This article might be mildly weird but – whenever you experience something even vaguely similar to a “Mandela effect“, then it’s usually worth writing about. This is when you aren’t the only person who vividly remembers something being different to what it actually was. There are tons of possible explanations for this phenomenon, including everything from scientific and/or psychological ones about the brain, to more “out-there” ones about parallel timelines.
Still, the reason why I’m writing about this was because, on a sleep-deprived morning in early April, a “FrankyFade” comedy sketch on Youtube suddenly reminded me of Eminem’s famous 1999 hip-hop song “My Name Is”. The nostalgia was instant!
If you’re younger than about thirty-five, “My Name Is” was an edgy dark comedy song, a mixture of fearless social satire and Eminem’s miserable childhood memories, with the sort of “shock value” humour that “Explicit lyrics” stickers were made for. And, if you were aged between about ten to twenty in 1999, it seemed like one of the coolest and most rebellious songs ever written. It is a valued part of both Millennial and Gen X cultural history.
Naturally, I looked up the official music video on Youtube but – because of the site’s increasingly strict “monetisation” rules – it had been replaced with a “PG-13” censored version which not only muted all of the profanity (and also the word “dope”, in a stoner context, for extra puritan points…), but also changed several other lyrics as well. Nothing unusual so far…
Like any sensible and rational person, I then searched for the uncensored version. And this is where it gets weird. Yes, of course, there were videos claiming to be the uncensored version… but one claimed to be the “Banned” uncensored version. I was intrigued. Was this a version of the song that I hadn’t heard before? No, it had the exact lyrics that I remembered from my youth. And I was ready to just write this video title off as clickbait… but then I read the description, read some comments and did some research. And, yes, this exact version was actually – sort of – banned.
The “banned” version of the song was the original intended version of the song but, in order to get permission to include re-recorded parts of Labi Siffre’s 1975 song “I Got The…” in the background, Siffre insisted that Eminem changed at least two parts of the song. And, under most circumstances, I would criticise this as censorship… but Siffre actually had a valid point.
Even by the standards of the late 1990s – which is saying a lot – at least two of the “shock value” parts of the “banned” version of the song are grossly homophobic. As an LGBT musician, Siffre had every right to demand changes before giving permission. These changes not only helped the song as a whole to age more gracefully, but I also love the fact that – whilst Siffre was principled enough to stand up for himself – he was also seemingly aware enough of the artistic/social merit of the rest of the song that he didn’t just refuse permission outright. For all of the many faults of the late 1990s, it was at least a time before modern-style “cancel culture” was a thing.
Technically, according to the Wikipedia page, remembering this version from my youth wasn’t technically a Mandela Effect: “The original uncensored version of the song with the aforementioned offending lyrics is mistakenly included on the compilation The Source Hip Hop Music Awards 1999 and some releases do have the original version intact.” It’s technically possible that one of these versions showed up in the UK during the late 1990s or the 2000s, and was heard by my younger self. My copy of the 1999 UK CD single and the copy of the “The Slim Shady LP” (1999) I later bought in about 2005-7 are long since lost to the mists of time. So, I can’t prove it either way.
But I genuinely thought that this version was the default, ordinary “uncensored” version of the song for most of my life and, whilst this might not technically be a “Mandela Effect”, it certainly felt like one for a while. My memories of this song were different to the vast majority of listeners’ memories of it. And, yes, this isn’t the only Mandela-type experience I’ve had – I was also shocked to read that the “Fruits Of The Loom” logo wasn’t a cornucopia – but it’s always interesting when stuff like this happens.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
