The film's star, Eminem, doesn't appear to have a great deal of range, but he can play himself. Even though the protagonist is named Jimmy Smith, the thoughtful '8 Mile' is a raw version of the rapper's own story.
Where I'm from is like 'Hustle & Flow' versus '8 Mile.' It's that really grimy, box-Chevy, dope-boy, working-class music.
I lost a lot of homeboys growing up, a lot of family, at early ages.
I grew up in Compton: 116th and Wilmington.
I come from where Mike Tyson came from. I come from right across the street from Jay-Z. I didn't have a pond in my backyard. I saw violence.
I rap about Memphis and what a dangerous spot that is.
Yeah, I was a brother on the streets of Compton doing a lot of things most people look down on but it did pay off. Then we started rapping about real stuff that shook up the LAPD and the FBI. But we got our message across big time, and everyone in America started paying attention to the boys in the hood.
We grew up in the Rose Park section of Salt Lake City. It's a good neighborhood but a tough one, on the poor side but proud. Sports are big. You learn to fight.
Growing up in inner-city Glasgow, it sometimes seemed to me money hadn't been invented.
I grew up in the Bronx. The Bronx teaches you to survive. It's like, 'Bring it on!'
As gang members, as young dudes in the streets, especially in L.A., we're the effect of a situation. We didn't wake up and create our own mindstate and our environment; we adapted our survival instincts.
I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood, Paramount, California, outside of L.A., like near Compton, that's where I'm from.
I come from Eastside Buffalo and prison cells. That's the beauty about hip-hop. It just brings everybody together.
I love Baltimore. This city has made me the man that I am.
I grew up in South Central Los Angeles in the '80s, back when it just wasn't a cool scene. But my mother had the foresight to look for a number of projects that would keep us away from the streets.
I remember where I was when I first heard 'Boyz N The Hood' - 126th Street and Normandy, South Central, Los Angeles. I remember that I was on my porch. What they described in that song was so vivid and so clear to me because it was the kind of life I was used to witnessing and partly experiencing in my neighborhood.
Growing up in Harlem, I was always in the parks playing ball.
Red-hot songs were born on the black streets of Baltimore, where I delivered five-gallon cans of kerosene and ten-pound bags of coal.
Chicago is a rough city. It made me raw.
The things I rap about are 100 percent real. But at the same time, I don't rap about those things to tear my city down. I give you the reality of what it is and what I been through and how it is living in those conditions in Gary, Ind.
My parents didn't really understand too much about sport. At that time, we were in a Polish community in the inner city of Chicago, and I was the youngest of a bunch of cousins. Polish families are real big, with cousins and aunts and uncles.
My formative years would be in South Central Los Angeles. It was a really volatile environment, but, I always say, when you're living in the hood, you don't live this life where you're crying every day, downtrodden every day.
Where I grew up - I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights - that's every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don't want your kids to hear growing up.
My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity.
Thinking back to boyhood days, I remember the bright sun on Harlem streets, the easy rhythms of black and brown bodies, the sounds of children streaming in and out of red brick tenements.
