Trivia

• Although technically a skit, the track does not carry the “Skit” subtitle; some digital editions have since corrected this.

Words from Eminem and Steve Berman

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Steve Berman is the head of Marketing and Sales at Interscope. He’s the guy that gets in contact with all the stores to order [your record] as soon as your record is done. Steve Berman was in the “Dre Day” video and he was playing Scary Heller in a cameo where he was talking to Sleazy-E when Dre and Eazy had their beef. But that was Steve’s cameo in that video. But you gotta know Steve ’cause he’s a character just by the way he talks. So we thought of a skit where we have Steve coming down on me like everyone else does. So we put it together on the album, then we thought it would be perfect to have his ass in the video for “The Way I Am”.

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I remember when [Paul Rosenberg] first came to me, [he] explained [the skit] to me. [They] wanted it to feel real. [They] wanted me to be that character that I became on those records. At the time, Violet Brown was the buyer for Warehouse Records. They were the centre of the target of hip-hop music in the world — primarily West Coast were the stores — but if it broke out of the West Coast, they were the tastemakers. It was a big chain at the time, but if you got it right there, then it became a domino effect. So the more that we got into going back-and-forth on that, the easier it became to frame it the way that Marshall and [Paul] saw the outcome to be.