Robbed hit of the week 7/4/22 - Eminem's "Stan"...
"Stan" - Eminem
from the album The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #51 (three weeks)
This week's "robbed hit" comes from white-boy rapper Eminem, who scored his first top ten success in the summer of 2000 with "The Real Slim Shady", the lead single from his second album The Marshall Mathers LP. Despite that success, radio and the public wasn't full-on accepting his shenanigans yet, with the follow-up single "The Way I Am" stalling down at #58 on Billboard magazine's pop Hot 100 chart, though it did rise to #26 on their R&B Singles list. For the third official release from the album, Eminem put out his darkest and most nuanced song to date, "Stan". The record uses as a musical backdrop and its full chorus the song "Thank You" by at-the-time obscure British singer Dido (Armstrong), which originally was on the soundtrack to the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors. To Dido's haunting vocals Eminem adds a story about an obsessed fan that writes him letters, coming from that guy's perspective as he increasingly gets more and more nuts that he hasn't had a response. Things come to a head where he takes his girlfriend (isn't it the way that these guys always find someone to love them) and commits murder-suicide, only to have the coda bring Eminem himself answering one of the letters apparently too late. It's a very real and touchy subject for the guy who made a career for himself being the vulgar bully clown, and I think radio just wasn't ready for such an expose', even in its brutally censored version. Nevertheless, the record became one of the rapper's keystone works and even coined a term used to this day. In the music video, Devon Sawa plays the obsessed fan, while Dido herself portrays the unlucky pregnant girlfriend. It's uncomfortable to the point of queasiness, but I can't deny its truth..
"Stan" stopped right below the halfway mark on Billboard's Hot 100 chart in December of 2000. The song climbed to #36 on the R&B chart. On the radio, "Stan" went to #9 on the dance-oriented Rhythmic format chart, and #33 on the Mainstream Top-40 list. Internationally, the single did much better, topping the charts in the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Australia, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Romania, Iceland, and making the top ten in Belgium (#2W/#3F), Spain (#3), Sweden (#3), the Netherlands (#3), Norway (#3), Portugal (#3), France (#4), and Croatia (#6). And due to the legacy of the song, Dido herself would eventually have a huge hit with the original "Thank You", which will make the regular "song of the day" series.
(10/10)
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Next up, in concert in London with Dido as well...
Fast forward to another show in 2005...
And lastly, in an in-studio radio gig for the BBC...
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