D12 — Purple Pills

Released June 5, 2001, from D12's debut album Devil's Night, 'Purple Pills' was Eminem's gift to his Detroit crew: he produced the beat and traded verses with Bizarre, Proof, Swifty, Kuniva, and Kon Artis over a track that sounded like nothing else on radio. The track was exactly what its title promised: goofy, drug-addled, and unapologetic, with a hook that was impossible to forget.

But radio couldn't play it. So a second version emerged, 'Purple Hills,' with the lyrics rewritten to travel imagery — the 'mushroom mountain' became 'the highest mountain' — and suddenly there were two songs circulating under almost the same name. In the US and the UK, radio played only 'Purple Hills,' while the explicit 'Purple Pills' lived on the album, in clubs, and on the burned copies kids traded at school. A generation grew up knowing the song under two names — and plenty only discovered years later that the version they'd memorized off the radio wasn't the real one.

The single peaked at No. 19 on the Billboard Hot 100 and climbed all the way to No. 2 in the UK, Ireland, and Norway. Both versions got slick Joseph Kahn music videos, and the track arrived at a perfect cultural moment: Eminem mania was at a fever pitch between The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) and The Eminem Show (2002), and his willingness to just let D12 be their ridiculous selves felt rebellious and wild. It was the kind of song that got banned and celebrated in the same breath — and the fact that it existed in two competing canonical versions only made it more legendary in retrospect.