The Marshall Mathers LP: A Retrospective
It’s Eminem Week on radorbad.net!
In 2000, MTV was king, America wasn’t openly afraid of Muslims yet, and Eminem reigned supreme.
It’s weird to think about a world where we all hung onto everything Eminem said, which inspired millions of fans and protesters. He had so much influence and it weighed heavy on his shoulders, as you can see in the progressions of his albums. And in 2000, after the release of The Slim Shady LP, Em was getting ready to find out just how fucking big he was with his magnum opus: The Marshall Mathers LP.
The obvious standout on the album is “Stan” and it still holds up today. Listening to Stan narrate his letters is still as sad and scary as it was in 2000. We see Stan go from a fan who admires Eminem, to an angry kid with a history of abuse with a possible hint of homosexuality, to an unhinged criminal who kills his wife and unborn child. It truly is the greatest song Eminem has ever written, and the Dido sample was a stroke of pure genius.
It gets even sadder when Eminem writes back to him…but it’s not the Em you expect. The final letter, written by Em, shows the audience that he really is just a normal guy navigating the tsunami of fame. It shows that he can speak to people with sincerity, as a human and not an image. The last verse is one of Em’s greatest.
But if you think we’re getting the softer side of Em on the album, you’d be wrong. He quickly transitions back into America’s outsider poking fun at America, Columbine, and social justice warriors. The whole album is a response to the responses to The Slim Shady LP and nothing encapsulates what Eminem and the world was going through at the time better than “I’m Back” does.
Another highlight on the album is “The Real Slim Shady.” Yes, it is the most mainstream song, and the most fun, and the only song without layers to it. It’s a fun song to listen to, it’s fun to rap to, and he doesn’t compromise lyrical content for a radio single.
Alright, let’s talk about the elephant in the room: “Kim.”
It’s an uncomfortable song. He raps about killing a 4 year old child and her new husband and then Kim. He spends the whole time screaming at the top of his lungs while imitating her voice and singing the chorus. The whole song is manic, beautiful, sad, fucking weird, and hypnotic. There’s something about it where you can’t stop listening once it starts.
It doesn’t help that she attempted suicide like a year before that. But she tried to sue him for $10 million and full custody of their daughter, but it never materialized. Em has been sued a lot.
MMLP is filled some of Em’s greatest verses. And it’s fun to see where America was in 2000, before everything became awful…well at least before we were forced to see how awful everything was. It was a time when Columbine was considered a national tragedy and not just another Wednesday. It was a time when gas was $1.26. It was a time when nobody thought about wars or terrorism. It was a time when mainstream America’s biggest problem was a white rapper from Detroit making fun of people.
