I understand why everybody things The Marshall Mathers LP is THE ONE. It has “Stan” -his Dido sampled expression of the difference between rapping about and committing violence, “The Way I Am” -an explanation and a decree, and “The Real Slim Shady” -a strung up masterpiece. All of them hits, all of them great, but all of them singleminded. Revenge and violence, Eminem’s evil twins, Em for revenge, Shady for violence, but neither for Marshall Mathers.
The album is a great one but the album is a dead end. It is part two of the Slim Shady album and it is misnamed… so let’s name em properly.
The Slim Shady LP should be called The Eminem Show
The Marshall Mathers LP should be called The Slim Shady LP
The Eminem Show should be called the Marshall Mathers LP.
Shady/Mathers are conceptual bookends, before and after fame, the rot and the roar and the revulsion. The Eminem Show is the world according to Mathers. Whether, in the best song he has ever written “Square Dance” he is skewering the game of politics, or, on “White America” he is distilling institutional racism, or the business of the business of rap as an extended shout to Dre on “Business”. The flip side is stuff like “Cleaning Out My Closet” an extended Oedipal yodel and “Say Goodbye To Hollywood” about the horrors of fame.
Strong meat and completed with four hit singles: “Without Me”, “Cleaning Out My Closet” “Say Goodbye To Hollywood” and “Superman”.
But it is not the greatest raps of the decade (though it was of the year, 2002). And for all his considerable gifts, Mathers is not the greatest rapper of the decade by a long shot. Greatest rappers prolly goes like this:
Big L
Ghostface Killah
Jay-Z
Eminem
So what? Big Mama Thornton sang the blues better than Elvis Presley (whom Eminem, accurately, compares himself to) but Presley made it palatable without watering it down for a white, racist audience. Eminem does the same for rap: in league with Dr. Dre he made a rap for a white youth audience (I have tons of black friends and they uniformly HATE Eminem -he’s a joke to them). So there’s the race card and Mathers plays it from the top of the deck on Eminem Show, it is the theme boiling and roiling through the album. Of all the reasons why ES is Mathers greatest moment, this is first and foremost. The album has a black rage from a white man and he manages the contradiction because a) he has Dre’s seal of approval, and b) he is, like Presley before him,dirt poor white trash.
It is a confusion for Eminem: he sneers at the guilt he pours on and though his audience, young , white males basically, wondrin’ to wig or not to wig, are reacting purely subconsciously to the questions raised about racism, they are working in deep background.
This is a place setting for pop music, it is all over the place and in the same place at the same time, just about perfect in execution with Eminem taking over the production for much of the songs and every song coming with vocal hooks (more than anything else, vocal hooks) aplenty and rhyhmic hooks on top and underneath sample after sample.
Eminem has yet to improve upon the formula.