![]() The Marshall Mathers LP brought him one big step closer. “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. “‘Wasn’t me, Slim Shady said to do it again,’” he rapped on “Who Knew,” channeling a teenage gunman. 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. 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. 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. 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. (“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”). 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!”īy his own admission, The Marshall Mathers LP was a peak. Dick Cheney knew a thing or two about real-world brutality. 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. And this is a man who is honored by the recording industry.” He talks about using O.J.’s machete on women. He talks about choking women slowly so he can hear their screams for a long time. 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. ![]() Before The Truman Show, people wrote Jim Carrey off as a comedian, too. That withering psychoanalytic criticism you just thought of? He said it five minutes ago-but it’s cool, you got a lot going on. 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. Or maybe you don’t, until you sell 10 million albums and find yourself making movies loosely based on your own life (8 Mile). If the music felt heavier and more dramatic-well, you get it. 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”). 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. But at least he knows he’s not alone, no matter how alone he sometimes feels. “I never would’ve dreamed in a million years I’d see/So many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me,” he raps. He even apologizes to the mom he spent two albums pretending to kill, at least kind-of (“Cleanin’ Out My Closet”). 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’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”). 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.
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