“Amityville” features a verse from Bizarre, who raps like he is reading off of a sheet of lyrics that someone else wrote for him while doped up on cough medicine*. The earnest “Marshall Mathers”, an even more earnest attempt at letting us know that Eminem is a real dude with complex feelings, is followed by a skit in which the Insane Clown Posse sucks each other off. “I’m Back” is a rewrite of “Who Knew” and is the definition of diminishing returns. “Remember Me?” sees RBX and Sticky Fingaz stink up the joint while reminding us that they like to kill people and kill people and, on occasion, kill people. Video can’t be loaded: Eminem – The Real Slim Shady (Edited) ()įrom here, The Marshall Mathers LP fluctuates between a proper hardcore hip-hop album and a pop album without concern for how things flow for the audience. What, then, is the song that follows this plea for freedom? “The Real Slim Shady”, the album’s most obvious attempt at commercial success that paints Eminem’s life as a circus side show. You believe him when he says that his life is not a circus side show and that he should be left to his own devices so that he can make the music he wants to make without concern for commercial success. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you buy into Eminem’s pain on “The Way I Am”. That Eminem spent most of the time on this album’s opening tracks finding creative ways to air his grievances makes “The Way I Am”’s flatly-stated pleas to be left alone ring so dull, but there’s also that he beats his point over and over again over the album’s most tepid beat. One of my favorite jokes goes that it took John Lennon and David Bowie to make a song about being famous that didn’t fucking blow, and Eminem is no Lennon or Bowie, so of course “The Way I Am” sucks.
Then the album hits a wall and stays there for the rest of its runtime. Video can’t be loaded: Eminem – The Way I Am () “Who Knew” is a lightning rod of bastard humor with no punches pulled and no one left blameless for society’s problems. Too many people have argued that “Stan” is yet another song about an obsessed fan that goes too far when it is really about how Eminem probably would have turned out if he had a shitlord like himself to look up to-if the song’s message was simply “don’t take music too seriously”, it wouldn’t have stuck with everyone as long as it has. “Stan”, of course, is a standout: a tale about a man driven to violence and madness due to believing that his idol abandoned him, it sticks with you not because of its shocking nature but because it is Eminem’s confession that his existing may have made the world a better place, and for once, he can’t blame it on the rest of the world’s failings. Everyone has churned pud over “Stan”, but the proper opening song, “Kill You”, helps set the stage by being this weird little exercise for Eminem to throw out demented bon mots, to the point that it feels half as long as its four-minute runtime. I say that, though, with the caveat that there is some really good stuff in it, mostly at the beginning. Video can’t be loaded: Eminem – Stan (Long Version) ft. Then again, that hasn’t stopped me from making fun of other albums influenced by the culture in which they were received, so I’ll spell this out as clearly as I can: The Marshall Mathers LP is a really bad hip-hop album. To talk bad about it is kind of like criticizing those Bugs Bunny cartoons in which he makes fun of Japanese people-it represents different cultural norms, and to criticize them without taking the time they were made into account doesn’t tell the whole picture. Fine, I get that my opinion is kind of invalid because I’m talking about this album in retrospect while The Marshall Mathers LP so obviously lives in the year 2000. As such, The Marshall Mathers LP is an album that Eminem had every right to make, and if you say anything negative towards it, you hate hip-hop or you are gay (tee hee, you like kissing people of the same gender) or you don’t understand it or your opinion is invalid because it sold millions of copies. There’s no other choice, really-the alternative is censorship, never a healthy option. When phrased like that, the logical conclusion is to side in favor of the artist. “what’s good for the kids” (read: what stuffy white folks think is good for their kids). The smartest decision made in marketing The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem’s third full-length album and his second to be released on a major label, was to accentuate the argument between the rights of the artist vs. With Eminem’s new album hitting shelves next week, we have decided to take a look back at the man’s most celebrated album.