Esham was born in New York, but mostly lived in Detroit city, although he commuted back and forth between the two. When he was eight he was sent off to long island to live with his grandma, after being caught stealing cars. While in New York, E started to listen to hip hop artists such as, Run DMC, Fat Boys, Geto Boys, and N.W.A., but also was listening to Hard Rock artists, AC/DC, Led Zepplin, Alice Cooper, and Ozzy Osbourne. In Detroit, he and his brother, James H. Smith, started to produce records on their self-made label, Reel Life Productions. Esham did all the rapping, engineering, and producing on the album, while his brother put the product on the street, with his hook-ups. When he was in the ninth grade in Osborn High, at 15, he released his first record,"Boomin Words From Hell", which was so successful that he re-released it in 1991. It also was the first rap album that had a song about drug abuse,"True". During those days Esham and Kid Rock ruled the scene in Detroit, Esham putting out two more albums in 1991 "Erotic Poetry" and "Homey Don't Play", which Esham had clown makeup on the front cover and it was produced by Icp producer, Mike E. Clark.

In 1992, the Insane Clown Posse came to Esham, and Kid Rock, to pay them for their contribution for their debut album,"Carnival Of Carnage", Kid rock explains,"Boomin' Words From Hell! I promoted that on that Ice Cube tour. I took 500 of his cassettes with me and gave them to everyone I know. We were, like, hangin' out fuckin', like, every day, me and him, and then ICP tried to get in the picture. Me and Esham were, like, running Detroit back then. I mean, go and ask any kid. Back in the fuckin' early '90s, it was Kid Rock and Esham, and we started the whole fucking shit. Shit you not. I helped Esham out, Esham helped me out. We were just fuckin' cool like that. And then fucking ICP came along, and they had a little bit of money. 'We'll pay you guys a little bit of money to be on our record.' We were both like, 'Fuck it.'" Violent J of the Icp retorts,"That was a strategy we did. See, we took Esham who--we loved his music, and we didn't really like Kid Rock, you know what I mean, but we paid 'em both to be on our album, our first album. Esham is super-in-the-house. The fact is while you're paying your dues, you thinking nothing's going right and you're fucked in all aspects, but in reality, you're totally hooked up by paying those dues because you got all this back catalog, all these old records that are owned by you, not no record label."

ICP opened for Esham on many shows and Esham produced for ICP,"Carnival Of Carnage", and "Beverly Kills 50187". Also in 1992, Esham released Judgement Day, Vol 1 and 2, which was the first double album in America. Also In 1992, Esham hooked up with long time friend, TNT and Mastamind to form the group NATAS, and released,"Life After Death". NATAS stands for, "Nation Ahead Of Time And Space, or " Niggaz Ahead Of Time And Space", however people get the wrong idea, as Esham states,"First of all Natas stands for Nation Ahead of Time and Space. And you don't really go through life reading things backwards. You don't look at the word ¡°live¡± and see ¡°evil¡±. You see things for what they are, and some people might get something negative from that. But for all the people who really understand the music and get the surge of energy, we put out what it's about