Eminem & Proof's Rare 1999 Car Freestyle, Now in HD: Our Birthday Gift to Marshall

For Eminem's 54th birthday we restored one of the most-shared clips of him and Proof: the 1999 MTV News car freestyle outside his childhood home on Dresden in Detroit. Here is where the footage comes from, what we did to it (AI-upscaled, not 4K), and the birthday posts from Shady Records, Complex and Eminem himself.

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Eminem & Proof's Rare 1999 Car Freestyle, Now in HD: Our Birthday Gift to Marshall

Four and a half minutes of Marshall and DeShaun trading bars in and around a car on the street Em grew up on, shot for MTV News in early 1999. For his 54th birthday, we cleaned it up so you can actually see their faces.

Eminem turned 54 on Saturday, October 17. The label, the media accounts and a lot of fans marked the day, and we rounded up every verified tribute in a separate piece. This one is about the thing we made. Instead of another birthday graphic, we went back to a clip almost every Eminem fan has seen at some point, usually as a blurry, compressed upload: Eminem and Proof freestyling in the car outside Em's childhood home in Detroit, 1999. We AI-upscaled and enhanced it and posted it on X as our birthday gift to Marshall:

Our October 17 post: "Happy birthday, Marshall ๐ŸŽ‚ My gift to you: you and Proof freestyling in the car outside your childhood home in Detroit, 1999, now upscaled to HD. Two legends, pure chemistry. RIP Proof ๐Ÿ•Š๏ธ" View it on X.

As of this writing the post has passed 1,000 likes, 200 reposts and 20,000 views, which for a four-minute clip from 1999 tells you how much people still care about these two together.

Where the footage comes from

The clip comes from MTV News. On March 13, 1999, a few weeks after The Slim Shady LP came out, MTV premiered a Kurt Loder feature on Eminem in which the network went back to Detroit with him, visited the house he grew up in and met his best friend Proof. Complex's "This Day in Rap History" describes it simply: the two of them "tag-team rapped for MTV over the span of four and a half minutes," and the freestyle works "thanks largely to Em and Proof's chemistry." Complex also points out that 8 Mile later has a scene that plays a lot like this one, with Rabbit rapping alongside his best friend.

The house is the one on Dresden Street in Detroit. A 2008 post on the blog Paul Rosenblog, which shared the uncut freestyle back then, says it "was shot during the MTV News Kurt Loder interview of Eminem in front of the house that he grew up in on Dresden in Detroit," and adds that pieces of it were probably used on air, "but not the whole thing uncut like this." The MTVNEWS.COM logo is still burned into the corner of the footage.

The version most people know is "Eminem and Proof Freestyle (1999) (Rare)", uploaded to YouTube by the channel eminemfi in May 2016. It has a little over 4.1 million views as of this writing:

The widely shared 2016 upload of the original MTV News footage, by eminemfi. This is the "before."

What we actually did to it

We want to be precise here, because "remastered in 4K" gets slapped on a lot of old footage that isn't. This is not 4K. Here is the full list:

  • AI-upscaled and enhanced with Upsampler. The picture is sharper, and face detail that had been smeared by years of re-encoding is restored, which matters most on Proof, who spends a lot of the clip leaning in from outside the car window.
  • Same frame rate, no interpolation. We didn't invent in-between frames, so the motion looks the way it did on the original tape.
  • Original audio. Nothing was re-mixed, cleaned or replaced. You're hearing exactly what MTV recorded.
  • Eminem News branding. A small eminemnews.com tag in the corner, a short intro card and an end card. The MTV News logo stays, because it's their footage and they deserve the credit.

The full horizontal version is on YouTube:

"Eminem & Proof Rare Car Freestyle (1999) โ€“ Upscaled in HD ๐ŸŽ‚ Happy Birthday Marshall." Watch on YouTube. If you're on your phone, there is also a vertical version.

Watch it side by side with the 2016 upload and the difference is obvious in the faces: you can read Em's expressions as he's searching for the next line, and Proof's grin when one lands. It's still 1999 MTV camcorder footage. It just isn't a smear anymore.

Why this clip, and why Proof

Because it's the purest look we have at the two of them before everything got big. Proof, born DeShaun Dupree Holton, was Eminem's best friend from their teenage years, a founding member of D12 and the hype man next to him on stage for years afterward. He was shot and killed at the CCC club on 8 Mile Road in Detroit on April 11, 2006, at 32, a few months after serving as best man at Em's wedding. Eminem has kept him close in public ever since, most recently with his post on what would have been Proof's 53rd birthday this month.

In this clip neither of them is famous yet, not really. The Slim Shady LP is weeks old. They're two friends from Detroit in a car, going back and forth off the top for a TV crew, cracking each other up. Twenty years after Proof's death, that felt like the right thing to hand back to Marshall on his birthday.

Earlier on the day, we also posted a short birthday reel, captioned "Happy 54th Birthday, Marshall. ๐ŸŽ‚ I hope you like the video I made for you. If not... 'I'm a kill you!' ๐Ÿ”ช":

Our 54th birthday reel. View it on X.

The rest of the birthday posts

We weren't the only ones posting. Shady Records went with a "Lose Yourself" line:

Shady Records (@ShadyRecords, X, October 17): "โ€˜Seize the moment try to freeze it and own it, squeeze it and hold it / โ€˜Cause we consider these minutes goldenโ€™ Show some love, it's @Eminem's birthday!! ๐ŸŽ‚ Happy birthday, Em !!!"

Complex asked its followers for their favorite Eminem song ("Happy 54th Birthday to Eminem ๐Ÿ What's your favorite Eminem song? ๐ŸŽค"), and Complex Music posted a plain "Happy birthday, @Eminem ๐ŸŽˆ" that picked up close to 6,000 likes.

And Eminem himself? His only X post on his birthday wasn't about his birthday. Twenty-two minutes after Kid Rock's Halfway 2 Jesus went live in the U.S., he posted about "Heal My Faith," his song with Kid Rock:

Eminem's October 17 post: "Not about choosing sides, just choosing to make music with my old friend. Praying for all of us. #HealMyFaith @KidRock." View it on X.

That's a song about an old friendship, posted on his birthday, by a guy who marked his late best friend's birthday on that same timeline just two weeks earlier. Seems like a good week to watch him and Proof in that car one more time.

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