He sells millions of CDs and begins his UK tour in Manchester tonight. To his fans he is the "authentic voice of disaffected working class youth" and some of his lyrics have "all the depth and texture of the greatest examples of English verse", one literary commentator has observed.
But to his critics, the Detroit rapper Eminem is "a nasty little yob" who does little more than sing about beating and killing women and gays.
Some of his lyrics are undoubtedly offensive. In one song he offers a twisted birthday present: "My little sister's birthday, she'll remember me/For a gift I had 10 of my boys take her virginity."
Others, according to Eminem, are simply ironic, as in the song Role Model where he advises: "Follow me and do exactly what the song says/Smoke weed, take pills, drop outta school, kill people and drink."
Very little would have been written about Eminem's British gigs in the media here, apart from in the music press that is, had Sheffield University students' union not decided to ban his name from appearing in reviews and his CDs from being sold in campus shops.
The ban was imposed two months ago and caused little comment until the Daily Telegraph took it up as a cause celbre.
"Our aim is to create a culture of tolerance, equality and respect for our members," said a student union representative last week when commenting on the decision to ban Eminem's music.
But the ban was under threat just as it began. Soon students were complaining of censorship and a "nanny state" and Dan Morfitt, head of music at Sure, the student radio station at the university, responded saying he planned to break the ban and play an Eminem record.
"Of course we are against homophobia, but we're all over 18 and are unlikely to be turned into bigots by a couple of lines in a song," Mr Morfitt said.
The futility of the ban was compounded by a row over whether a debate or a vote was actually taken and whether any real consensus existed to sustain the ban. It opened up the issue for debate, which was supported by the gay rights group, Stonewall.
The ban also invited ridicule from the Daily Telegraph, which used it to illustrate the antics of the "loony left" and provoked anger from some commentators who argued that speech in any form, whether bigoted or inciting violence, should be allowed in all circumstances.
Angry parents, many of whom were white and middle-class and whose children had just begun listening to Eminem, called for a ban on his records on BBC radio phone-ins over the last two weeks, claiming that Eminem's lyrics were corrupting British youth.
On the liberal wing, people pointed out that in the 1950s Frank Sinatra described Elvis Presley's pelvic gyrations as a "vicious form of expression". The few fans that actually called the radio phone-ins described the "aggressive" attitude of some of the people going to Eminem's gigs and one 34-yearold man admitted that while he found the music exhilarating, the overall experience was quite dull.
It was an attempt to highlight the hypocrisy of popular indignation "located in time and place, rather than right and wrong", that led Gary Younge, writing in the Guardian, to argue that the parents leading the charge against Eminem were probably the same parents raised on the "nihilism" of punk.
"The reason he has been picked out for special treatment can be found not so much in his message as in his medium. Rap has long been a form of music to which both liberals and conservatives did not so much tap their feet as jerk their knee. What was a strong, radical voice of urban, black America is now a multi-million dollar industry selling to a market which is overwhelmingly white and suburban," Younge wrote.
If misogyny and violence were the grounds for banning music, then why start with Eminem, Younge asked. The Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar referred to a black slave woman being beaten and raped by her owner and that was just the start as he went on to remind readers that Tom Jones had once sung about killing his lover on the doorstep.
When he walks out on stage tonight Eminem is unlikely to be concerned about the outcry over his lyrics. He is being ironic and he is helping to break down the barriers of stereotype, he says.