Imperfect: The Marshall Mathers LP
Here’s the thing about Eminem: at his best, there is no disputing the claim that he is one of the finest lyricists in the history of hip hop. Growing up reading dictionaries, the man has written some of the most creative, witty, and provocative rhymes in music history over the course of a career that has now spanned more than 2 decades. The Marhsall Mathers LP, Eminem’s third studio album, is widely hailed as his magnum opus and one of the best albums of all time. Released in the spring of 2000, it was immediately hugely successful, setting a record in the United States as the fastest selling album by a solo artist, with Nielsen recognizing 1.76 million units sold in its first week. The album held this title for fifteen years before being dethroned by Adele’s 25 in 2015. In 2001, The Marshall Mathers LP netted Eminem the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album, and was even nominated for Album of the Year, losing out to Radiohead’s Kid A Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature, a result applauded by exactly 3 people (Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, Your Dad).
Here’s the thing about The Marshall Mathers LP: putting aside its celebrated legacy, it hasn’t aged well. At all. Even looking beyond the controversy associated with the often violent, misogynistic, or homophobic lyrical content that is Eminem’s calling card (we’ll get to that), so many of these songs just feel so dated. The album features (among other things), namedrops for Fred Durst and Tom Green on its lead single (“The Real Slim Shady”), and an interpolation of LFO’s “Summer Girls” on “Marshall Mathers” (Don’t remember “Summer Girls”? Congratulations on being one of the millions of Americans born after 1996!). Throughout the album, the listener is frequently reminded of the fact that this album is a product of the year 2000 in a manner that could only be less subtle were it to be retroactively re-titled Make Way for President Gore!.
All of this may sound like a minor, petty gripe, and maybe it is, but the importance of applicability to music simply cannot be overstated. Even songs written for a particular place and time often have staying power due to the ability to mold the meaning of their words to fit new situations. There’s a certain amount of timelessness required for a song or an album (or any work of art really) to truly ascend to greatness. It’s the reason it’s so hard to look at so much of what was released in the 80s without laughing at the absurdity of it all. It’s the reason we all chuckle and roll our eyes when we see earnest discussion of Y2K in things released near the turn of the millenium. With respect to movies, this is called an “Unintentional Period Piece,” and I honestly don’t know that I can think of a better way to describe this album. So much of Eminem’s music is dependent upon the listener being up to date on the barrage of pop culture references he’s throwing at you. “Shit, Christina Aguilera better switch me chairs / So I can sit next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst / and hear ’em argue over who she gave head to first” packs a lot less punch when you only know Carson Daly as “some guy on NBC,” and Fred Durst and Limp Bizkit as the butt of jokes about how lame we all were in the year 2000. Similarly, with Tom Green’s fall into obscurity, it’s really hard to share in Slim’s outrage that it’s cool for him to hump a dead moose. Without context, he’s just kind of throwing a bunch of names at you for the sake of it.
In fairness, “for the sake of it” has always seemed like Eminem’s M.O. He just does things to stir the pot, with no real thought behind any of it. Controversy has clearly alway been his end goal. To verify this, one need look no further than his 2017 outrage over Donald Trump’s failure to be publicly upset by his BET Awards verse. There’s a Simpsons bit where Bart is trying to impress some older, cooler kids with his skateboarding antics, only to be dismissed with the line, “The whole thing smacks of effort, man.” Such is the ultimate fate of all who strive only to create controversy without any real messaging. Look at The Sex Pistols. Sure, they seem scary at first glance. But they were a fabrication. A sham. They stood for nothing, and elementary lyrical analysis can show it. In the span of their one album, they’re fascists (“Holiday in the Sun”), they’re anarchists (“Anarchy in the U.K.”), they hate the Queen because she is a fascist (“God Save the Queen”), they care about nothing (“Seventeen,” “Pretty Vacant”). You can’t think about it because there’s nothing to think about. There’s plenty of schlock to keep you entertained, but when you try to look for depth, you’ll be disappointed. The same is largely true here.
All of this to say, in a roundabout way, that Eminem seems desperate to create some sort of stir. It’s really hard to ignore the audacity inherent in a chorus like “I’m just Marshall Mathers / I’m just a regular guy / I don’t know why all the fuss about me” when the first track on the album, “Kill You” features a section in which the rapper talks about raping his own mother. Then you have the “Steve Berman” skit, a sequel to a skit on The Slim Shady LP, in which we find the titular Interscope executive lambasting the rapper for his lyrical content, and telling him that this is an album that could never possibly sell. We are meant to sympathize with Eminem, to view him as an underdog. Never mind the overwhelming success of his (rather similar) previous album, which has since been certified quadruple platinum. Eminem wants so badly to be viewed as a misunderstood visionary. One with no support from anyone, not even his own label. Of course, this narrative requires one to entertain the possibility that any executive would be telling the rapper “no” at this stage in his career.
What’s really most frustrating about this is that Eminem is almost always much more interesting when he is in fact just Marshall Mathers, when he pulls back the Slim Shady curtains gives us a peek into his real feelings about the world. On tracks like “Marshall Mathers” and “The Way I Am,” we get a picture of a person struggling with a level of fame he never thought he would achieve. Any semblance of normalcy he could have ever hoped for has been lost forever. In its place, a world where he can never again hope to spend a day in public without being recognized, and a world in which he finds himself lumped in with Marilyn Manson as the latest entries in the Sex Pistols-esque lineage of being the most convenient source of blame for what’s wrong with America’s youth. This idea is affirmed on “Stan,” perhaps Eminem’s greatest song, in which he speaks to a mentally ill fan with a degree of sincerity that he has yet to display up to this point. He’s aware of his burgeoning status as a role model, and knows he isn’t up to the task, but he’s still doing his best. You can almost feel sorry for the guy at so many points, but then he hits you with a skit in which the Insane Clown Posse give fellatio to recurring gay stereotype Ken Kaniff, and we’re back into “smacks of effort” territory.
But then there’s “Kim,” a prequel to the previous album’s “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde.” The song is not enjoyable; it’s downright unpleasant. But, it’s also one of the most important songs to understanding Eminem as a performer. A huge amount of Eminem’s music is steeped in duality. There’s the sensitive guy, the flawed father whose children mean the world to him. And then there’s the villain, the nihilist who sees anything and everything as something only to be destroyed. On one side, you have a man whose words are too blunt to be anything but sincere, and on the other is the character too extreme to be anything but just that: a character. Every line uttered by Slim Shady is intentionally too over the top to be taken seriously. For all the clutching of pearls done upon the release of “My Name Is,” I think it’s safe to say that no one ever actually expected the man to stick Nine Inch Nails through each one of his eyelids. The dichotomy is pretty easily digestible, and it’s really easy to figure out who is who. There’s Marshall and there’s Shady and never the twain shall meet. But here they do. And it’s genuinely terrifying.
As mentioned, the track serves as a prequel to “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde,” which features Eminem and his infant daughter disposing of the body of his estranged wife, the titular Kim. Sure, the implications are horrific: there is a corpse in the trunk of the car after all, but the song focuses more on the absurdity of the scenario. It’s catchy and upbeat, and at no point does it really make you think about how we got to this point. Here, we have to experience it for ourselves, to witness an actual, disturbingly plausible depiction of spousal abuse that ends in the woman’s death. It’s brutal. So brutal that the clean version of the album doesn’t feature it at all, swapping in the South Park knockoff track, “The Kids,” which, while significantly less impactful, probably fits in better with the general tone of the album, especially when one considers that in “Kim” a lyric about murdering a four year old boy is considered too horrific to appear unedited one any officially released version of the album, but in the literal very next track, “Under the Influence,” Kuniva of D12 gleefully delivers the line, “Shoot up the household, even the young toddlers,” as the sound of a crying child can be heard in the background.
“Shit, half the shit I say, I just make it up / To make you mad…” Eminem says on “Criminal,” the closing track of The Marshall Mathers LP. It shows. In terms of technique and lyricism, Eminem is untouchable, sitting comfortably near the top of the mountain. But it very much possible to respect someone’s abilities, but to criticize their application. Eminem may be untouchable, but The Marshall Mathers LP is not. Impactful? Certainly. Important? No doubt about it. But also imperfect.