“I Feel Like This Could Be an Eminem Song”: Bebe Rexha Retells the Night The Monster Was Born

She called the record before the verses were even written. Two new interviews this month fill in the best version yet of how a dropped 19-year-old's demo became a four-week number one.

Bebe Rexha is doing press for her album Dirty Blonde, and the question that follows her into every room is the one Complex asked in a clip that went around this week: tell the story of writing "The Monster." Her answer named the song by its original title, "Monster Under My Bed," and credited the room: her, Jon Bellion, and producers Aalias and Frequency. Asked if she knew it would be a hit: "I knew right away. I knew the night I wrote it."

The Complex clip is short. The fuller telling came days earlier on Angie Martinez's IRL podcast, and it is the best version of this story she has ever put on the record.

Set to start at 9:08, where the Monster story begins. The "this could be an Eminem song" moment lands around 12:04.

A dropped artist, a quote, and a snowstorm

The context she gave Martinez matters. In 2012 Rexha was nineteen, freshly out of a deal that had gone silent on her, calling a label where "no answers" came back, and eventually begging to be released. "So then I got really into like a darker headspace," she said, "and that's when we wrote The Monster, cuz I found a really amazing quote that said, 'We stop looking for the monsters under our beds when we realize they're inside of us.'"

The session was at a studio on 125th Street in Harlem, November 2012. Her memory of leaving it is the detail that makes the story: "I left the studio, it was like 1:00 a.m., I had to go get the ferry cuz the buses stopped running and it started snowing. I was in my big North Face puffer. I can't tell you the high I was on. I was like, wow, we really wrote something special."

And then the prophecy, which she says came mid-session, before the demo even had verses: "I told the producer, I said, I feel like this could be an Eminem song. I really do. I said it out of nowhere." The producer's reply: "B, let's focus. Let's get the verses down."

A year of silence, then an Instagram tracklist

The demo was meant for her own project, and she shopped it around on old-fashioned EPK discs, playing it in label conference rooms. "There were some people that liked it," she told Complex, "but nobody really grasped the idea of it." What she planted in the room eventually traveled the exact route she had predicted: Frequency got it to Riggs Morales, the Shady Records A&R, who sent it to Eminem. Em kept her hook, wrote his verses to it, and had Rihanna sing it, with the beat reworked. "They made it like what it is today," she said. "Changed the beat up and made it really special."

In between: nothing. "For a year I heard nothing. Silence, until he posted the tracklist on his Instagram." That is how the writer of the hook found out her baby had landed on The Marshall Mathers LP 2. Her reaction, by her own telling: "I was like, yeah, I'm gonna finally make some money."

The record, corrected for the record

Since the anniversary retellings tend to inflate or garble the stats, here they are, verified. "The Monster" was released October 29, 2013, as the fourth single from MMLP2. It spent four weeks at number one on the Hot 100 across December 2013 and January 2014, Eminem's fifth chart-topper and Rihanna's thirteenth. It won Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the Grammys in February 2015, the same night MMLP2 took Best Rap Album. And the certification fans keep calling diamond is not: the RIAA lists it at 8x Platinum, certified March 2022. Enormous, and the video crossed a billion views years ago, but not diamond yet, no matter how many aggregators say otherwise.

Why she keeps telling it

Rexha is not precious about what the song cost her. "It was hard giving away a song that's kind of your baby," she told Complex. But every version of the story ends the same way: the record bought her a publishing deal, a move to Los Angeles, and rooms she could not previously get into. "It also had people in the industry take me more seriously," she told Martinez. Within four years she was a multi-platinum artist under her own name.

She only shared a stage with Eminem once, at Coachella 2018, singing the Rihanna part on the song she wrote. Her memory of him from that night, told to DJ Whoo Kid earlier this summer, fits every account that has come out of the camp this month: "Very quiet, composed, smart, very focused, like he's on a mission." Somewhere in that focus, thirteen years ago, he heard a stripped demo from an unknown teenager and recognized exactly what she had known on the ferry home in the snow. She called it first, though. That part of the story is hers forever.