'97 Bonnie & Clyde

Background

The song depicts Eminem disposing of the corpse of his ex-wife, Kim Mathers, in a lake with his infant daughter Hailie. Opening sounds of jingling keys and a car door slamming imply that the body has been placed in the trunk; these same sounds appear at the end of Eminem's later song 'Kim'. Eminem conceived the idea during a period when Kim was preventing him from seeing his daughter. He asked Marilyn Manson to appear on the track, but Manson declined, finding the song 'too misogynistic'.

Uncomfortable explaining the subject to Kim, Eminem told her he was taking Hailie to Chuck E. Cheese's, but instead went to the studio to record Hailie's vocals. When Kim learned he had used their daughter to write a song about killing her, she reacted angrily. Eminem later stated that when Hailie is old enough, he will explain that the song was not to be taken literally, though he admitted that at the time he wanted to do it.

Critical response

AllMusic highlighted the song as a 'notorious track where he imagines killing his wife and then disposing of the body with his baby daughter in tow', noting its connection to Eminem's life struggles. Steve 'Flash' Juon called the remix 'lifeless and oddly out of place among an album full of mostly dope cuts'. Rob Sheffield wrote that 'the wife-killing jokes of "97 Bonnie and Clyde" aren't any funnier than Garth Brooks''. Entertainment Weekly offered a positive opinion, describing it as 'the album's funniest slice of black humor' and a parody of Will Smith's 'Just the Two of Us', with Eminem rapping lines about the mother floating and a boo-boo on her throat.