FEATURE:
My Tea's Gone Cold, I'm Wondering Why…
Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP at Twenty-Five
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A number one album…
PHOTO CREDIT: Interscope Records (via The Independent)
in multiple countries around the world, Eminem’s third studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP, was released on 23rd May, 2000. Among the album’s producers were Dr. Dre, Mel-Man and F.B.T. The Marshall Mathers LP also featured guest spots from Dido, RBX, Sticky Fingaz, Dina Rae, Bizarre, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and others. Perhaps a more personal album than his previous two, Eminem’s lyrics tackled his rise to fame, criticism of his music, and estrangement from his family. Mixing different genes and sporting some of the sharpest and best lyrics on any Hip-Hop album, it is hard to hold it in high esteem without mentioning its faults. Whether playing a character or not, the album has not aged well in some respects. Its consistently misogynistic and homophobic lyrics would not be tolerated and supported in Hip-Hop today. Even though this happens still to this day, we have not really heard an album quite as vitriolic as this since 2000. In the way Eminem treats women and the violence evident through the album’s tracks. In addition to references of the Columbine High School massacre, there are repeated threats of violence and murder. In fact, songs like Stan that actually do feature murder. In spite of this, there is emotional depth from Eminem. His poetic turns of phrase no doubt influencing scores of rapper since. Almost twenty-five years after its release you can see the legacy it has and how it is seen as one of the most important Hip-Hop albums ever. However, at a time when there is misogyny and violence against women, is it an album that we should celebrate and spotlight?
I want to bring in a couple of reviews of The Marshall Mathews LP before asking whether we remember the album for its innovation and moments of brilliance or its frequently unsettling and toxic lyrics. I will start with a review from Stereogum. They wrote about The Marshall Mathers LP on its twentieth anniversary in 2020:
“On The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem talks about himself as if he’s public enemy number one, as if he’s the most hated person in the history of mainstream America. This is an act. He wasn’t that — not yet, anyway. A little more than a year earlier, The Slim Shady LP had sold well and established Em as a shock-rap star. He’d been on arena tours — as opener, not headliner — and he’d rankled public-taste watchdogs like Billboard editor Timothy White. But his success wasn’t a public crisis yet. Still, Eminem spends The Marshall Mathers LP speaking about himself as an inescapable pariah — the despised colossus who stands astride the world. As soon as the album came out, that’s exactly what he became.
On The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem’s great superpower is an ability to magnify every perceived slight to absurd degrees. In an anodyne MTV segment, Christina Aguilera had mentioned that Em had married Kim Mathers, the woman who he’d rapped about murdering on “’97 Bonnie & Clyde.” This was a tiny on-air moment, not some grand campaign that Aguilera was waging. But at the time, it wasn’t public knowledge that Em had married Kim, so Em was furious. On “The Real Slim Shady,” the ridiculously catchy first single from The Marshall Mathers LP, Em goes nuclear against Aguilera, imagining himself at the VMAs, sitting “next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst, and hear them argue over who she gave head to first.” It’s a wild, dizzy, indefensible overreaction — one of many.
Eminem has so many enemies on The Marshall Mathers LP: Parents, teachers, gay people, journalists, boy bands, girl groups, Insane Clowns, his own fans, his mother, his wife, himself. A couple of years before he made the album, Em had been a white-trash no-hoper in Detroit, a grown kid with a failed rap career and a daughter he couldn’t afford to raise. Em had transcended his origins through sheer profane ingenuity and force of personality and a lucky connection to Dr. Dre, and he’d suddenly become a public figure. But he was still miserable. His wife was cheating on him, and he was getting into fights over it, getting arrested. His mother was suing him for rapping about her. He was going through it, and he was telling jokes about going through it: “Tell me, what the hell is a fella to do?/ For every million I make, another relative sues.”
Trolling didn’t exist as a verb in 2000, but that’s what Eminem does all through The Marshall Mathers LP. He’d noticed that his homophobia on The Real Slim Shady had made people uncomfortable, so he doubled down on it, admitting later that he’d done it just to piss people off. Pissing people off had become his religion. This was a cruder time in American public history, when you could become a free-speech crusader just by saying fucked-up shit and daring uptight old people to react. (Lynne Cheney, another Eminem adversary, took the bait, complaining about his lyrics on the floor of Congress.) Em caught the same wave that the South Park guys did, riding shock-value infamy to towering mainstream fame. On the album, Em plays the villain — “I was put here to annoy the world, and destroy your little four-year-old boy or girl” — because he knows that this will make him a hero.
As irresponsible as Em gets on The Marshall Mathers LP, though, he also vents a whole lot of anxiety about his own success and what that might mean. Sometimes, he’s outwardly offensive, as on all the moments where he raps about the Columbine massacre, “a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time.” Sometimes, he’s defensive, insisting that he’s not society’s problem: “What about the makeup that you allow your 12-year-old daughter to wear?” Sometimes, he’s self-conscious, fretting about being “in rotation on rock ‘n’ roll stations” just because of his race. And sometimes he’s piercingly, fearfully vulnerable. That’s the power of “Stan,” a nearly-seven-minute Hitchcockian horror story about the kid who takes all of Eminem’s jokes the worst possible way.
“Stan” is a fascinating relic now — a genuinely cutting and absorbing story-song that entered the lexicon, changed the dictionary, and gave toxic fandom a name. Producer Mark The 45 King sampled a ballad from the relatively unknown British trip-hop siren Dido and briefly turned her into a star on American adult contemporary radio. (This was less than two years after the 45 King had sampled Annie for Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem).” Has a not-that-famous producer ever had such a culturally impactful one-two punch?)
My colleague Chris DeVille just wrote a whole piece about the legacy of “Stan,” but the song also served a function in the moment. At the 2001 Grammys, the same night that he famously lost Album Of The Year to Steely Dan, Eminem performed “Stan” with Elton John, making a feeble attempt to defuse all the homophobia accusations. The song choice was auspicious. “Stan” is the moment where subtext becomes text, where Eminem makes his vulnerability plain. Em wasn’t just a spitball-shooting outrage magnet. He was also a smart and incisive storyteller. You couldn’t hear “Stan” and believe otherwise.
If you’re listening closely enough, that vulnerability is all over The Marshall Mathers LP. Em imagines himself in a nursing home at 30, or staying home with a 40 at 40, babysitting his daughter’s kids while she’s out getting plastered. He gives voice to his own worst impulses — to the worst impulses that anyone could have. The previous album’s “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” where Em babbled lovingly to his daughter while disposing of her mother’s body, was bad enough. The Marshall Mathers LP gave us the harrowing prequel “Kim” — six minutes of crying and screaming and, finally, murdering: “You were supposed to love me! Now bleed, bitch, bleed!”
I hated “Kim.” It stressed me out, and made me sad, and exhausted me. So I avoided the song. I had the album on cassette, so I couldn’t just skip the song. Most of the time, I just fast-forwarded the tape to the end of the second side, sacrificing “Under The Influence” and “Criminal” so that I wouldn’t have to listen to “Kim” again. You couldn’t endure “Kim” and think that Eminem was cool, that he was someone worth emulating. He sounds pathetic, unhinged, his own worst-nightmare version of himself. But even on “Kim,” Em imagines himself as the victim, immune to whatever harm he may be inflicting on the rest of the world. It’s a perennial Eminem problem. As much as he fumes about bullies, he can’t process the idea that he might be one.
“Kim” plays out like a movie — dialog, sound effects, Em doing his own wife’s death-scream voice. “Stan” works the same way, with pencil scratches and car-in-river splashes giving physical dimension to the stories that he’s telling. The level of craft on The Marshall Mathers LP remains staggering. Where Dr. Dre only produced a few tracks on The Slim Shady LP, he and his proteges take over for much of Marshall Mathers, giving Em a tense, springy blockbuster-rap heft. And even when Em produces himself, as on the gothically pretty “The Way I Am,” the music has scope.
In terms of pure rapping technique, The Marshall Mathers LP is almost peerless. On his more recent records, Eminem has turned rap virtuosity into an empty technical display. But on Marshall Mathers, Em shows urgency and personality even when he’s speeding rings around his tracks. The album’s maddening catchiness is almost a problem. Em raps in absurdist, transgressive nursery rhymes that remain permanently lodged in my brain decades later: “Skippity bebop, Christopher Reeve!” I have spent most of the time since 2000 working in the music media, and yet I can’t see the word XXL without immediately hear Em’s clowning echoing in my skull: “Maybe now your magazine won’t have so much trouble to sell!”
The Eminem of 2000 was such a great rapper that he could make anything sound compelling — Tom Green catchphrases, UFO cockpit-radio chatter, intra-MTV gossip. A lot of it was terrible. The “Ken Kaniff” skit, wherein the two members of Insane Clown Posse give loud and slobbery blowjobs to Em’s menacing gay sketch-comedy character, is probably the most uncomfortable thing to have playing on your stereo when anyone else walks into your room. In decades of pornographic sex-noise rap-album skits, I don’t think anyone’s ever made anything worse. And yet I still kept listening. So many of us did. Apparently, there was a million of us just like Em, who cussed like Em, who just didn’t give a fuck like Em”.
I want to move onto a 2018 review from Pitchfork. Even though they celebrated its confidence and contradictions, there is this complex legacy. An album with very few radio-appropriate songs, one wonders whether spotlighting The Marshall Mathers LP is appropriate. Despite its clear problems and acidity, there is this legacy and reappraisal. How this album has changed Rap and influenced some of the best Hip-Hop artists of today:
“After the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem would shatter sales records with 1.7 million copies sold in the first week alone, 6.5 million in the first month, and eventually, over 35 million sold worldwide. It’s still the best-selling rap record of all time. He would cross over from rap to pop and rock radio, sell out arenas, win Grammys, rankle Lynne Cheney in front of the U.S. Congress, add a word to the dictionary, and incite protests from no small number of social justice groups. By virtue of his whiteness and talent in almost equal measure, Eminem would come to rule pop culture in America by becoming this century’s prototypical troll.
Whatever he’s become since, there can be no question that Eminem was one of the greatest to ever do it. He blew a young Kendrick Lamar’s mind, teaching him things about narrative clarity that he wouldn’t learn elsewhere. He killed JAY-Z on his own track, thus spoke Nas. It was Dr. Dre—N.W.A., The Chronic, Aftermath Records, kingpin of West Coast rap-Dr. Dre—who got Eminem’s demo tape in the late ’90s and co-signed this twentysomething, lemon-faced, twiggy, vociferously self-proclaimed son of a bitch from the East side of Detroit born Marshall Bruce Mathers III.
He was also, and remains, a homophobe, a misogynist, a confessed domestic abuser. He wrote later that, because of his critics, he went into what he called the “‘faggot’ zone” for this album “on purpose. Like, fuck you.” He defended this ugliness using the modern troll’s boilerplate: double down on the thing they want you to change until they can’t tell what you believe and what you don’t. To be a long-suffering listener of Eminem is to contend with this petulant fake-radical impulse, but it remains an impulse that defined the scope and tenor of The Marshall Mathers LP and became part and parcel to its success.
Across his major label debut, The Slim Shady LP, Eminem established the framework of his mythology: He was born into poverty, raised without a father, shuttled between Missouri and the lower-middle-class black neighborhoods of Detroit, rootless, bullied to near-death. The album established his to-put-it-lightly Freudian relationship with his mother, his clear love for legends like Big Daddy Kane and Masta Ace and Nas, and his come-up battle-rapping at the Detroit hip-hop clubs. When the dust settled, his rapid ascent and sudden fame began to burrow into his writing, coloring his every want, thrumming behind the text.
“The Real Slim Shady” was one of the last songs written for the record. All through 1999, Eminem had been scribbling lyrics—not actual lines, just two or three words, little scraps of meter and verse unarrayed on a page—while on a world tour supporting his debut. Verses began to blacken notebooks after had found inspiration in the deregulated drug culture of Amsterdam, so much so that he almost named this album after the city. Meanwhile, over in the States, Dr. Dre and several other producers, including the Funky Bass Team and the 45 King, were assembling the beats for what would become the bulk of The Marshall Mathers LP. In early 2000, when Eminem submitted the project to Interscope label boss Jimmy Iovine, he was unsatisfied. It was macabre, morose, reflexive, and unflinchingly personal. It also didn’t have a hit.
The goal of rap, for Eminem, is to overwhelm. The Marshall Mathers LP floods the room with “South Park” and grisly kidnappings, Ricky Martin and ecstasy, the assassination of Gianni Versace and the impregnation of Jennifer Lopez. One minute you’re dealing with hypocritical gun legislation, the next you’re subject to an Insane Clown Posse diss track; as soon as you consider Bill Clinton’s abuse of power, Eminem is recasting the shooters of the Columbine High School massacre as the real victims. It is data overload, that sharp inhale and sigh of never getting a word in edgewise. For 70 minutes, you are tethered to a twirling Mathers, eye to eye, a dizzying and intimate manipulation by pathos and abuse by words. Sometimes it really is just a litany: “Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts,” or, “Fuck, shit, ass, bitch, cunt, shooby-de-doo-wop, skibbedy-be-bop.” The album’s centrifugal force is thrilling and it is to Eminem’s great credit that he doesn’t once let go of his grasp.
American culture allowed Eminem to freely negate any kind of identity he wanted to, as was his inherent privilege. But, as the critic Hilton Als wrote in his 2003 essay “White Noise,” it didn’t matter to Eminem. “Mathers never claimed whiteness and its privileges as his birthright because he didn’t feel white and privileged,” Als wrote. It’s interesting, though, that Eminem never negated his masculinity or heterosexuality, two identities that were and, more or less, remain intrinsic to the success of male rappers. His privilege meant that he could shed his racial signifiers and become a ghost, a psychopath, a loving father, a bigot, a clown. So why do fans believe any of this? Why, when they listened to Eminem rip his vocal cords open and disconnect from reality and mimic slitting the throat of his wife while he screams at her to “bleed, bitch bleed” do they take him so seriously?
Part of it has to do with that virtuosity. If contemporaries like OutKast and Ghostface grew their albums from the soil, Eminem grew his from the salted earth. He’s grounded but acidic, you see the ink of his words, the indent they make on the page, the ridges formed around the letters by the force of his pen. The delight when he finds a little turn of phrase like “ducked the fuck way down,” or, “I guess I must just blew up quick” shoots out dopamine. It would be one thing if Eminem simply loved language, but more than that, he loves the tradition of rapping, this guy whose passion was donated to him by hip-hop at an early age, a vocation that rescued him from the status quo of poverty, that kept him from becoming among the millions just like someone else. At his best, he is like watching a gymnast spin on the parallel bars in slow motion:
Part of it, too, was the fantasy he offered. Along with his ’00 nu-metal tourmates Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, Eminem’s music became synonymous with a kind of ball-chain necklace, mad-at-the-world angst, channeling the latent rage leftover from rap rock’s heyday. Here was a guy who put to carefully chosen words the feeling of being broke, at the end of your rope, jealous and backed up into a corner. Those who threw up their arms and screamed “You don’t want to fuck with me” along with him could feel a little bit of anger exiting their bodies, and the mental pressure dropping by a few millibars.
But the anger and trauma he conjured from his childhood of abuse and bullying felt uncomfortably real in all his performances. On The Marshall Mathers LP, he suits the action to the word and the word to the action. He picks the right tone for the right mood, the horrorcore of “Remember Me?,” the beleaguered artist on “The Way I Am,” the impish malevolence of “Criminal,” or the tortured, regretful, loving, deranged, murderous everything-all-at-once feeling of “Kim.” We don’t really believe it, but we believe Eminem really believes it.
Art bends the world in ways we can’t always see. This album is categorically music for kids, and it rests on the shelf as a time capsule from the last big cultural flashpoint of the 20th century. Heard now, the album is still a considerable piece of music, but it’s also full of this hate. And the targets of that hate—women, the LGBTQ community—are the same people that those in power seek to marginalize. To say otherwise is to rob great art of its power. To say that Eminem’s clearly homophobic lyrics should be read as satire is to argue in bad faith that the impact art has on the world, the way it shapes the life of those who experience it, can be controlled and mitigated. Because hate emerges under the guise of art, it doesn’t erase the profound hurt it brings to a population that may be out of your own purview”.
There is that debate about albums like The Marshall Mathews LP. Others will write about it closer to its twenty-fifth anniversary on 23rd May. So important in terms of its musical impact and how it revolutionised Hip-Hop, at a time when you could not conscientiously an album like it that came out today, will the 2000 release always have this complicated legacy? In spite of that, as Wikipedia write, there has been this reappraisal and modern-day relevance that at least shows what a powerful and important album The Marshall Mathers LP is:
“Since its initial release, The Marshall Mathers LP has been highly acclaimed in retrospective critic reviews. It has been regarded by critics as Eminem's best album and has been ranked in multiple lists of the greatest albums of all time. In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Christian Hoard said it "delved much deeper into personal pain [than The Slim Shady LP], and the result was a minor masterpiece that merged iller-than-ill flows with a brilliant sense of the macabre." According to Sputnikmusic's Nick Butler, The Marshall Mathers LP stands as a culturally significant record in American popular music, but also "remains a truly special album, unique in rap's canon, owing its spirit to rock and its heritage to rap, in a way I've rarely heard". Insanul Ahmed of Complex wrote, "At a time when the Billboard charts were dominated by squeaky-clean pop acts like NSYNC and Backstreet Boys, Eminem offered a rebuttal to the hypocritical American mainstream that criticizes rap music while celebrating—and, worse, commercializing—sex, violence, and bigotry in other arenas. This album turned Eminem into a global icon. There was a huge amount of hype and controversy around it [...] But none of that takes away from its musical achievement. This album definitively proved that the Detroit rapper was a gifted lyricist, a brilliant songwriter, and a visionary artist." Mike Elizondo, a former collaborator on Eminem's albums, said, "I felt like Marshall was part of this wave with Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (1994) and Reservoir Dogs (1992) [...] This next level of art with incredible graphic imagery that Marshall had the ability to paint. Love it or hate it he was obviously very skilled at the stories he was telling."
Jeff Weiss of The Ringer wrote, "The Marshall Mathers LP certified Eminem as an alienated voice of a generation, a caustic wedge issue distilling the spirits of Elvis, Holden Caulfield, Johnny Rotten, Kurt Cobain, Cartman from South Park, and Tupac if he shopped at Kroger. In a postmodern abyss where everything's performative, it might have been the last album that possessed the capacity to genuinely shock.” Dan Ozzi of Vice highlighted that "Eminem was the one artist high school kids seemed to unanimously connect with. [...] he represented everything high school years are about: blind rage, misguided rebellion, adolescent frustration. He was like a human middle finger. An X-rated Dennis the Menace for a dial-up modem generation." Max Bell of Spin wrote that the album remains "one of the most critically-acclaimed, commercially-successful, and influential albums in rap history", citing rappers influenced by the album, such as Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and Juice WRLD. Bonsu Thompson of Medium described the album as "a masterful confluence of punk, bluegrass, and subterranean hip-hop that gave life to a singular brand of Americana rap." Thompson further praised the album's impact on white rappers, saying, "For a snapshot of the album's seismic influence, compare the pre–Marshall Mathers LP decade of White rappers like Everlast and MC Serch with the post-2000 landscape of Action Bronson, G-Eazy, and the late Mac Miller [...] Eminem homogenized the White rapper”.
It is clear that The Marshall Mathers LP has changed Hip-Hop. Its place in music history is set. However, as we mark twenty-five years of a groundbreaking album, what impact will it have in years to come. Its moments of lyrical genius and genre-blending cannot be faulted. However, at a time when misogyny is rising and being weaponised; where domestic abuse, violence against women and sexual violence is high, there is this sense of guilt or discomfort listening to an album as visceral and unapologetically explicit and violent as The Marshall Mathers LP. One would wonder what the album would sound like if Eminem focused the proverbial gun on himself or cut away the homophobia and misogyny. It is difficult. Both timeless and a moment in Hip-Hop that we do not want to see repeated, how do you acknowledge the bigotry and misogyny in 2025? However, without an album like The Marshall Mathers LP, you do wonder whether certain artists of today would be here without it. It is clear that, when it comes to this album, there is…
NOTHING else like it.