Eminem’s ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’: Hear What Came Before and After

Eminem’s second major-label album was a compelling but lurid whodunit. “The Marshall Mathers LP” wasn’t a murder mystery, per se, though plenty of characters met their demise. It was a mystery of realness.

This remained a hip-hop conundrum 20 years ago — especially after the still-unsolved deaths of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Were rappers real or fake? If you claimed to be a product of the drug trade, had you actually moved weight? After Eminem’s unprecedented success for a white rapper, via “The Slim Shady LP” in 1999 and its follow-up, questions abounded. Was he a prankster, an industry plant, a generational voice? (The last was asserted in 2003 by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney). Were his lyrics truth or fantasy? Was he a public danger?

These days, a rapper’s rhymes are rarely more than a Twitter trending topic. But in 2000, multitudes were engrossed: a United States Senate committee about entertainment and violence (where vice-presidential wife Lynne Cheney said Eminem “advocates murder and rape”); feminist and gay activists; parents groups and religious activists.

In the often very catchy pop songs of “The Marshall Mathers LP,” Eminem got into it with all these people, plus his family, other musicians (famous or obscure), celebrities and the media. As a result, virtually every bystander had an opinion cocked, locked and ready to rock, to quote another Motor City madman, Ted Nugent. Eminem was a one-man internet before the internet really became the internet.

With his troika of identities — Marshall Mathers, Eminem, Slim Shady — appearing together for the first time, multisyllabic mockery, metrical slaloms of disdain and lots of funny voices, he exorcised trauma like a street magician flourishing cards, lyrics whirring around your ears. In 2020, having gone platinum 10 times, “The Marshall Mathers LP” hits differently. But it’s still a vivid snapshot of the late culture wars, when a foul-mouthed white rapper was our worst public health scare.

Source: Music - nytimes.com