Happy Birthday to Eminem’s “Marshall Mathers LP”

I don’t listen to the Marshall Mathers LP every day, and up until yesterday, probably hadn’t given it a full spin in at least five years. But it’s not for lack of interest — I’ve listened to the album a billion times and personally think it’s one of the best albums ever made.

Released in 2000, in the dominant days of MTV’s TRL — a veritable smorgasbord of the day’s inane pop hits, delivered by the charming Carson Daly— MMLP was inescapable. Em was the biggest artist in music, and frankly, considering that he’s the top-streamed artist of all time on Spotify, he might still be (although admittedly, that’s an imprecise metric).

I was in my senior year of high school when MMLP came out and while younger fans probably don’t remember it that much, that was just a year after the Columbine High School shootings. The killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, left behind a laundry list of music they liked and disliked, and because of this, public interest groups and even the government got involved with trying to censor music.

The history between censorship and art is particularly long and complicated, but in this day and age, when rappers like J. Cole are apologizing because they might have offended someone with their lyrics, and the outrage machine seizes on anyone with a point of view that doesn’t agree with their own, something like the Marshall Mathers LP is hard to imagine even ever happening at all.

In its day, serious music critics — an oddly puritanical bunch — wrote the record off as hate speech, but in reality the album is more of a 70-minute ‘fuck you’ fantasy. It’s about a kid from a Michigan trailer park who blows up in the entertainment business and is then forced to deal with the reality of his previously-terrible life.

A year removed from “My Name Is” and the Slim Shady LP, Eminem is still in a destructive relationship. He still hates his mom. He still has drug problems. He still has baggage from growing up an unpopular kid. These things didn’t go away just because he was handed millions of dollars and millions more fans. In fact, they made his problems even worse.

A big moment for Eminem came in 2001, when he performed at the Grammys with Elton John. Here it was, the purported homophobe in the flesh, hugging it out with the flamboyant piano man. An odd couple for sure.

I have no idea how they came together on that stage and I’m sure it’s been documented exhaustively, but I’m too lazy to look it up and whatever was said publicly is probably bullshit anyway. Because almost everything musicians say publicly is bullshit.

What I do know is that even though there were gay slurs and misogynistic lyrics on the Marshall Mathers LP, the idea that a piece of art could be and should be censored for that was more shocking than the album itself (and of course I recognize my own bias and point of view in writing that sentence).

And yet somehow lost in the conversation about the record was the fact that its central character was an actual human who thought and felt and created these things. And there was no discussion about the conditions that might have lead to that point.

In an interview back then, Eminem commented on that, by way of Columbine.

Columbine is so touchy. As much sympathy as we give the Columbine shootings, nobody ever looked at it from the point of view of the kids who were bullied — I mean, they took their own life! And it was because they were pushed so far to the edge that they were so mad. I’ve been that mad!

No artist would ever say anything like this today, for risk of being torn to bits by the perfect people who populate social media, but the point was made. Eminem was a disaffected youth just like those angry kids, just like a lot of angry kids.

But instead of walking into a school and shooting everyone, he voiced his frustration in song. Music became an outlet, a way to channel that anger into something that other people could identify with. In fact, by doing that he brought people together, instead of splitting them apart.

That was something Elton John might have seen in Em — what he has to say is just as important as what anyone has to say — and maybe the reason why he chose to join him on that stage. It could have also been opportunistic, too, as Eminem was so big at the time (but I’d like to think it was genuine).

But the point is, we should never take away that ability to exorcise our demons through art. And we should never stop celebrating people who do that either. For some people, art is the only thing they have. It’s therapy, without the high-paid therapist involved. And yes the line between free speech and hate speech is a very thin one, but I’m not exactly sure who gets to make the decision on which is which. Hate is a real emotion.

Good art should make you feel a little uncomfortable. It should make you squirm and have to confront a reality that you didn’t realize existed. That was something the Marshall Mathers LP largely accomplished. It took this middle American milieu — this thing that intellectuals on the coasts try to pretend doesn’t exist — and put it right in their face.

And that was fucking scary. And needed. And great. We need a little more of that these days.

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