This technique is hardly unique to Eminem, and Dylan was hardly the first to use internal rhyme in his songs, and it's sad to see that someone could truly believe, firstly that Dylan 'unwittingly' 'stumbled across' the technique, and secondly that this is any kind of innovation.

Dylan's song was, as Dylan himself freely admits, an homage to the style of 'talking blues', and especially to the song Too Much Monkey Business by Chuck Berry, the lyrics to which, like "Running to and fro hard working with the mail/never fail with the mail, here comes a rotten bill" and "Salesman talking to me trying to run me up the creek/Say you can buy it come on try it you can pay me next week", bear more than a passing resemblance to the work of some of the more intelligent rappers (and unlike Eminem's lyrics actually talk about something).

Talking blues lyrics were a huge influence on the development of hip hop, especially through the influence of late-60s performers such as The Last Poets, and the style was mainstream enough, even including the use of internal rhyme, that as well-known a performer as John Lennon was doing proto-rap using this technique in Give Peace A Chance - "Ev'rybody's talking about ministers, sinister, Banisters and canisters, bishops, fishops, Rabbis, and Pop eyes, Bye, bye, bye byes " and "Revoluton, evolution, masturbation,Flagellation, regulation, integrations, Meditations, United Nations, Congratulations " seem, to my mind, to be at least as clever in use of rhyme as anything listed in the above writeup.

I am deliberately using the most mainstream examples I can find here of the talking blues style that was a precursor to rap in order to show that this is not unique even in the genre (I don't know enough about hip-hop itself to cite examples from that, but I would be very surprised if no rappers prior to Mr Mathers had used a technique that was so widespread in music that influenced them). For other examples though, see Bo Diddley, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, The Last Poets... this is not a rare thing.

But this style is not confined by any means to talking blues, and in fact has found its widest expression in the work of Broadway lyricists like Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein III and Cole Porter. A lyric like My Funny Valentine, You're The Tops or Bewitched is far subtler in its use of internal rhyme than anything by Eminem - lines like "I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering, whimpering child again" or "At words poetic I'm so pathetic but on the other hand babe you shine/And I feel after every line/A chill divine down my spine/Now gifted humans like Vincent Youmans might think that your song is bad/But I've got a notion to second the motion/And this is what I'm going to add" were written in the 1930s, a full 60 years before Marshall Mathers started his no doubt excellent career.

Of course, there is a difference between the lyrics cited in this writeup, and those cited above, in that the lyrics in this writeup actually do rhyme. Of the lyrics cited above, the line from I'm Back contains one true rhyme ("Rhyme" and "time") and two false rhymes. The line from The Real Slim Shady actually has a fairly clever triple rhyme that Lorenz Hart or Sammy Cahn might have been proud of (cantaloupes/antelopes/can't elope) but other than that is mostly assonance as opposed to real rhyme, and the line from The Way I Am contains no real rhymes whatsoever, not even 'allowable' false rhymes like 'mind' with 'time'. Assonance is not rhyme (and there's very little in the line quoted that even counts as assonance), and anyone could write a lyric if merely sharing one consonant counts as a rhyme.

This writeup may appear nit-picky, but the fact is this node as it stands is an insult to generations of craftsmen, people who sweated to write the best lyric they were capable of, not to mention centuries of poets (ever hear of Samuel Coleridge? John Donne?). If Eminem can sincerely be lauded as an innovator for using internal rhyme (or more commonly internal assonance), then I'm going to claim that I invented the idea of doing a 12-bar blues in E. I believe the Beatles may once have accidentally stumbled across this progression, but since nobody in the top 40 this week is doing it, nobody else could ever have done that before, could they?

amnesiac points out that the w/u above is meant as a joke. I really should read these things twice before posting responses, shouldn't I? Still, I have seen people take the attitude above seriously...