Welcome to the summer of Shady. Where a very blond, white-trash
homeboy from Detroit named Marshall becomes the king of
hip-hop. It's like something out of science fiction.
Eminem's 1999 triple-platinum major-label debut, The Slim
Shady LP, was a shot in hip-hop's arm, the grand entrance
of a hurricane dressed as a Detroit kid with major-league
skills and a potential mental disorder. This time out, he's
more funny and much more scary. On The Marshall Mathers
LP he hits you with the lyrical complexity and detailed
narratives of Biggie, the hilarious, is-he-kidding-or-not
button-pushing of Howard Stern, the disaffected angry-white-boy-ness
of Fight Club and the fearless, kill-me-if-you-can energy
of Tupac. He has a macabre imagination to rival Satan's
and an incredible ability to create new rhyme patterns.
He has a frightening proclivity to spit venom one moment
and humor the next, and a never-ending slew of jaw-dropping
punch lines. He is, simply, better than any other MC in
hip-hop except for Jay-Z -- yes, better than Beanie Sigel,
Pharoahe Monch, Snoop, Common, Prodigy, Xzibit, Redman,
Big Pun and all of the Lox. It feels dangerous to think
of a white boy nearing the aesthetic zenith of the celebration
of black maleness called hip-hop, but just as blacks have
to be twice as good to get ahead in life, to get ahead in
hip-hop Eminem has had to be twice as ill.
Expect, during this summer of Shady, to hear Marshall Mathers
following you around the hip-hop nation, flowing from boomboxes,
trucks and lips the same way Dre's The Chronic, Raekwon's
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx . . . and B.I.G.'s Life After Death
once did. You may find Eminem popping out of your own mouth,
because he's the most quotable MC alive, both consistently
funny and ridiculously far over the top. He rarely uses
the same rhyme pattern twice, and he changes his vocal style
again and again on Marshall Mathers, often in the space
of one verse -- he uses six different voices in one stretch
of "Criminal." His feelings on Jennifer Lopez:
"I'm sorry, Puff/But I don't give a fuck if this chick
was my own mother/I'd still fuck her with no rubber."
And life in Detroit: "That's why we're crowned the
murder capital still!/This ain't Detroit!/This is motherfuckin'
Hamburger Hill!/We don't do drive-bys/We park in front of
houses and shoot/And when the police come, we fuckin' shoot
it out with 'em, too!"
Expect, also, many of these tracks to become the beat of
the summer. Dr. Dre and partner-of-late Mel-Man produced
much of the album, while Eminem and his Detroit crew, F.B.T.,
handled most of the rest. The sound shifts between slick,
bright, melodic funk that's so R&B-ish, you can dance
to it ("Who Knew," "The Real Slimy Shady")
and slow, driving, outrageous-bass hardcore raw hip-hop
made for cruising in lowriders ("Amityville,"
"I'm Back"). Seven years after The Chronic and
fourteen after the dawn of N.W.A, Dre is that legendary
coach taking a third different team to a national title,
still making your head hurt from all the nodding, still
crazy dope after all these years.
Finally, this summer you'll also see Eminem become 2000's
Luther Campbell or Sister Souljah, the rapper attacked in
public for supposedly bringing our standards to new lows.
His insistent, tiring gay bashing almost begs you to hate
him: "I'll stab you in the head, whether you're fag
or les/Or a homosex, a hermaph or a trans-a-ves. . . ./Hate
fags? The answer's yes." This may just be grade-school
bullshit, as Eminem claims, but it's bullshit nonetheless.
But the man who pronounced that he was sent here to "piss
the world off" knows that being hated is essential
to his appeal. It creates a boundary between his fans and
outsiders, whether they be parents or his much-maligned
TRL peer Christina Aguilera.
But there's too much anger on The Marshall Mathers LP for
it to be just a calculated scheme to win fans. Eminem is
a kid who was brutally beaten up in school and raised by
a mother who recently hit him with a $10 million defamation-of-character
lawsuit for saying things like "A mother did drugs,
tar, liquor, cigarettes and speed/The baby came out disfigured,
ligaments indeed/It was a seed who would grow up just as
crazy as she/Don't dare make fun of that baby/'Cause that
baby was me. . . ./How the fuck you supposed to grow up
when you weren't raised?" The album opens with "Kill
You," in which he threatens Mom with guess what.
Things degenerate from there into the mountain of bile
reserved for Kim, the mother of his baby and the star of
the world's most public ongoing murder fantasy. The song
named after her on Marshall Mathers is the prequel to the
previous album's " '97 Bonnie and Clyde" -- in
which Eminem speaks to his daughter, Hailie, as he dumps
Kim's body in a lake. But where "Bonnie and Clyde"
is a clever takeoff on Will Smith's "Just the Two of
Us," "Kim" has Eminem screaming at his ex
in an insane stream-of-consciousness hate spew. There's
little humor to blunt the shock of the hellbent animosity
of "Kim." What makes it powerful is that, of course,
he doesn't just hate her. It's the most harrowing sick-love
song since Guns n' Roses' "Used to Love Her."
Eminem could be the Axl Rose of hip-hop, a rage-filled,
drug-addled, homicidal, charismatic talent and bona fide
megastar. The Marshall Mathers LP is a car-crash record:
loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling.
It's also impossible to pull your ears away from.
by Toure, Rolling Stone
