Eminem only cusses to make your mom upset. That’s what he said back in 2000. 13 years later, he promised to not stop till the swear jar is full.

Some time around the release of Recovery, however, fans and critics decided he’s not filling up that swear jar as fast as he used to. Between collaborations with Rihanna and songs about keeping your head up or not being afraid, he’d become inspirational. Reviews talked about his “empathy and humanity”, and the man who’d made a career from writing about women, his own infamy, murderous fantasies, bigotry and doing drugs spawned a whole new set of fans whose opinion of him can be summed up in this tweet, posted days after the release of Recovery:

Eminem raps about life, not just girls, weed, and cars. — TayKimp. (@Taykimp) June 22, 2010

To some fans, it was beyond question that Eminem had softened his image, so when he used a few homophobic slurs on Rap God, they responded with spine-tingling nostalgia: it was as if the rapper who cussed to make your mom and everyone else upset was back.

But did Eminem ever soften up? Did he tone down his vocabulary on Recovery? Did he go crazy again on The Marshall Mathers LP 2? I decided to go through his discography and make a note of every swear word – any word that would make my own mother upset – and see what his swear jar is like (Note: more about what constitutes a swear word at the bottom; these stats include all the words on his albums, including guest verses).

Eminem’s Swear Jar: An Overview

The short answer is no. Taking just his vocabulary into consideration, Eminem neither toned down his language for Recovery nor turned it up for MMLP 2. Here’s how his albums stack up, starting with Infinite at the bottom:

Unsurprisingly, Infinite has the least swearing. In fact, three of the four songs in Eminem’s discography without a single word my mother would tut at are on Infinite (the other is ’97 Bonnie and Clyde off The Slim Shady LP).

More interestingly, as the chart below shows, Eminem cranked up the swearing on Recovery, making it his third most profanity-laden album, after MMLP and The Eminem Show.

When looking at how much swearing there is on each album, per minute, what we find is that Encore and Relapse, with an average of 2.71 swear words per minute (swpm), are nearly as low as Infinite, at 2.37 swpm. This is largely due to the debut’s short run time (37 minutes) and the song Open Mic, which features an impressive 18 uses of the word “fuck”.

“Fuck” and its derivatives are Eminem’s go-to word. Of the 2,036 instances of cursing, 855 (42%) are some form of “fuck”, and most of the other ones are “shit”, “bitch”, or “ass” (something he coincidentally alluded to once).

As you can see, two songs off Recovery (Untitled and Cold Wind Blows), made it to the list on the left, with a swear-count of 37 (11.4 swpm) and 48 (9.6 swpm) respectively.

Interestingly, two songs off Relapse (We Made You and 3am) made the other list. 3am – without a single “fuck” – is of course the song where Slim Shady muses, “I remember the first time I dismembered a family member”. ’97 Bonnie and Clyde, with zero profanities, is possibly the most disturbing song Eminem has written.

Observations

Just Don’t Give a Fuck has the highest number of “fuck”s, at 23 (27% of SSLP‘s total), or 5.75 per minute. In comparison, The Wolf of Wall Street, used it 3.16 times per minute. The album as a whole only uses it 1.45 times a minute.

A high “shit”-count often means a low “fuck”-count. Stan has a ratio of 4:1, Till I Collapse’s final count is 11:2 and Business clocks in at 9:2.

Ass Like That doesn’t have the highest “ass”-count. That honour belongs to Still Don’t Give a Fuck.

The word “fuck” isn’t used in 3 songs on SSLP (My Fault, ’97 Bonnie and Clyde, Bad Meets Evil), 2 songs on Encore (Rain Man, Just Lose It), and 4 songs on Relapse (Medicine Ball, Same Song and Dance, 3am, We Made You).

The word “shit” isn’t used in 21 songs. These include Must be the Ganja and Insane (Relapse), Mosh (Encore) and Brain Damage (SSLP). These last two points don’t include skits.

There is very little correlation between content and swearing. Relapse is tame in comparison to the rest of his albums, with quite a number of verses with no swearing, but is told almost entirely from the perspective of the psychopath Slim Shady. Similarly, most of his homophobic lyrics don’t include a lot of homophobic slurs. He has no trouble using the word “bitch”, though (except on Relapse where he only uses the word 8 times, compared to MMLP‘s 68 or Recovery‘s 33).

So while numbers are fun to look at, they say very little about the albums themselves. Recovery might have ramped up the swearing, but the subject-matter is much more melodramatic. And it gave us that windowpane line.

Note on swearing: What is and what isn’t swearing isn’t very clear cut and definitions vary, so there’s quite a lot of subjectivity here. For the purposes of my list, I started with the five that Eminem mentions in Who Knew, which made the word “ass” unambiguously part of it. Then I included ones used to discriminate against women and homosexuals (however, maybe inconsistently, I didn’t include the word “ho” while I did include “slut” and “whore”). There were a number of words that I included at first that didn’t make the final cut because they were used fewer than 10 times and weren’t representative of his lyrics, and some (e.g. “crap”) I didn’t feel were strong enough to be counted along the others. If anyone is interested, I’ll publish the raw data.