Question 1

Who is Erinem?

Accepted Answer

Erinem is a rapper, producer, and avid lyricist with a indefatigable enthusiasm for the craft of rhyme, and the art of flow and cadence. An interesting fact that few people know is that Erinem is a member of Mensa. She also has a Master's degree and attended an ivy league graduate school on full Merit Scholarship. But academics is not the world she feels any ties to. Erinem's life is all hip hop, all the time. And literally nothing else.    Erinem is often accused of being a perfectionist (almost to a fault) but her unbridled passion and exuberance for her work is part of what makes her music stand out in the wash of so many mediocre, mainstream songs.   Erinem is a female rapper, and though that is becoming more and more a common place thing in the hiphop world, she is uniquely uninterested in playing into her gender. Erinem strives to come off in such a way that it is almost forgettable that she is a girl. She doesn’t want to be a “great female rapper” but rather, simply, a great rapper. Downplaying her gender was strategic, but also something she naturally does anyway.   Erinem does not want to be known for her appearance, gender, age, race, or any other superficial identifier. She wants to be recognized for her work, her lyricism, her attention to detail and her well honed skill and craft. She wants more than anything to work with her peers, and to participate in the hip hop culture in a way that is humble and contributive.

Question 2

Where is Erinem?

Accepted Answer

Erinem currently lives in Tyler, Texas. Tyler is about an hour and half south east of Dallas. Erinem was born in this small town, and moved back to the house she was born in after living elsewhere her entire adult life.        Born Erin Emily Wheeler, Erinem’s parents moved away from Tyler when she was just a few years old. They had bought a small duplex in a poor part of town as their starter home, and rented it out to tenants when they moved after finding work closer to Dallas.   Erinem grew up in the outskirts of Dallas. She was kicked out of kindergarten for various social issues, and then after a troubling time in grade school, she was once again expelled from middle school in the 8th grade. Her 9th grade year, she was expelled from every school in the district — incredibly, seven different schools in one semester — until finally there was no school that would take her.   Erinem emancipated herself from her parents, legally. She then went on to take her GED and started college classes at the age of 16. Finally hitting her academic stride with the freedom of college, she began to do a little better within the confines of formal education.    Eventually, after facing much opposition with her professors in college, Erinem finally graduated. Her grades were good enough that she was able to get into an Ivy League school, on a merit scholarship. Erinem moved to New York City to attend graduate school there, and lived happily in East Harlem for the better part of 5 years. Although she was hardly having an easy time in school. This much had not changed.    After grad school, she moved back to Tyler, the town of her birth, which had not changed at all since she was an infant. She moved into her parents old duplex, where she would fulfill the role of slum lord in exchange for living rent free in one side of the house.      Erinem moved back to this sleepy, conservative town, with its worn down buildings and one lane roads, because there was simply no other way she could make music full time. How would she be able to, if she had to get a full time job?  It was this conundrum that forced her to leave New York and return back to the home of her birth. She still lives there, where she has built a home studio and continues to make music. She doesn’t know a single other person in town. Which is exactly how she likes it.

Question 3

Artist Name

Accepted Answer

Erinem is often compared to Eminem, because their lyricism is so similar, as well as other stylistic choices they both have in common. While this is a welcomed comparison, Erinem has always written lyrics this way. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she discovered Eminem, first by reading his lyrics and realizing she’d finally found a peer in this industry.    With regard to her artist name, this too, surprisingly, was a bit of a serendipitous coincidence. Born Erin Emily Wheeler, Erinem decided to keep some semblance of her given name as part of her artist name, because she felt like she found her true self in her musical pursuits, so it made sense to keep her real name associated with her artist name, as music felt like the first real thing she’d done before.      The early iterations of her artist name (circa 2012-2014) began with Emcee Erin Emily, which she later shortened to Emcee Erin Em, then to Emcee ErinEm, then to ErinEm, then, finally, in 2018 she changed it to Erinem.   It wasn’t until she saw her name spelled out in all caps that she saw the connection to Eminem’s artist name, which was something she certainly enjoyed about it, but hadn’t purposefully contrived. Though, she often says, had she thought about it earlier, she would’ve absolutely gone for the name which calls to mind the artist who she respects so highly above the rest.    The question over her artist name, with respect to its connection to Eminem, is a question that comes up a lot, so it was decided that some detailing on the origin of Erinem’s artist name should be addressed in this biography.

Question 4

Origin Story

Accepted Answer

Erinem has worked on her craft every single day, 18 hours a day, for the last 9 years. When she first discovered hiphop it was much later in life. She had gotten into an Ivy League graduate school in New York (Sarah Lawrence College) for their highly selective MFA program, and so she left her hometown in Texas and moved to NYC to pursue her masters in Creative Writing, with an emphasis in poetry. She loved rhyming, ever since she was a child and was noticeably obsessed with it. But Erinem quickly found she was not like the others in her poetry program. All of her poems had a rhythm to them that no one else could hear, as if she was writing them to a beat that played only in her head. Sarah Lawrence was mostly wealthy girls, from old money, and Erinem was already finding disapproval because she had never been well off and came from a lowly state school whereas the others had done their four year degrees at other Ivy League schools. It quickly became clear that both the professors and the students had no love for her. The pretentious, rich kid art school was no friend to her, and she was ousted by her peers — but then, this had become common place for Erinem. A familiar refrain replayed again and again throughout her life. She was always just ... a little different ... from everyone else. But this came to a head at Sarah Lawrence. Her professors didn’t like that she rhymed in her poetry, saying it was outmoded, or that it was the crutch of inadequate poets. They didn’t understand what rhythm she would refer to when reading her poems, if not a pentameter or other poetic meter they were familiar with. There is no concept of “flow” in poetry.   Even Erinem didn’t know there was such a thing. She just knew whatever she was doing, it was right, and it had a place in this world — somewhere. Erinem was told by the dean that if she didn’t correct the rift she was causing in the tight knit poetry program, that she would lose her merit scholarship, and may even be expelled. Erinem refused to reform. She couldn’t seem to stop rhyming even when she tried to. It felt almost compulsive, and the rhythm she added to the words was something the other students and teachers had never seen before; there was no precedence for it in poetry, except perhaps in spoken word, which also found her work too unusual to fit in.    Eventually she was expelled from grad school. She quickly got accepted to another prominent school in New York, The New School, but could not find her peers there either. A loner, she was a ghost drifting between classes, the wind completely knocked out of her sails. On the long walk home one day, to her apartment she had moved to in East Harlem, she was reviewing a poem she had written for class, thinking about how certain she was that the way she was writing was valid somehow. She happened to hear a song being loudly blasted from a parked car in her neighborhood. She heard a verse. She heard rhymes that dazzled her, and a rhythm and cadence she recognized as her own. What is this? She thought. She asked the boys who were standing by the car. It was“Look at Me Now” by Lil Wayne, Busta Rhymes and Chris Brown.   The verse she had heard was Busta’s. Erinem was instantly obsessed. She consumed hiphop so avidly from that day on, that she barely managed to graduate from her masters program — though she did graduate, with highest honors. It turned out phoning in her school work was what they had wanted all along from her. It didn’t matter though. She was on a mission. She hadn’t been writing poetry — she had been writing verses. No wonder poetry had felt like such a mute art. It was missing the music, missing the rhythm and the flow, the cadence and the craft of rhyme and lyricism. She made a five year plan - she would find her peers, in hiphop. And she would move back home to Texas, where she could live rent free in a tiny duplex her parents owned but didn’t live at. She would live on one side of the tiny house, in a poor neighborhood, and not work a day job. She would live on a few hundred dollars a month for the next five years and devote herself full time to her music. She learned to produce, mix, master, how to play piano and read sheet music (fluently), how to sample records and make beats. She would learn the history of hiphop and delve deep into the culture. And, she did just that.    But her five year plan — quickly became six.  Then seven.  Eight.    Now, it’s been nine years since she started this journey. Starting at square one. Every year thinking, this will be the year. But never giving up when each year ended the same way it began... with her, living alone in a dirty neighborhood, in a tiny, worn out home, making food stamps stretch, devoting every waking moment to honing her skill set. She spent years just working. Working long days and even longer nights, just trying to make up for years of lost time. But she never lost her drive, or her optimism. This year, then. This year will be the year, is what she would always say when yet another past her by, as she lived in poverty, isolation, and utter oblivion, alone in a town where no one even knew her name. The years Erinem has spent trying to claw her way out of the obscurity of the underground have been desperate and difficult, with so many attempts to gain traction in an industry with shifting values, every scheme and plot she has tried inevitably leads to one dead end after another.    And with all of this considered and no end to this cycle in sight, Erinem maintains that she is still happy; saying that these hard years have been, without question, the best years of her life.

Question 5

Priorities

Accepted Answer

Erinem is a rapper, producer, and avid lyricist with a indefatigable enthusiasm for the craft of rhyme, and the art of flow and cadence. She is often accused of being a perfectionist (almost to a fault) but her unbridled passion and exuberance for her work is part of what makes her music stand out in the wash of so many mediocre, mainstream songs.    But, even as she stands out, it is difficult for any independent artist to be heard over the wash of so many other come-ups, pushing and promoting themselves at the top of their lungs until almost no one is seen or heard over the noise. Erinem lives far away from any hip hop community, and as isolated as she is in general, it is the isolation from her peer group that she struggles with most. She lives in the dirty outskirts of a small East Texas town, in the tiny rundown house she was born in. A town where she never intended to stay, but which she cannot afford to leave.    Erinem has never had much money, but claims she’s never really needed more than she has.  But that doesn’t mean she does not want more. She wants to reach the top more than anything. It just isn’t a pursuit of fortune or fame that drives her to work so hard, and keep trying when even hard work has yet to pay off. No matter how many times she struggled to pay for groceries, she could not be convinced to quit music and get a real job (which is something that her advanced college degrees certainly afford her the opportunity for).    Regardless of how much easier it might be in some ways to get a regular job, start a family, buy a house and start the slow decent towards old age, something about all that just never really appealed to her. She never had any interest in pursuing wealth or chasing the stability one enjoys when they have a full time employment. She isn’t tempted by the normal things life has to offer, or the extraordinary fame and fortune that stardom promises. She is uninterested in both of these prospects.    Erinem has no Plan B, and refuses to consider quitting if she never gets any traction in the music industry.Erinem adamantly claims hard work, a little time, and infinite persistence... is all it really takes. And if her journey so far tells us anything, it’s that she won’t stop until she gets to her peers. And she will likely achieve this improbable goal (if not impossible) feat. Mostly because, it is very hard to dismiss someone who just won’t quit. No matter what. But, the development of Erinem’s career is yet to be seen.   This is Erinem, and she is honored to be a part of this culture... and humbled to be welcomed into a world she finally feels like she belongs to.

Question 6

Peers

Accepted Answer

Erinem is often compared to Eminem, because their lyricism is so similar, as well as other stylistic choices they both have in common. While this is a welcomed comparison, Erinem has always written lyrics this way. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she discovered Eminem, first by reading his lyrics and realizing she’d finally found a peer in this industry.    Erinem only wants one thing, really: To do her work, and to work with her peers. But finding her work — and even more so, finding her peers — proved to be a life-long quest for Erinem. Only when she found hip hop did she find her work, and only once she found the artists who are in some deeply intrinsic way, like she is, did she realize that she knew who her peers were.     Once Erinem had identified where in the industry her peers were - primarily under Interscope in general, and Aftermath/Shady Records specifically, she had complete and utter tunnel vision, a deadlock focus on getting to that corner of the industry as soon as possible. Offered the opportunity to entertain deals with other labels in the past, she had no problem refusing to even consider it. It was always only one goal for her: Find her peers. Once she found them, the goal was even more simple:    Get to them. No matter what.       Erinem is humbly looking for a way in, and wants desperately to be a part of this world where she has finally found those who are like her — who love what she loves, work as she works, and writes as she writes. She is often heard saying, longingly,  “I just want to work with my peers.”