“Just Don’t Give A Fuck”
When we put Infinite out, it was local. We pressed up under a thousand, initially. We expected we’d be able to get something with it, though. When that didn’t happen, it was really deflating. People were saying that I sounded like AZ and Nas. I was upset. Not to say that I didn’t love AZ and Nas, but for a rapper to be compared to someone, for people to say that you sound like someone else — nobody wants that. I had to go back to the drawing board. So I remember getting mad. I was like, “I’m gonna rap like I don’t care anymore. Fuck it.” I started to write angry songs like “Just Don’t Give a Fuck.”
I brought the material to Proof and the rest of the guys in D-12. Proof had the idea like, “Yo, let’s all rap like ‘fuck the world’.” That’s when I feel like I started rounding a corner. Whenever we’d make D12 songs, it was just staying on that page, that same page. I felt like it was a way to getting everything out that I wanted to say.
Coming out with an alias was part of Proof’s whole idea. He said, “Let’s be in a group called D12, and there will be six of us, and we’ll each have an alias. We’ll each be two different people.” When I started rapping as Shady, as that character, it was a way for me to vent all my frustrations and just blame it on him. If anybody got mad about it, it was him that said it, you know what I’m saying? It was a way for me to be myself and say what I felt. I never wanted to go back to just rapping regular again.
A lot of the aggression came from the Hip Hop Shop days, when you wanted to get a reaction out of people. When you’re behind a microphone in a studio, you’re not going to see someone’s reaction. So I wanted to say the craziest shit, imagining the reaction I would get if someone was sitting by a speaker. At the Hip Hop Shop, you had a pretty good idea of what lines were going to get a reaction or not. You would see it.