up in Suffolk and struggling to come to terms with his stammer, a million miles away from Detroit where Marshall Mathers was spitting pristine bars.
But Sheeran has opened up about how Eminem’s music helped him through his formative years which were plagued with self-doubt and teen insecurities.
GettySheeran spoke candidly about bullies who taunted him for his ‘weird’ ways, his ginger hair, his NHS prescription glasses and his stutter.
In a speech given for the American Institute of Stuttering in 2015, Sheeran said:
I was a very, very weird child. I had a port-wine stain birthmark on my face that I got lasered off when I was very young. One day, they forgot to put the anaesthetic on, and ever since then, I had a stutter.
My dad bought me the Marshall Mathers LP when I was 9-years-old, not knowing what was on it… And let me listen to it. I learned every word of it back to front. It helped me get rid of my stutter.
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Sheeran went on to say: “Stuttering is not a thing you should be worried about at all and even if you have quirks and weirdness you shouldn’t be worried about that either.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, he added:
Just be yourself because there’s no one in the world that can be a better you than you and if you try to be the cool kid from class, you’ll end up being very boring.
Sheeran is unequivocally the most successful British artist in the charts at the moment, and is heading for total world domination, so maybe we’d all do well to dig out the Eminem back catalogue for a little musical motivation.
Or maybe it’s as simple as taking a leaf out of Sheeran’s book and embracing our quirks.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.