Eminem

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Essential Albums

  • The Eminem Show (Expanded Edition)
    The Eminem Show (Expanded Edition)
    The Eminem Show (Expanded Edition)

    If The Slim Shady LP was the start of Eminem’s journey, and The Marshall Mathers LP a document of the rapper’s struggle to get to the top, 2002’s The Eminem Show is what it sounds like when the only real fight left is the one with yourself. He’s still angry, especially when you get him started on America, which had just thrown itself into yet another war against an enemy (“terror”) it couldn’t quite define (a topic Em tackles on “White America” and “Square Dance”). But on The Eminem Show, he also shows he’s done some softening up, taking on the subject of parenting (“Hailie’s Song”), and addressing his moral responsibility to his audience (“Sing for the Moment”). He even apologises to the mom he spent two albums pretending to kill, at least kind-of (“Cleanin’ Out My Closet”). “I never would’ve dreamed in a million years I’d see/So many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me,” he raps. Is that a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. But at least he knows he’s not alone, no matter how alone he sometimes feels. The fact that he got the album’s name from Peter Weir’s soul-searching 1998 Jim Carrey drama The Truman Show gives you a sense of where Eminem was at. Life wasn’t a simulation, but reality was definitely getting bent out of shape—even his daughter’s eyes couldn’t ground him anymore (“My Dad’s Gone Crazy”). If the music felt heavier and more dramatic—well, you get it. Or maybe you don’t, until you sell 10 million albums and find yourself making movies loosely based on your own life (8 Mile). No rapper had ever sounded so vicious, honest and breathtakingly arrogant at the same time: “My songs can make you cry/Take you by surprise at the same time/Can make you dry your eyes with the same rhyme/See, what you’re seein’ is a genius at work,” Eminem raps at one point on The Eminem Show. That withering psychoanalytic criticism you just thought of? He said it five minutes ago—but it’s cool, you got a lot going on. Before The Truman Show, people wrote Jim Carrey off as a comedian, too.

  • The Marshall Mathers LP
    The Marshall Mathers LP
    The Marshall Mathers LP

    Getting famous must’ve felt good, but you have to imagine Eminem took special pleasure when The Marshall Mathers LP got called out in the US Senate not long after its release in 2000: “He talks about murdering and raping his mother. He talks about choking women slowly so he can hear their screams for a long time. He talks about using O.J.’s machete on women. And this is a man who is honoured by the recording industry.” The speaker here is Lynne Cheney, the wife of a man who, not long afterward, would become one of the country’s biggest boosters for the invasion of Iraq, and an unapologetic supporter of an “enhanced interrogation program” that would be condemned domestically and internationally as torture. Dick Cheney knew a thing or two about real-world brutality. But why go for the bigger catch when you can fry what’s right in front of you? “Now it’s too late/I’m triple platinum and tragedies happened in two states,” Eminem rapped on “Kill You”, referring to then-recent school shootings in both Colorado (Columbine) and Arkansas (Westside) before taking the responsibility people like Cheney obviously wanted him to take: “I invented violence!” By his own admission, The Marshall Mathers LP was a peak. (“I will say this,” he told an interviewer in 2017, “I am forever chasing The Marshall Mathers LP.”) The provocations were more provocative (the ultraviolence of “Kim”), and the catchier moments among the catchiest in early-2000s pop (“The Real Slim Shady”). And if you didn’t think Eminem was capable of something as complex and empathetic as “Stan”, it’s there, and as acute in its portrayal of everyday desperation as Bruce Springsteen. That said, the album also found Eminem working against himself by using homophobic slurs to insult his detractors, and by bringing back the homophobic caricature Ken Kaniff. Such jokes diluted the bigger point Eminem wanted to make on The Marshall Mathers LP, which he articulates via “Who Knew”: “Don’t blame me when little Eric jumps off the terrace/you shoulda been watching him—apparently you ain’t parents.” The subtext, of course, is that little Eric is white, and that in the absence of a more easily defined scapegoat, The Marshall Mathers LP would do. Jay-Z and Puff Daddy had helped turn hip-hop into pop, but Eminem was going beyond music entirely—the Lynne Cheney testimony, for example, took place at a hearing about the effect of violent imagery on kids in the wake of the school shootings mentioned above. “‘Wasn’t me, Slim Shady said to do it again,’” he rapped on “Who Knew,” channeling a teenage gunman. “Damn, how much damage can you do with a pen?” A year earlier, Eminem had claimed that God had sent him to piss the world off. The Marshall Mathers LP brought him one big step closer.

  • The Slim Shady LP (Expanded Edition)
    The Slim Shady LP (Expanded Edition)
    The Slim Shady LP (Expanded Edition)

    Of all the complaints and concerns that greeted the 1999 release of Eminem’s The Slim Shady LP, the most interesting response might’ve been an editorial written by Billboard magazine’s then-editor-in-chief, Timothy White. The expected gripes with Eminem’s music are all there: It’s violent; it’s unrepentant; it makes money by “exploiting the world’s misery.” But White also spends a lot of time laying out statistics about domestic violence, and interviews the executive director of one of the country’s oldest domestic-violence-related agencies. “What is the message?” she asks. “What is he mad at?” Funny you should ask, as Eminem lists the causes of his rage throughout The Slim Shady LP. There’s the minimum-wage job as a grill cook (“If I Had”) and the bully who terrorized him as a kid (“Brain Damage”). There’s the mother who didn’t provide for him and the teachers who didn’t care, either (“My Name Is”). There’s the humiliation of being so poor that you can’t afford diapers for your daughter (“Rock Bottom”). And there’s Eminmen himself, of course (“Guilty Conscience”). But Eminem’s rage is also driven by the hypocrisy of the culture as a whole. After all, the media has long profited off violence and the denigration of women—and yet, here were powerful scolds telling Eminem that he was the problem, ignoring their own complicity (“Role Model”). Asked about the editorial in an early interview, Eminem smirked and said, “I think it hit a soft spot for Timothy White.” Being funny was one thing (though Eminem could be really funny). The problem with Eminem was that he was smart and wrote catchy songs—and that he had nothing to lose. He’d even bite the hand that fed him, if he thought the moral justification was there for it (he even took jabs at mentor Dr Dre on “Guilty Conscience”). “How the fuck can I be white?” he asks at one point on The Slim Shady LP, “I don’t even exist.” What’s that old saying? Hurt people hurt people. Slim Shady was the sound of someone climbing off Dr Phil’s Couch for Troubled Teens and grabbing America by the throat.

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About Eminem

On 1999’s “My Name Is,” Eminem entered the public imagination with a mandate: “God sent me to piss the world off.” From his provocative early work to the redemption narratives of his 2002 Hollywood star vehicle 8 Mile and beyond, he has more or less stayed true to form, holding a mirror to the American psyche—and his own—with an incisiveness rarely matched before or since. Raised in working-class Detroit, the artist born Marshall Mathers in 1972 got his start as a battle rapper, reaching the ears of then-Interscope Records CEO Jimmy Iovine and future mentor Dr. Dre. Only months before, he had been fired from his job as a line cook, where he worked nearly 60 hours a week to support his infant daughter—an origin story that set the tone for his career. Dark, funny and frequently violent, his breakthrough albums (1999’s The Slim Shady LP and 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP) established him as pop culture’s premier bogeyman, a bleached-blonde devil traumatised by circumstance who rapped about killing everyone from his mentor to his mother with such ferocity and wit that you’d almost forget he had the wrong idea. The result was a sound that reached beyond hip-hop into the heart of suburban America: rap not as social reportage but as primal-scream therapy. He even delved deep into his personal journey through addiction on 2009’s Relapse and 2010’s Recovery. Yet as he has matured—fame, stability, sobriety, an Oscar for 8 Mile centrepiece “Lose Yourself”—he’s retained his edge, taking shots at politics and society with a frustration that’s bordered on relentless. He even takes square aim at his career-making alter ego on 2024’s The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce), lamenting his ill-fitting position in a woke cultural landscape. As always, Em reserves his harshest words for himself, refracting his insecurities—about his family, his music, his cultural relevance—into verses that only make him seem more human.

HOMETOWN
St. Joseph, MO, United States
BORN
17 October 1972
GENRE
Hip-Hop/Rap

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