It’s still the best-selling rap record of all time. What I thought, instead, was: This guy is really fucking good at rapping.Īfter the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem would shatter sales records with 1.7 million copies sold in the first week alone, 6.5 million in the first month, and eventually, over 35 million sold worldwide. As he stormed the theater with about a hundred carbon copies of himself, countless sociopolitical minefields were being set up around me. I was Eminem’s audience, a teen from Middle America, one of millions. Long before I ever started thinking critically about music, I sat watching Eminem’s VMA performance from my rural Wisconsin couch, a 10th grader with no social media, no cell phone. This was 18 years ago, two or three epochs in music-industry time, back when “Total Request Live” held sway while boy bands and newly crowned pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera filled the airwaves. He knew it before many: People like the stuff they recognize.
The slim shady lp review tv#
As reality TV gained traction, Eminem’s dressing-down of celebrities endeared him to a generation who would soon find “drama” to be the coin of the entertainment realm. It was an echo-chamber of MTV-watchers, a real-time “Beavis and Butt-Head” for those who would be later be crowned millennials. Specifically, what was on television at that very moment. Even pop fans deadened to graphic lyrics are likely to flinch at a beyond-tasteless line like ”My favorite color is red/Like the blood shed on Kurt Cobain’s head/When he shot himself dead.” (Next on Celebrity Death Match: Eminem vs.”The Real Slim Shady” wasn’t rap about what was happening on the streets of Brooklyn or Compton or Atlanta or even Detroit. That coldly-calculated-to-offend alter ego considers date rape (”Guilty”), wants to ”turn the planet into alcoholics” (”If I Had”), admits to a preference for acid and cocaine (”Just Don’t”), and, in ”My Fault,” isn’t overly concerned when a gal pal overdoses on drugs at a rave (”Quit trying to swallow your tongue/Want some gum?”). With Dre providing a backdrop of predominantly spare rhythm tracks and occasional juicy melodies - skeletal versions of the G funk he pioneered earlier this decade - Eminem plays the role of the debauched character Slim Shady, rapping in a singsongy whine that makes his rhymes sometimes seem less insidious than they are. Sending up the gooey sentiments and pop melody of the Smith hit, Eminem raps: ”Mama said she wants to show you how far she can float/And don’t worry about that little boo-boo on her throat.”īut as much as he brazenly yanks your funny bone, Eminem is also intent on crossing the wide line between humor and horror. In the album’s funniest slice of black humor, a smart-ass parody of Will Smith’s unctuous ”Just the Two of Us” called ”97′ Bonnie & Clyde,” Eminem and his baby daughter take a pleasant drive to a lake - into which he tosses the dead body of the child’s mother. In ”Role Model,” he gleefully debunks the idea of rappers as heroes (”So if I said I never do drugs, that would mean I lie and get f -ed more than the President does”). The Slim Shady LP marks the return of irreverent, wiseass attitude to the genre, heard throughout the album in its nonstop barrage of crudely funny rhymes (”I get blunted offa funny homegrown, ’cause when I smoke out, I hit the trees harder than Sonny Bono”). The current face of hip-hop is so sullen that it’s often hard to recall a time when rap could be deliciously funny - truly naughty by nature. There’s no question we need someone like Eminem.
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