Rewrite
Eminem has sold over 50 million records domestically. Internationally, that number is up around 200 million.
This level of success has, understandably, had a distorting effect on how the rapper’s music is perceived. When an artist’s work becomes as popular and ubiquitous as Eminem’s has, there are going to be many, many interpretations of that work. And just because you think you’ve got a handle on Em’s story doesn’t mean there isn’t a very popular alternate perception. After all, this is Marshall Mathers, the guy who invented the term “Stan.” Suffice it to say, you find out quickly talking to Em fans—and who in hip-hop does this not describe, really?—that your take really is one of many.
Revisiting Em’s rap repertoire for this project has been an eye-opening experience. Spanning almost 20 years and 21 releases, his songs and albums have more unexplored nooks and crannies than most casual fans realize. His career has also taken a more complicated shape than its initial arc implied.
Eminem is one of the few rappers still releasing new music who can motivate large numbers to engage with his music. His artistic milieu, in many ways, is that of the album, even if he arose in the internet era that has done so much to lessen the importance of the form. So without further ado, here’s our ranking of every single Eminem project.
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, DJ Khalil, Charley Hustle, Resto, Mr. Porter, Rico Love, Kasanova, Sarom, CertiFYD, AraabMuzik, Just Blaze, Doc McKinney, Illangelo, Frank Dukes, DJ Premier, Stevie J, Sean Combs,
Features: James Horner, Royce da 5′9″, Gwen Stefani, Rob Bailey and The Hustle Standard, Busta Rhymes, KXNG CROOKED, Tech N9ne, Denaun, Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Rico Love, Slaughterhouse, The Weeknd, 50 Cent, Logic, The Notorious B.I.G., and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony
Sales: 100,000
In the mid-2010s, we saw a trend of movie soundtracks being executive produced by rappers. The high point was the Black Panther soundtrack, overseen by Kendrick Lamar, which featured an eclectic mix of some of the brightest talents from the West Coast. At the other end of the spectrum, we had the clumsy Great Gatsby soundtrack, supervised by Jay-Z, with a collection of songs that felt too scattershot to make an impact.
Nestled in between—perhaps a notch above Future’s Superfly soundtrack and just below J. Cole’s Creed III album—is the Eminem-produced Southpaw soundtrack. The soundtrack came during those peak Slaughterhouse years, where Em’s production choices were chunky and rock-inspired, while the rhymes were more technical than personal.
Em only appears on four tracks, but his influence is all over this project. From metal-inspired posse cut “Beast (Southpaw Remix)” to Slaughterhouse’s “R.N.S,” the soundtrack attempts to present a sound that features a blend of ruggedness, dramatics, and inspiration that aligns with the film. They ultimately both kind of fail, as they try to grasp a seriousness that doesn’t really match the material.
The most successful moments on the Southpaw album occur when everyone just relaxes a little bit. “All I Think About” stands out, showcasing Em and Royce rapping in a vibrant and loose kind of way. While What About the Rest of Us,” featuring Action Bronson and Joey Badass, has a great lunchtime table energy that I wish Em would adapt more. However, these moments are rare; much of the album carries a tight, aggressive energy. Em was originally supposed to star in Southpaw, but dropped out. Maybe he just wasn’t that into the material. —Dimas Sanfiorenzo
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, DJ Premier, Boi-1da, The Maven Boys, Just Blaze, Luis Resto, Emile Haynie, John Hill, Conrad Clifton, Mr. Porter, Marv Won, Statik Selektah, WLPWR
Features: Slaughterhouse, Yelawolf, Kobe, Sia, Kon Artis, Swifty McVay, Bizarre, Kuniva, Skylar Grey, Royce da 5’9″, Big Sean, Danny Brown, Dej Loaf, Trick-Trick
Sales: 300,000
What started off as a joke with “Lyrical miracle, spiritual individual, criminal, subliminal in your swimming pool” during Shady Records’ 2011 BET Hip-Hop Awards Cypher turned into a full-blown obsession by the time the label anniversary compilation Shady XV hit the shelves. This is to say that Eminem became far more concerned with complex rhyme schemes than creating compositionally compelling songs.
The nine new Eminem songs across the Shady XV compilation album are some of the most hollow and forgettable of his career. It’s these kinds of song structures—or lack thereof—that would cause disgraced comedian Chris D’Elia to create his own video mocking Marshall Mathers’ overly technical flow. “Shady XV” and “Right For Me” are particularly heinous offenders, whirlwind of nothingness with Em rhyming without any cohesion or narrative trajectory.
Unlike 2006’s The Re-Up, the stable of Shady Records was more promising this time around. It’s a shame that signees Slaughterhouse and Yelawolf are relegated to two songs each. (Slaughterhouse’s DJ Premier-produced “Y’All Ready Know” and Yelawolf’s country-laced “Down” are a couple of highlights.)
Despite largely falling flat, the label’s head honcho still has a moment or two of saving face. As far as Eminem’s melodramatic pop tracks go, “Guts Over Fear,” with Sia, is one of his most overlooked. Serving double duties as both the compilation’s lead single and the theme of Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer, the track serves as a rare moment of self-awareness on Shady XV. It sees Marshall Mathers contemplating where to go next in his career, concerned that he has nothing new left to say. “Sometimes I feel like all I ever do is find different ways to word the same old song,” he raps on the opening verse.
The closing track, “Detroit Vs. Everybody” is an epic passing of the torch for the Motor City, with fellow veterans of the city Royce da 5′9″ and Trick Trick paying it forward to recognize the next generation of D-Town spitters in Big Sean, Dej Loaf and Danny Brown.
Eminem’s presence across Shady XV exists in two ideological playing fields. At once, he has redeemed himself as a label head, finding his first batch of bankable artists since 50 Cent. On the other hand, the project would usher in an unpleasant era in his rap career, where rhyming was king but rapping itself was something of an afterthought. —Mr. Wavvy
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Rick Rubin, Skylar Grey, Luis Resto, Mr. Porter, Mark Batson, Emile Haynie, Frequency, Aalias, Just Blaze, Alex da Kid, Fredwreck, Rock Mafia, Hit-Boy, Illa da Producer, Scram Jones, DJ Khalil
Features: Beyoncé, Phresher, Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys, X Ambassadors, Skylar Grey, Kehlani, P!nk
Sales: Platinum
Speaking with Elton John for Interview Magazine a few days ahead of its release, Eminem described his approach to Revival in such a way that outlines its pitfalls: “I’ve tried to make a little something for everyone.”
Revival falls flat in pandering instead of innovating. It is an album that struggles to find cohesion. The rapper would acknowledge his struggle to draw inspiration during an interview with Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell’s Broken Record podcast.
“When you start out in your career, you have a blank canvas, so you can paint anywhere that you want because the shit ain’t been painted on yet…by the time you get to your seventh and eighth album, you’ve already painted all over that,” he said. “There’s nowhere else to paint. So it’s like, where do you go? And people are always expecting something different from you.”
Even the track Eminem was describing here, “Walk on Water” with Beyoncé—about not knowing where to go next in his career—is a rehashing of an idea he explored just a few years earlier on “Guts Over Fear.”
Revival revisits approaches of past Eminem albums to far more underwhelming results. Rock-heavy tracks like “Remind Me” and “Heat” emphasize the “trash” in trailer trash. Mr. Mathers hits listeners over the head with cringeworthy lyrics such as “Your booty is heavy duty like diarrhea” and “You got buns, I got aspergers.”
Where the aforementioned tracks attempt to recapture the rap-rock success of The Marshall Mathers LP 2, others find the rapper chasing the “Love The Way You Lie” dragon in the album’s inordinate amount of pop features. “River” with Ed Sheeran feels like it was lost in the Tumblr era. “Need Me” feels like Eminem featured on a P!nk track, a song with an acute soccer mom sensibility. “Nowhere Fast” with Kehlani has a name that speaks for itself.
However, no track is more egregious than “Untouchable.” Eminem attempts to tackle systemic oppression on this conceptually-ambitious song, rapping from the perspectives of both a white policeman and later a black man. Although well-intended, the song feels more performative than resonant. This led former Shady Records recording artist Joe Budden to call the track “one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard,” and accuse his former label head of “[using] the plight of Black people to sell a fucking record.”
For all the pitfalls of Revival, the album ends on a strong note. The duo of “Castle” and “Arose” show that Eminem is still capable of crafting deeply personal, emotionally resonant songs when he hones in on a tight concept. Both tracks see Eminem reflecting on his near-death experience at the hands of his pill addiction with a creative narrative, rapping in a letter to his daughter Hallie on the “Castle,” and to his family whom he would have left behind had he overdosed on “Arose.” Revival shows flashes of greatness, but they’re buried under layers of misfires. —Mr. Wavvy
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Luis Resto, Hi-Tek, Lance Nicholas, Mr. Porter, Witt & Pep, Red Spyda, Kanye West, Trackboyz, Dr. Dre, Mike Elizondo
Features: Obie Trice, Young Zee, B-Real, Bugz
Sales: 2x Platinum
Judging from the string-laden theatrics of opener “Git Up”—which feels like the spiritual successor to 2001’s temper tantrum anthem “Fight Music”— it would be easy to assume that D12 World would continue the gully, cartoonish violence of the Detroit group’s previous album, Devil’s Night, and be yet another record filled with self-motivational songs designed to give the bullied the courage to knock out their bullies. With an alliteration-heavy, tongue-twisting verse, Eminem sounds particularly fired up and more thuggish than ever before, rapping: “Hands around our Colt handles, hold them like Roman candles.”
Yet this early promise isn’t really built on enough, with D12’s second studio album suffering from an identity crisis due to production that’s far too sugary. The title track is produced by Kanye West, but a goofy Middle Eastern flute harmony and lazy bars about “crashing your moms’ jeep” mean it’s an instant-skip. Hearing D12’s most horrorcore member Bizarre talk about killing women while wearing a Jason Vorhees mask, over glitzy production that feels like a knock-off Jazze Pha beat (“I’ll Be Damned”) is also strange. The song is a perfect crystallization of the project’s identity crisis. Throughout, it’s like an Interscope executive is advising D12 to tone down their hardcore instincts and remember to appeal more to the Billboard charts.
Led by the goofy single “My Band,” which is a sort of frat-boy mocking, lightly subversive take on the excesses of rock and roll fame, the project tends to capture Eminem on autopilot, more concerned with being a comedian than scratching blood out of America’s indulgences, like he did before with 2002’s cutting The Eminem Show. “Yesterday, Kuniva tried to pull a knife on me / Cos’ I told him Jessica Alba’s my wife-to-be” Em spits on “My Band” in a flat tone, suggesting the jokes aren’t as galvanizing to Slim Shady’s spirit anymore and he’s talking shit with less incisiveness. Arguably, on various occasions, Kon Artis and the late Proof (who recorded their raps separately due to a falling out) have better verses than their leader.
However, despite the overall patchiness, D12 World definitely has a few restorative moments, particularly “How Come,”where the group analyzes their up-and-down internal relationships in real-time. This song offers more honesty than most of the other tracks combined. Eminem powerfully suggests his fellow group members have shown less loyalty since he became the biggest pop star on the planet: “Now I feel a vibe, I just can’t describe it / Much as your pride tries to hide it / You’re cold, your touch is just like ice and your eyes is a look of resentment.”
The ferocious beat to the B-Real-featuring “American Psycho II,” which sounds like a demented take on a ‘60s superhero theme tune, also inspires Eminem to soar, as he bravely threatens to avenge an attack by gang members in LA on his rap friend Xzibit by making them drink a liquor bottle filled with urine.
This album marked the end of D12 as an Eminem-backed group—but even if the results are more disappointing than memorable, there’s just enough fiery moments to ensure it’s not a complete waste of time. Perhaps though, the primary takeaway here is that when rap superstars like 50 Cent (with G-Unit) or Eminem try to elevate their day one friends into rap stars, they’re naturally going to hit a brick wall by trying to keep everyone happy, making a brutal cut off point grimly inevitable. —Thomas Hobbs
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Luis Resto, Rikanatti, Witt and Pep, Focus…, The Alchemist, Akon, Dr. Dre, Dawaun Parker, Disco D, L.T. Moe
Features: Obie Trice, Stat Quo, Bobby Creekwater, Cashis, Bizarre, Kuniva, 50 Cent, Lloyd Banks, Proof, Swifty McVay, Mr. Porter, Akon, Nate Dogg,
Sales: 2x Platinum
Originally conceived as a mixtape, The Re-Up serves as a showcase of Shady Records’ talent pool, from established acts like 50 Cent and Obie Trice, to ushering in newcomers Ca$his, Stat Quo and Bobby Creekwater. Unfortunately, the compilation reveals that Eminem’s instincts as a label head aren’t as sharp as his rapping.
Eminem’s personal life was in turmoil during the time of The Re-Up’s release. Two thousand six saw the loss of his best friend, Proof, his remarriage and subsequent divorce to Kim, and an escalating pill addiction. His verses feel strangely detached. Instead of offering introspection or vulnerability at this trying time, Eminem dives into empty gangster talk and paranoia. You can hear the numbness in Em’s voice throughout the project—the project sounds like someone trying to move on with their life without processing their pain.
Years later, Eminem would remember this period as one of his lowest points in his addiction journey. “I remember things started getting really, really bad when me, 50 and G-Unit did BET’s 106 & Park,” he wrote in a cover story essay for XXL in 2022. “That’s when the wheels started coming off. One of the hosts was talking to me and I could not understand a word she was saying. 50 had to cover for me and answer every question.”
“No Apologies” is a diamond in the rough on The Re-Up. A rehashing of two past freestyles mashed together, the track is a rare moment where Em offers something raw and compelling.
“My head hits the pillow, a weeping willow, I can’t sleep, a pain so deep it bellows, But these cellos help just to keep me mellow, Hands on my head, touch knees to elbows,” he raps on its second verse.
The new label additions fail to drum up any music to write home about, with the exception of Stat Quo’s Dr. Dre produced club-heater “Get Low.” If anything, this track is a reminder that the good doctor’s presence is deeply missed, serving as his only appearance throughout the project.
Instead of elevating the next wave of Shady Records talent, The Re-Up backfires by exposing the weaknesses of its roster and Eminem’s own creative struggles during a difficult period in his life. All three new artists, Ca$his, Stat Quo and Bobby Creekwater, left the label without ever releasing a studio album and as of 2024, not a single artist from the compilation aside from Eminem himself remains on Shady Records. —Mr. Wavvy
Label: WEB Entertainment
Producers: Eminem, Mr. Porter, Kevin Wilder
Features: Proof, DJ Head, Eye-Kyu, Mr. Porter, Thyme, Three
Sales: N/A
Before he became the record-breaking rap juggernaut we all know and love, there was struggle rapper Eminem, a high school dropout who couldn’t even sell 500 copies of his debut album. But everyone’s gotta start somewhere, right?
Em, who had been honing his rap skills as a member of groups like New Jacks and Soul Intent, was first discovered by production duo the Bass Brothers (Jeff and Mark Bass) years before appearing on Dr. Dre’s radar. Mark heard Em on local Hip Hop radio station WJLB and was struck by his ability to “put rhymes together rhythmically that looked like a drum solo.” From there, he and his brother decided to launch a record label, WEB Entertainment, in order to put Em’s music out. Its first release: Infinite.
Arriving just a couple of months after the death of 2Pac, the album made its debut in November 1996. Sold locally—or attempted to be sold locally, at least—the 11-track project failed to make noise, shifting just a few hundred copies. But this wasn’t a huge surprise given the project’s lack of direction and lackluster production. Mr. Porter’s dusty loops and lo-fi aesthetic offer consistency but the dated underground ambience stunts the album’s growth.
It isn’t just the production that impedes Infinite. Eminem’s delivery oddly lacks urgency, which in turn rubs off on his lyrical competency. Just listen to “313.” Besides the unfortunate hook (“What you know about a sweet MC?”), the verses are littered with corny lines (“You could date a stick of dynamite and wouldn’t go out with a bang”). Then on “Tonite,” he face plants right into one of hip-hop’s cringiest tropes, rhyming “miracle” with “lyrical.”
The tone nuances of a young Marshall Mathers feel familiar, though; his rhyme schemes stand out on occasion too. Like on “It’s OK,” when he spits: “Caught up in bouts with the root of all evil/ I’ve seen it turn beautiful people crude and deceitful/ And make ’em do shit illegal for these Grants and Jacksons/ These transactions explain a man’s actions.”
Infinite forced Eminem to rethink the approach to his art. Opting to try something very different, a trip to the bathroom sparked the idea for his Slim Shady alter-ego which inspired a game-changing new musical direction and birthed a Rap God. The rest, as they say, is history.—Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Shady/Interscope
Producers: Mr. Porter, Eminem, Havoc, Bangladesh, DJ Khalil, Magnedo7, Supa Dups, JG
Features: Slaughterhouse, Bruno Mars
Sales: Gold
There aren’t too many rappers who can keep up with Eminem on the mic.
One MC, however, who has always been able to step up to the plate and prove himself a worthy sparring partner and reliable wingman for Eminem is fellow Motor City MC Royce Da 5’9”. The pair, who first met in 1997 at an Usher concert in Detroit where Royce and his group Wall Street were performing, formed the duo Bad Meets Evil towards the end of the ‘90s. Dropping a few underground cuts during this time, the duo were officially introduced to the world in 1999 on Em’s major label debut, The Slim Shady LP, on the track “Bad Meets Evil.” It’s here that Royce unknowingly (or maybe knowingly) spoke into existence the title of his and Em’s future project: “He’s Evil, and I’m Bad like Steve Seagal/ Against peaceful, see you in hell for the sequel”.
Showcasing the same lyrical intensity, seamless chemistry and potent penmanship found in their earlier works, but with added range thanks to some personal growth and new experiences, Hell: The Sequel secured Bad Meets Evil’s place amongst the GOAT duos debate. Topping the Billboard 200 chart in June 2011, with first week sales of 171,000 copies, it was helped on by lead single “Fast Lane,” an adrenaline-fueled, high-octane display of blistering lyricism on which Em and Royce take turns getting their lyrical guns off, spraying listeners with more punchlines than they know what to do with.
Other standouts include opener “Welcome 2 Hell,” bonus cut “Living Proof,” and “Take from Me,” a spurring PSA that hears both Em and Royce lash out at friends, fans and crooks with a fondness for stealing. “The Reunion” and “A Kiss” offer comic relief, while “Loud Noises” introduces Eminem fans to Slaughterhouse (Royce Da 5’9”, Joe Budden, Joel Ortiz, Crooked I) who at the time had just signed to Shady Records. “Lighters” is by far the project’s most divisive track, a cheesy, Bruno Mars-featured bop manufactured for pop radio, while it turned some Eminem die-hards off, it seemed to find an audience—the record was certified double Platinum.
Hell: The Sequel didn’t just quench the thirst of fans desperate to hear Bad Meets Evil reunite, it also provided a safe space for Em and Royce to mend fences and rekindle a friendship that was fractured for a time following a very public fallout.
Now, the real question: will they ever drop another project together? — Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Denaun Porter, Scott Storch, DJ Head, Jeff Bass, Mike Elizondo, Luis Resto
Features: Dr. Dre, Obie Trice, Truth Hurts, Dina Rae, Rondell Beene
Sales: 2x Platinum
Despite the commercial success of D12’s debut, Devil’s Night, is an underrated album. Even if you choose to fast forward through all of Proof, Kuniva, Swifty McVay, Bizarre, and Kon Artis’ contributions, Devil’s Night features some of Eminem’s best 16s. Riding high off the huge success of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem’s rapping is more confident than ever; here was an artist at the height of his powers.
Thematically and stylistically, Em picks up where MMLP leaves off. Since he isn’t labored with carrying an entire song, his verses are laced so tight they’re simultaneously effortless and intricate. “Ever since I spit some shit/On Infinite/I been giving it/A hundred and ten percent,” he says on “Shit Can Happen.” And yet, Em is absent from the best song on the album, “That’s How,” where all the other group members take turns telling stories in four bars. Like this one, from Kuniva: “Choking your wife all in front of your peeps (bitch!)/She toss a brick through the window of your Jeep/Get back together by the end of the week, that’s so sweet/(Slim and Kim argue too much.)”
The thing is, as overshadowed as they’ll always be by Em, the rest of the D12 are perfectly solid rappers. Especially Proof and Swifty. (Kon Artis has also had a successful career as a producer, under the moniker Mr. Porter.) These guys have a lot to say, even when they’re not just speaking of the devil. —Insanul Ahmed
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Luis Resto, Mark Batson, Tim Suby, !llmind, Royce Da 5’9″, Andre Brissett, Dawaun Parker, d.a. got that dope, Alex Villasana, Skylar Grey, Mr. Porter, The Alchemist, Dem Jointz & Trevor Lawrence Jr., Erik “Bluetooth” Griggs, Ricky Racks, Jayson DeZuzio, IllaDaProducer, mjNichols, BlackNailz, J.LBS, TheLoudPack, Mike Zombie, Luca Mauti, T-Minus, Frano, Lonestarrmuzik, S1, Black Bethoven, Mark Batson
Features: Young M.A, Royce da 5’9″, White Gold, Ed Sheeran, Juice Wrld, Skylar Grey, Black Thought, Q-Tip, Denaun, Anderson .Paak, Don Toliver, Kxng Crooked, Joell Ortiz, DJ Premier, Ty Dolla $ign, Dr. Dre, Sly Pyper, MAJ,
Sales: 2x Platinum
Entering the 2020s, Eminem is clearly fed up of trying to keep up with contemporary trends; instead, he would rather ridicule all their shortcomings (like he did so much with the anti-mumble rap Kamikaze two years prior). Therefore Music To Be Murdered By is more a chance to go back to basics and find creative ways to kill his imitators akin to legendary horror filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (whose cryptic yet jolly voice Em samples throughout), back when he shocked audiences by pulling away the shower curtain with 1960’s Psycho.
There’s a dimly lit atmosphere to “Darkness,” where Em shows the loneliness that goes with being a rap legend, and “Little Engine” uses what sounds like a 16-bit synth line lifted from a ghost game on the Super Nintendo to rap edgy bars about the Manson Family’s murder of Sharon Tate and boast of how his own victims are often “on a flight too, but it’s a staircase.” Beyond pushing dissenters down stairs, Music To Be Murdered By sags because of its instinct to deliver syrupy stadium ready, sing-song hooks, courtesy of guests like Ed Sheeran, Don Toliver and Anderson Paak. Had Eminem stuck with the concept of rooting his bars in the macabre, it would have hit far more profoundly. But it’s undeniably impressive hearing Em keep pace with Juice WRLD (who idolized Slim Shady growing up) on “Godzilla” and this hit song is proof of Em’s impact on even the Soundcloud rap generation.
The fact Eminem quickly followed up Music to be Murdered By with a Side B and 16 new songs is perhaps an admission that he didn’t think Side A quite went hard enough. The sequel of sorts certainly has its moments, particularly “Discombobulated,” where a classic Dr. Dre piano line is paired up with spooked out bass and the music inspires Em to showcase a deliciously, line-pushing sense of humour: “I just took an AIDS test and the doctor said to think positive, what the fuck?” Yet the problems from Side A tend to persist and the menacing content doesn’t sync up with the poppy production. “Black Magic,” in particular, will have you scratching your head and wondering why Em uses the cherub-like vocals of Skylar Grey so often, especially when their seriousness lessens the impact of all the twisted punchlines he’s rapping. On Music To Be Murdered By Side A and Side B, Eminem reminds us of his abilities, sure, but he doesn’t quite nail the primary concept. In Hitchcockian terms, it’s more a Topaz than a Vertigo: so maybe not Em’s best, but destined to still have its advocates, who swear it’s better than the critics claimed.—Thomas Hobbs
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Just Blaze, DJ Khalil, Mr. Porter, Supa Dups, Jason “JG” Gilbert, Emile, Boi-1da, Jim Jonsin, Script Shepherd, Nick Brongers, Alex da Kid, Makeba Riddick, Havoc, Magnedo7
Features: Kobe, P!nk, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Slaughterhouse
Sales: 8× Platinum
In 2010 Eminem was staggering toward a creative crossroads, having to adapt to a completely new way of making music and also follow up 2009’s Relapse, a conceptual serial killer record that—while his hardcore fans rejoiced in all the madness—the masses found somewhat irritating due to the faux European accents and non-stop references to perverse gore. The most critically acclaimed Eminem projects were created in a haze of psychedelics, chronic-filled blunts, and prescription pills, resulting in a hyper-animated flow and an MC who offered even more creative ways of eviscerating his enemies than the average episode of Itchy and Scratchy.
But this process “almost killed” Eminem following a drug overdose in 2007 and he knew things desperately had to change. While the brilliantly defiant “Cold Wind Blows” and its screeching organ is a natural continuation of Relapse’s stubbornly disturbed spirit, the rest of Recovery’s music is noticeably more mature and sounds like someone slowing down in order to restore their sanity. Massive lead single “Not Afraid” is the best reflection of this shift, with its howled out hook and gooey refrains about breaking free from cages obviously the result of a freshly sober creative process. It’s undeniably interesting to see Eminem in this different light.
But while these life changes are powerful on a personal level, the mature, guitar-driven stadium rap-rock production choices they tend to result in feels far less dangerous than the circus rage beats Eminem worked best on previously. The soppy, lovelorn storytelling of a track like “Spacebound” just doesn’t really go anywhere and meanders. And the Rihanna-duet, “Love The Way You Lie”, and its sickly piano-line, also feels like a blunt shift from the Eminem we’re all used to. Although he raps with that trademark anger, the actual lyrics are a little cheesy and don’t match all the vocal intensity; arguably, for the first time in his career, Eminem’s bark just doesn’t match up to his bite.
The intoxicating stomp of “Cinderella Man” is a reminder of what Eminem can produce when his back is against the wall. He seems to be talking about a greedy music industry, combatively rapping: “That boy’s hot enough to melt hell, burn satan too / Fry his ass and put his ashes back together with glue.” Yet so much of Recovery’s fire lacks a real target and, although technically proficient, it’s a project where Eminem seems a little lost, working out a new way of doing things and giving us a grown-up yet ultimately gimmicky sound that doesn’t quite fit his personality. — Thomas Hobbs
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Web
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Luis Resto, Mark Batson, Mike Elizondo
Features: 50 Cent, Nate Dogg, D12, Dr. Dre, Stat Quo
Sales: 5x Platinum
This is just a weird album.
Riding the wave of nearly universal acclaim that began with the conciliatory The Eminem Show and peaked in the one-two punch of the 8 Mile Soundtrack and the part he played in unleashing 50 Cent’s Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ on the world, Eminem faced some interesting new expectations during the lead-up to his fifth album. There was talk on the street that he would deliver a conventional hip-hop classic.
Despite adhering rigidly to certain cultural conventions of hip-hop, Eminem’s actual output had always lived on the fringes of the genre. He likes a very particular kind of musically lush, rhythmically stiff beat. And his emotional pendulum has always swung violently from unabashed goofiness to an extreme sort of self-seriousness and rage, rarely landing in hip-hop’s cooler, more nonchalant sweet spot. But in 2004, he was the undisputed king of mainstream rap—with the beefs under his belt to prove it—and his subject matter and tone on both of the aforementioned album’s suggested a more conservative direction.
Whoa, were we wrong.
What he delivered with Encore is a sprawling mess of schizophrenia awesomeness. The album starts quite straight-forwardly, tackling expected autobiographical business in short order. From “Evil Deeds” to “Never Enough” to “Toy Soldiers” to “Yellow Brick Road” to “Mosh,” Em addresses all the hot topics of family, rap beef, politics and, perhaps most pressing, his regrettable use of the N word as a teenager. Cool, thanks for clearing all that up.
But that’s where things start to get zany.
The next six songs are just a totally self-indulgent bizarre ride to the far side of…I don’t even know what. Whether it’s his scathing singing freestyle ode to ex-wife Kim Mathers, “Puke,” or the comical rebuke of Benzino, “Big Weenie,” or the club banger parody “Ass Like That,” listening to it, you get the sense that you’re witnessing the biggest artist in the world baiting his fan base to balk. Eminem had always skated close to Weird-Al novelty territory—stuff like “Mushroom Song.” But when he sings “poo-poo, ca-ca” on “My First Single,” it’s maybe the first time in his career that you actually believe that he just doesn’t give a fuck. And then there’s the juvenile stream-of-conscious epic “Rain Man.” Can’t forget that one. The most meandering, strange and “audience-less” song of his entire career (maybe the career of any artist of his stature?) this is definitely not a song for you or me. But the real question is if it’s even for him. Then again, this is an enigmatic fellow we’re talking about. This might be the most “Marshall” music ever.
Things sober up towards the end, and Em gets back inside the box with the more traditional “Spend Some Time,” “Mockingbird,” and “Encore.” But even that material can’t shake off the surreal feeling of, “Did the middle of that album actually happen? Did Eminem, world famous superstar, really just rap an entire conversation with Dre debating what constitutes a homosexual act? Was that real?”
Understandably, many fans found Encore to be a real head scratcher. But that’s exactly the point, and that’s what makes it so great. Under the weight of expectation Eminem bucked and delivered this amazing exercise in absolute freedom. Given carte blanche to create—so many miles into the stratosphere of success that literally anything he made was guaranteed to sell millions—this inscrutable, genius oddball made a manic, bipolar masterpiece. —Noah Callahan-Bever
Label: N/A
Producers: Eminem, Luis Resto, Dr. Dre, Kon Artis, Mike Elizondo
Features: D12, Obie Trice
Sales: N/A
It’s not really fair to compare an incomplete body of work, released without the artist’s consent, to proper studio albums, but the music on the Straight From the Lab EP is strong enough that it deserves inclusion on this list. Also, because it answers the question, “What would it sound like if Eminem made a ‘normal’ rap album?”
Leaked by a friend of Eminem’s younger brother, Nate Mathers, who found a CD of works-in-progress lying around the house, this collection represents a snapshot of the solo material Eminem was creating during the post-8 Mile, pre-Encore era. Clearly influenced by his time with 50 Cent, surging with confidence from his unhindered success, these songs find Mathers making what is by far the most straight-ahead hip-hop of his career.
Similar in their dark tone to the production work he’d been providing for the likes of Jay-Z, Nas and 50, songs like “We As Americans” and “Monkey See, Monkey Do” eschew the use of metaphors and humor that accent most of his work in favor of declamation and explanation. Even the collection’s twisted love/domestic violence ballad, “Love You More,” barrels straight ahead—replacing the clever conceits of “Just The Two Of Us” and “Kim” with unflinching passion and honest, extremely honest, urgency: “You fuck other people and I fuck other people/You’re a slut but I’m equal, I’m a mut… So it’s off and on, usually more off than on/You’re the only one I fuck without a condom on.”
The dichotomy of “Canibitch” and “Bully“, the collection’s two diss records, really demonstrates the change in Eminem’s song writing that happened when he started hanging around 50 Cent. The former, recorded shortly after The Eminem Show, is a goofy cartoon takedown in which Em channels Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” and spins a ridiculous Looney Tune that involves him impersonating Canibus and driving to Canada with Dr. Dre (and running over Jermaine Dupri along the way) to stomp out “Stanibus.” The latter, on the other hand, is a deadly serious dissection of Benzino, Ja Rule, and Irv Gotti that contemplates the violent, and potentially deadly, outcome of rap beef: “If I get killed for this rap, I got a million in cash that says that I will get you back in Hailey’s name.” That’s a long way from threatening to peg Fred Durst with the bottle of dye that he bleached his head with.
One can’t help but wonder how different Encore might have been had these songs not leaked; had Eminem recorded the entire album in the shadow of Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ and 8 Mile rather than the following year. But that’s fanfiction for another day.
It may only be a collection of sketches of an aborted album. But the Straight From the Lab EP was sourced from one of the most exciting moments of Eminem’s career and its value cannot be overstated. —Noah Callahan-Bever
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Doc Ish, Dawaun Parker, Mark Batson, Trevor Lawrence Jr.
Features: Dr. Dre, 50 Cent
Sales: 5x Platinum
Relapse is an enlightening look into the depths of the human soul. Not since Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 masterpiece Requiem For A Dream had pop culture offered such a harrowing view of the vicious cycle of drug addiction. The album may be relentlessly dark, but so is Eminem’s life. He desperately tries to be himself again, but can’t: He might be off drugs, but they’ve permanently changed who he is. Watching an artist you’ve known for a decade deal with basic identity issues makes for a fascinating—though not always enjoyable—listen.
Yet, Relapse was so hated on that even Eminem started believing it was wack. He publicly bashed it on Recovery‘s lead single “Not Afraid” where he admitted, “Let’s be honest, that last Relapse CD was ehhh/Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground.” Perhaps he did. Relapse is marred by a series of obvious flaws: The accents are frustrating, “We Made You” used the outdated “my funny first single” formula that just wasn’t funny anymore, and what was once just a running serial-killer side theme in Em’s music came front-and-center at the weirdest time possible. And yet, there’s still so much to be found in the 22-track deluxe edition and the seven bonus songs on Relapse: Refill.
Yes, the album could have used more editing, but as sprawling as it is, there’s still 13 to 15 great songs worth of an album here. “3 a.m.” felt forced the first time you heard it, but within the context of the preceding “Dr. West” skit it made a lot more sense. More importantly, it highlighted the vitality of Eminem’s music—the peerless intricacy of his lyricism. Accents or no accents, few rappers could string together bars like these:
“You’re walking down a horror corridor/It’s almost 4 in the morning and you’re in a nightmare, it’s horrible/Right there’s the coroner/Waiting for ya to turn the corner so he can corner ya/You’re a goner, he’s onto ya/Out the corner of his cornea he just saw you run…”
Casual fans may have checked out of the album when it goes into a rough patch after the first three of songs, but things really pick up towards the end—and on the additional songs. “Déjà Vu,” “My Darling,” “Careful What You Wish For,” and “Elevator” are some of Em’s best late-period material. Songs where he takes a focused look into what addiction, fame, and more money than he knows how to spend have done to his life. The songs are littered with harrowing honesty that longtime Em fans often take for granted.
Relapse wasn’t quite the “Shady’s back!” moment we were all hoping for. But in truth, that moment will never come. For lots of reasons—as he admitted in a Complex interview, for one, Ambien has left holes in his brain—he’ll never be the same old Marshall again. Yet it remains a fascinating entry in his catalog because even when he isn’t himself, there’s no one quite like him. —Insanul Ahmed
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Mr. Porter, Dem Jointz, Fredwreck, Don Cannon, Cubeatz, Cole Bennett, Benny Blanco, Luis Resto, White Gold, Narza, Callus, Skylar Grey, D.A. Got That Dope
Features: Big Sean, JID, Jelly Roll, BabyTron, White Gold, EZ Mil, Skylar Grey, Sly Pyper, Dem Jointz, 2 Chainz, Grip, Westside Boogie
Sales: Gold
Legends never really die, or so the saying goes. But if Eminem’s latest record is to be believed, then Slim Shady has well and truly left the building.
It’s never easy to say goodbye, but at least on this occasion the not-so-dearly departed left loved ones with a parting gift in the form of farewell album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce). Essential listening for any Eminem die-hard, it’s the album they’ve wanted for years, a zany return to the dark side of his brain, although his deranged alter-ego meets his match after Marshall Mathers finally gets sick of his shit.
A chaotic clash of the titans, Eminem’s 12th studio LP harks back to the glory days of the concept album. More intentional than his other conceptional release Relapse, he made it a point to alert fans to his creative and very calculated strategy a day before its release, putting out a PSA informing his followers that “if you listen to the songs out of order they might not make sense.” With that said, Em’s storytelling on TDOSS is top-tier.
From the moment he spits on the grave of Slim Shady and lets off a fully loaded clip of rebellious lyrical acrobatics on the opening track, “Renaissance,” it’s obvious Eminem’s ready to face his greatest adversary, while throwing the occasional shot at fickle rap fans (“You nerdy pricks would find somethin’ wrong with 36 Chambers”). The album actually feels like an extension of Kamikaze, but instead of Em taking aim at his critics, it’s Slim Shady’s time and he just wants to use it to piss all over cancel culture.
From little people and the blind and handicapped to the gay and trans communities, no one is safe from the rapper’s evil spawn, his inappropriate rants worse than ever before. Purposely nosediving the boundaries of political correctness, he does his best work (or worst, depending on how you look at it) after plowing a 16-year sober Marshall with drugs and alcohol. On “Trouble,” with only 40 seconds to get his shit off, he manages to offend every marginalized community possible without fear of consequence. “You gonna cancel me, yeah? Gen-Z me, bruh?” he taunts an incapacitated Em.
The main theme of the album centers around a conflicted Eminem deliberating over just how much his twisted alter-ego was responsible for his gargantuan fame. Facing some hard truths and cleaning out his closet once more, it couldn’t have been easy for him to pick the chainsaw back up, especially being that those memories come with some serious demons including his battle with substance abuse. But at 51 years old, he’s confident in his sobriety — and it actually makes him a sharper MC. Not convinced? Just listen to “Fuel.” His dizzying display of wordplay trickery is mind-blowing; it should be in the contender for verse of the year.
His songwriting hasn’t lost a step, either. “Temporary” is a masterclass in penmanship. Pulling at the heartstrings of fans, particularly those who have been following Em since his daughter Hailie was in preschool, it imagines a world where the rapper is no longer alive and she has to navigate life without him. The chilling piano backdrop, paired with Skylar Grey’s stirring chorus, lubricates the eyes, but it’s Em’s vulnerable honesty that busts the tear ducts wide open.
Eminem might be all smiles after ending the life of his crazed alter-ego on the cinematic “Guilty Conscience 2,” but it’s a bittersweet moment for fans. The Death of Slim Shady is among some of his best work in over a decade, restoring the feeling of Eminem in his prime and picking up where some of his classic albums left off. But with Slim now dead, we can only hope the quality of his future works aren’t affected by the loss. — Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Rick Rubin, DJ Khalil, DVLP, Frequency No ID, StreetRunner, S1
Features: Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, Skylar Grey, Nate Ruess, Jaime N Commons, Sia
Sales: 4× Platinum
Eminem holds the unique distinction of being the single most Monday-morning-quarterbacked artist in hip-hop. Every one of his releases—with the possible exception of 8 Mile, which was his fastball-down-the-middle (to mix a couple sports metaphors right off the bat)—has been relentlessly second-guessed by pundits and critics. He’s not serious enough. He’s too serious. He talks too much about his personal life. He needs to talk more about his personal life. He needs more Dre beats. He needs more outside producers. Yada yada yada…You’ve heard it all. So has he.
Somehow, despite all the know-it-alls knowing it all, Eminem’s managed to make the specific artistic decisions that have yielded a catalog that’s revered by fans, as well as contemporaries, and has sold so many records, that a tower of his CD jewel cases would reach a height eight times higher than the earth’s atmosphere. So at 41—rich as shit, famous as fuck, still living in Detroit, still stuck in the ’90s, and still rapping as well as anyone’s ever rapped—he made an album for himself.
As such, if you are not an Eminem fan—which is to say that you’re turned off by rage, the casual hurling of homophobic epithets, pointed, pervasive misogyny, and beats that fall out of the spectrum of what is considered “hot” hip-hop production—this is not going to be the album to sell you on him. Go listen to The Eminem Show or 8 Mile, and step into a world.
If, on the other hand, you are an Eminem fan—which is to say that you’re able to compartmentalize your gender and sexual politics in order to enjoy hyper-articulate, hyper-tortured self-examination (and self-immolation), and get a kick out of hearing the art of rap pushed to its technical limits over quirky music unlike anything any other artist would choose—then, well, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is here to scratch your itch.
Where Eminem’s 2010 album Recovery sought to fit in, to reassert him within the context of the pop and hip-hop music of the time, MMLP2 shirks the pretense of conforming. (Although songs like “The Monster” certainly don’t shirk the pretense of appealing.) As was the case with the original Mathers album—which stuck out like a green hat with an orange bill, musically—this body of work exists for the purpose of exorcizing the noise in his brain via shock and awe.
And it does both. However, where MMLP leaned more heavily on shock to spark controversy, the sequel’s preoccupation is inspiring awe to spark conversation. Conversation about who’s the best rapper. “Awesome” in the truest meaning of the word, “Rap God” is at the same time an exhausting exhibition in wordplay—one that is perhaps without peer in terms of pure execution—and also a clever reflection on his career. “Well, that’s what they do when they get jealous, they confuse it/It’s not hip-hop, it’s pop, cause I found a hella way to fuse it/With rock, shock rap with Doc… ‘I don’t know how to make songs like that, I don’t know what words to use’/Let me know when it occurs to you/While I’m ripping any one of these verses, that versus you, it’s curtains.” Never let it be said that Eminem dumbed it down to double his dollars. Besides the head-spinning verbiage, the physicality of his rapping is so fierce you can’t help but imagine veins in his neck throbbing and spit flying around the booth. This is not “cool.” This does not care about being cool. This is about an almost frightening level of, a near-religious devotion to, craft. This is about testing one’s own limits, about personal-best.
Equally ambitious, on the album’s intro, “Bad Guy,” Eminem uses his gift for narration to turn what appears at first like a hokey conclusion to his epic “Stan” into a poignant moment of personal revelation. Thirteen years later, Stan’s little brother, Matthew Mitchell, the one who got egged on the autograph in Denver, is comin’ back on some G Rap shit, like he’s avenging his brother’s death. ‘Cause he is, in fact, avenging his brother’s death—by kidnapping and killing Eminem. But at the moment of truth, the music shifts and Em wakes from what he realizes is his own morbid dream. Stan, Matthew, and even Slim Shady are all projections of his subconscious, his own insecurity embodied. He admits to creating these coping mechanisms to deflect his own discomfort with the hypocrisy of his art—to have been bullied as a child only to to grow up to bully (gays, in particular) as an adult, to in dehumanizing women in his work while putting his daughters on a pedestal at home, to lament his own celebrity while still white-knuckling it to the end.
And it is in these honest, introspective moments that the album is most satisfying. The mirror-effect songwriting on “Legacy” illustrates Em’s journey from self-hate to self-respect through the tool of hip-hop. “So Far…,” a madcap roasting of the idea of a glamorous celebrity life, is one of the most entertaining story songs he has ever recorded. Marrying Joe Walsh’s acerbic, arena-rock reflection on celebrity, “Life’s Been Good” with Schooly D’s “PSK (What Does It Mean?)” samplewise, the story finds our world-famous hero befuddled by modern technology. In Walsh’s comic timber he belts, “Got friends on Facebook, all over the world/Not sure what that means, they tell me it’s good…” Later, after being stalked by a fan in the frozen food aisles of Costco while fighting a nosebleed, he escapes to his car, only to get caught at a red light with a finger in his nose by two young women who recognize him. They laugh. Norman Mailer once described being the heavyweight champion of the world as akin to God’s big toe. Being the best rapper alive is not dissimilar. Apparently, when no one’s looking, even God gets toe cheese.
MMLP2 matches its candor with rare moments of emotional maturity. On “Stronger Than I Was,” Eminem revisits the sung styles of “Hailey’s Song” to parse his long on-again-off-again relationship with the love/hate of his life, Kim—and finds the silver lining of personal fortitude in their shared, torturous history. He hasn’t exactly forgiven her, but he is certainly appreciative of the exercise. Far more shocking is “Headlights.” In a bombastic, over-the-top pop ballad, Em, a father of teenagers, has a moment of realization: parents are just people, struggling to sort it all out like the rest of us. And so he reaches a place of forgiveness with the most frequently recurring villain in his body of work—his mother. “Why’re we always at each other’s throats?” he ask. “Especially when Dad, he fucked us both!” For the first time on record, Eminem acknowledges the fact that, for all of his mother’s damaged-and-damaging shortcomings, she did, at least, stick around.
Though it is unlikely, in fact, impossible, that the second Marshall Mathers LP will recreate the moment in pop music that its predecessor brought about, to focus on that is to miss the point. The reception of an album is a byproduct of the music, inevitably affected by time and circumstance—it is not the music itself. That Eminem has managed to revisit his career-defining work, 13 years later, and not just carbon-copy it, but advance many of the themes and ideas it introduced, with such deft, studied mastery of his craft, is nothing short of a victory. A pretty great one.
If that’s the kind of thing you like, of course. —Noah Callahan-Bever
Label: Web Entertainment
Producers: Mark and Jeff Bass (executive producers), Mr. Porter, Kuniva, DJ Rec
Features: Bizarre, Fuzz
Sales: N/A
The Slim Shady EP opens with a dramatic dialog that sounds like a scene taken straight out of a horror movie. Late one dark and stormy Detroit night, a deep, distorted, devilish voice calls Eminem’s name, awakening him from his slumber. He tries to ignore it, but the voice just won’t be silenced.
“Wake the fuck up, motherfucker,” the demonic spirit commands as Eminem screams in anguish, “What do you want from me?” The voice laughs mirthlessly, asking “Remember me?” in a sarcastic tone. “I killed you,” Eminem replies in disbelief as the psychodrama continues. Next the voice instructs Em to look in the mirror, apparently to confront the monster that lurks within him. Eminem’s denials take on an air of desperation, as if he’s clinging to his last shred of sanity while the voice taunts him, “You’re nothing without me.”
Marshall Mathers’ pitch-perfect performance on this spine-tingling skit is just a little bit too convincing. Although the rest of the 1997 EP indulges in the sort of over-the-top comic violence we hear on numerous rap records, this introduction of the Slim Shady persona, delivered without the slightest hint of silliness, is a singular instance in hip-hop. The demonic discourse on Snoop Dogg’s “Murder Was The Case” seems casual by comparison. Not even Scarface on the Geto Boys’ classic “Mind Playing Tricks”achieves such verisimilitude of madness on wax.
The skit casts a pall over the entire EP, so that by the time we encounter horrors like “Just The Two Of Us,” in which a deranged father and his young daughter dispose of the mother’s body and plan their future as a fugitives, there’s no way to laugh it off. The EP’s cover depicts Em smashing a mirror to pieces—a chilling, evocative image reminiscent of the album art for Black Flag’s Damaged.
Eminem elaborates on his aberrant alter-ego on the EP’s first song, “Low Down, Dirty”: “Wearing visors, sunglasses and disguises/’Cause my split personality is having an identity crisis/I’m Dr. Hyde and Mr. Jekyll/Disrespectful/Hearing voices in my head while these whispers echo.”
Hip-hop thrives on exaggeration, and while it may be an overstatement to say that Eminem suffered from multiple personalities, there was no shortage of real drama in his life at the time he recorded The Slim Shady EP. After a tumultuous childhood, young Marshall Mathers found an outlet for his feelings through hip-hop. But his 1996 release, The Infinite, a competent but unremarkable effort that was mostly produced by The Bass Brothers and released through their indie label Web Entertainment, failed to get airplay on local radio stations in Detroit. At the time, Mathers saw few other options to support his young daughter aside from working dead-end restaurant jobs. The apparent failure of his music career plunged him deeper into drugs and despair.
The Slim Shady EP, which features production by The Bass Brothers as well as D12 members Kuniva and Mr. Porter, must have felt like Eminem’s last shot to achieve his dreams, and he held nothing back. Although he did give voice to life’s pressures on certain tracks from The Infinite, it was only after he began to sound truly unhinged that his work caught the attention of the hip-hop underground, and eventually, Dr. Dre. The legendary producer was sufficiently impressed with the EP that his first release with Em was called The Slim Shady LP, preserving not just the title but three of the EP’s illest cuts, “If I Had,” “Just Don’t Give A Fuck,” and “97 Bonnie & Clyde,” a reworking of the disturbingly twisted masterpiece “Just The Two Of Us.”
So the demonic voice proved prophetic about at least one thing: before the emergence of Slim Shady, Eminem’s rap career seemed to be going nowhere. Afterwards, he became America’s worst nightmare—a white kid from the wrong side of the tracks who truly does not give a fuck about anything except using his mastery of hip-hop to spread his own unique strain of mental illness like audio anthrax spores. —Rob Kenner
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Eminem, Mike WiLL Made-It, Boi-1da, Tay Keith, S1, Illa da Producer, Ronny J
Features: Royce Da 5’9”, Joyner Lucas, Jessie Reyez
Sales: Platinum
Remember on ‘I’m Shady’ when Eminem said he was going to write his biggest “fuck-you-letter”? Well, Kamikaze was it.
Waving that lingering middle finger at his biggest critics, Eminem’s surprise album pulled zero punches. Arriving just eight months after Revival, his most panned album to date, he let fans and detractors know exactly what his intentions were right out the gate: “I feel like I wanna punch the world in the fucking face right now.” Unhappy with the reception his ninth studio album received, Em goes full-on rhyme psycho, obliterating anyone who had a bone to pick with him and his music, while also using the opportunity to “get the anger out.”
Starting exactly as he meant to go on, “The Ringer” unapologetically sets the tone for the rest of the 13-track album, delivering a high-energy lyrical tirade on everyone from Machine Gun Kelly, Vince Staples and Charlamagne tha God to all the Lils (Yachty, Pump, Xan), and despite his manager urging him to wind his neck in (“Paul wants me to chill”), he doesn’t stop there. His relentless onslaught extends to politics, jabbing at former Vice President Mike Pence, and, of course, Donald Trump (aka Agent Orange)—who allegedly sent the Secret Service to Em’s house over terrorist claims.
As the album progresses, it’s evident Em really took the Revival slander to heart, as well as comments made about him being over the hill. The court of public opinion and media gets roasted throughout—there’s even a skit where Em tells Paul he’s heading over to a journalist’s house who wrongly critiqued him—as does the Recording Academy (“Tell the Grammys to go and fuck themselves”), but it’s his fellow entertainers who bear the brunt of his rage.
Tyler, the Creator, Lord Jamar, DJ Akademiks and Joe Budden all get it on “The Fall,” with Em warning the latter (who was signed to Shady Records at the time) to “fasten it” while bringing up some of his controversial past transgressions (“The closest thing he’s had to hits is smackin’ bitches”). Die Antwoord takes a jab on “Greatest,” while “Not Alike” with Royce Da 5’9” doubles as a scathing takedown of mumble rappers and MGK.
Kamikaze isn’t all about settling scores, though. Eminem does take some time to dissect the traumas he’s suffered at the hands of unhealthy relationships. On “Normal,” he expresses a desire to find drama-free love, distancing himself from the toxic partnerships he raps about on songs like “Love the Way You Lie,” “Tragic Endings,” and, of course, “Kim.”
One of the most vulnerable moments, however, comes on “Stepping Stone,” where Em decides it’s time to have a long overdue and very difficult conversation with D12. Facing the elephant in the room that had plagued the group ever since the death of Em’s best friend and the group’s co-founder Proof, he gets a lot off his chest here, admitting that he can’t be responsible for the group’s success anymore. “I love all of you men/ But I just can’t be the guy everybody depends on for entire careers ‘cause that’s not even fair,” he spits, before confirming that “D12 is over.”
Ultimately, Kamikaze is a utopia for lyric nerds who love to dissect bars. A calculated effort that requires listeners to do a lot of heavy lifting and unpacking—which is something rap used to pride itself on—it proved Eminem is still one of the best to ever do it despite his Revival hiccup. —Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Red Spyda, Denaun Porter, Mike Elizondo, Chucky Thompson, Nas, DJ Premier, Guru, Luis Resto
Features: Obie Trice, Jay Z, Freeway, 50 Cent, Xzibit, D12, Nas, Macy Gray, Boomkat, Rakim, Young Zee, Gang Starr
Sales: 6x Platinum
The release of 8 Mile, the semi-autobiographical movie that told the story of Eminem’s coming up through Detroit’s famed battle-rap scene, marks the absolute high-point of his artistic confidence level, and his world-level dominance of rap music, and pop music in general. So, though he only raps on five of the 16 songs on the soundtrack, and is only credited as a writer or a producer on seven, Eminem’s style and persona come through in every second of every minute of the album. If only in the way that all the songs fit into the scheme of the whole, and the way you can hear the other artists positioning themselves in his environment, or reflecting themselves off his presence.
The five songs Eminem raps on, all self-produced, capture a master lyricist at his peak. The megasmash “Lose Yourself” is of course the most well-known, with a patch of vomited-up spaghetti staining a sweater and leading to the defiance of gravity and the absolution of self in an eternal now. But the title track, and “Rap Game” and “Rabbit Run” and the dark, seething “Love Me” stand right with it in quality.
“Love Me” is monumentally great. His Shady Records signees Obie Trice and 50 Cent join him on it—and to a man, to a line, to a word, the rapping is phenomenal. Somehow, on a song where Obie delivers a couplet as instantly memorable as “But in the meantime/It’s Jimmy Iovine time…” and 50 makes every rap fan choke on shocked laughter with, “I’m convinced, man/Something really wrong with those hoes/I thought Lil Kim was hot til she started fuckin’ with her nose,” Em wins the day by twisting his words around themselves til they’re like some kind of crazy grapevine climbing up a trellis.
“My noodle is cockadoodle/My clock’s cuckoo/I got screws loose/Yeah, the whole kit and kaboodle/It’s brutal…”
That’s Em at his best, which is pretty darn close to rap at its best, period. That is someone with a great gift for rhyme, an elevated understanding of the way vowel sounds and consonant sounds play off each other, someone able to discern rhythms and patterns in words that most of us can’t even hear—not until he arranges them in order and pronounces them in a way that highlights their melodiousness. That’s a guy like that just showing off. Just having fun. But knowing that in putting his fun down on record, he’ll let millions of other people share in the fun. In the beauty, really, to put it a little more loftily.
The miracle of the album, though, is how the other songs fit in with Em’s. Young Zee’s frosty, slinky, “That’s My Nigga Fo’ Real,” with its emotive chorus balancing between comedy and pathos in a way familiar to any Em fan. The two R&B songs, Macy Gray’s “Time of My Life” and Boomkat’s “Wasting My Time,” soulful and mournful, world-weary but with a wry hip-hop smile. They’re both terrific. And you can hear why Em chose them. They suit him—they sound like a damaged loner walking home down 8 Mile Road, not much to look at, baggy sweatshirt and jeans. But secure in the knowledge that when it comes down to it, if it comes down to it, he’s armed with a wit and a sense of savvy that can get him over anything. —Dave Bry
Label: Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Mark and Jeff Bass, Mel-Man
Features: Dr. Dre, Royce Da 5’9″
Sales: 5x Platinum
Once Eminem hit MTV with “My Name Is” in early 1999, shit was a wrap.
Overnight, he went from an underground punchline rapper with a taste for the transgressive and a gift for the absurd into a household name.
The album that followed set the blueprint for his career. The Slim Shady LP was the first domino, the moment that he became an icon to a generation of teenagers who felt abused, abandoned, uncounted—or could, at the very least, identify with some of these feelings. The Slim Shady LP ended up being directly and unintentionally responsible for Em’s thematic approach going forward, the way his work began to curl in on itself in a reflexive, ever-intensifying paroxysm of raw self-interrogation. It set the stage for some of the central conflicts of his career: the tension between fiction and realism, between documentation and glorification, and of course the way his race magnified these conflicts and transformed him into one of the genre’s true superstars.
But though he went from obscurity to fame so suddenly, getting to that point was arduous, fraught with struggle and failure, beset by angst and anguish. And a lot of that makes it into The Slim Shady LP. At the very least, this gives reason why the album is what it is: a morbidly cartoonish blend of pulp and shock tactics, the defense mechanism of a person living in society’s brutal, vulnerable underbelly. It’s also darkly hilarious, at moments, deeply sad in others, tinted by juvenilia, and shot through with underclass rage directed upward, outward, inward.
The Slim Shady LP has a fascination with the things polite, middle-class society knows not to talk about. Everything you weren’t supposed to say, Eminem would say. And it was this that forged such a deep connection with his audience, a sense that he was speaking to something the media had otherwise ignored, which made his more absurdist rhymes seem scarily real. Songs like “If I Had” and “Rock Bottom” channeled the frustrations of those in a dead-end job well before Kanye’s “Spaceship” launched, the former articulating the mind-numbing boredom at the heart of poverty, the sense of being stuck: “Tired of stepping in clubs wearing the same pair of Lugz.”
A darkness pervades the record beyond its class aggression; the anger points everywhere, including the women in his life (his father is absent, and so spared). Em embodies some horrific characters. In “Guilty Conscience,” he’s encouraging robbery, statutory rape, and murder. On “’97 Bonnie and Clyde” he’s taking an infant child to help dispose of her mother’s body. Even at his most optimistic, as on the borderline-slapstick flight of fancy “My Fault” (Em meets a girl at a rave party who proceeds to swallow a whole bag full of psilocybin mushrooms), the song ends with his character sobbing and praying that this girl he just met come back to life.
The song that best captures his worldview, though, is “Brain Damage,” which is ironic because it’s also one of the most exaggerated, comic book-esque moments. (It ends with the protagonist’s brain popping out of his head and getting stuffed back inside.) But it sets up a world where a character is completely alone and unprotected: picked on by bullies, his teachers leave him vulnerable (and add insult to injury by piling on more work), and his school principal joins the bully in beating him down. When he goes home, his mother continues the stream of abuse. The message is clear, for those who feel alone and abandoned: Eminem understands how you feel.
Although Eminem was a locus for all these different ideas, he didn’t invent any of them, of course. Although to the mainstream press—and a substantial portion of white America—he might as well have. What was his at this point—before he embraced 2Pac’s exposed-nerve, autobiographical subjectivity in full, pushing his own story from the underpinning to the main event—was an exceptional gift for writing, an prodigious ability to exercise certain archetypes with seemingly effortless flair. Along with similar rappers like Redman, he was adapting the particulars of an underground movement into a mainstream expression of personality.
He had lyrical style. Although now attention is often drawn—by himself and fans alike—to the effort that goes into his bars, what made him initially so appealing here was how he made it seem as if he’d emerged from the womb just talking like this. —David Drake
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre (executive producer), Eminem, Mark and Jeff Bass, The 45 King, Mel-Man
Features: Dido, RBX, Sticky Fingaz, Dina Rae, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Nate Dogg, D12, Bizarre
Sales: 11× Platinum
The Marshall Mathers LP was Eminem stepping into the prime of his career. It was a lightning rod for controversy in the year 2000 when CD sales hit their all time peak. At a time when the Billboard charts were dominated by squeaky-clean pop acts like ‘N Sync 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—culminating when he performed “Stan” at the 2001 Grammys alongside Elton John. 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.
In many ways, MMLP picked up where his previous album, The Slim Shady LP, left off—many of the new songs mirrored older ones. There’s another “Public Service Announcement” (once again voiced by Jeff Bass of The Bass Brothers), Em calls “Drug Ballad” his “love song” the way he called “Cum On Everybody” his “dance song,” and the “holy-shit-this-guy-is-out-of-his-fucking-mind-but-also-amazing” song “Kim” is a prequel to “’97 Bonnie & Clyde.”
Unlike his debut, however, the album got past being seen as silly or cheesy. In 1999, we didn’t know what to make of this angry blonde dude because it was hard to tell when the jokes started and ended. In 2000, things became clearer as he delved further into autobiographical territory. We started to hear the seriousness in the stories about how he used to get “beat up, peed on, be on free lunch, and changed school every three months.”
The album sounded different too. Dr. Dre provided only three beats on The Slim Shady LP; here he and his partner Mel-Man handled most of the first half of the album, with Eminem and The Bass Brothers taking over for most of the second. Even when it came to the production credits, duality remained a running theme for Eminem (or is that Slim Shady?)
The brutal honesty and specific clarity in the rhymes was striking, but Em’s anger is the hallmark of this album. This is roll-your-windows-down, turn-your-system-up, throw-up-your-middle-finger-and-let-it-linger-music. Em’s words are so precise and he’s so in control of his pen, yet he’s so emotionally erratic. (Maybe a lasting effect of his infamous Amsterdam acid trip, upon which he claims he wrote so much of the album that he considered calling it Amsterdam.)
He rages against everyone; past tormentors, magazines that made fun of him (“Double-XL, Double-XL!”), his mother, his wife, and even manages to aim an AK at Dre’s face, just because. He’s so damn good at it you hardly want to hear anyone else rapping. There isn’t a long guest list, but every voice other than Em’s feels like a distraction you want to fast-forward past. How could we listen to anyone else when Em was spontaneously combusting before our very ears? The rage was magnetic, hypnotic. “Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts!”
The anger spews in every direction as he takes reckless shots at pop culture’s other famous figures. Maybe because Em was still a battle rapper at heart, one in need of a bullseye to aim his verbal darts at. He spends a lot of time lashing out at his critics, too. In retrospect, his overzealous use of homophobic slurs seems knowing and jokey, a smirky kid reveling in his ability to piss you off—like when you tell someone to turn down their music and they respond by turning it up and yelling, “WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!”
Despite the album’s artistry and massive success, in a weird way, it’s hard to call it an “influential” album. Sure, there are lots of white rappers today and Em certainly inspired part of that, but all of them shy away from Em comparisons. And none of them—stylistically, musically, and definitely lyrically—can hold a candle to Eminem at his peak. Really, no one of any race can compare.
Bar for bar, line for line, Eminem is and always will be a rapper’s rapper. But this isn’t the typical “rap” album, it’s so far removed from hip-hop’s sonic center and typical subject matter. It’s an Eminem album, and this is when Eminem became EMINEM. And Eminem isn’t your regular rapper, not your regular pop star. He’s what he’s shown to be on the back cover of the album, a freak genius who likes to write raps. There he sits, Marshall, and he sits alone. —Insanul Ahmed
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem (executive producer), Jeff Bass, Mr. Porter
Features: Obie Trice, Dr. Dre, Dina Rae, D12, Nate Dogg, Hallie Jade Mathers
Sales: 12x Platinum
The Slim Shady LP made him a star. The Marshall Mathers LP was a masterpiece, a moment when he opened up his own life and bared his soul on record. The Eminem Show was a response to the backlash, and that response was to push everything to a new breaking point, each illustration receiving depth of shading and color.
Eminem was a bona fide superstar, increasingly conflicted about his place at the top of the charts. His relationships—with his fans, with the media, with his daughter, with white America—became more complex. His rapping became more intricate, his vocals more impassioned. In the lead-in to the album’s release, there was concern that he might be approaching mannerism if he tried to follow up “My Name Is” and “Real Slim Shady” with a similarly-themed lead single. He pulled it off, though, with “Without Me,” his rapid, increasingly dense lines snaking through the beat with fluency that makes the whole thing feel second nature. Each line has its own carefully composed cadence: “A little bit of weed mixed with some hard liquor/Some vodka that’ll jump start my heart quicker than a shock when I get shocked at the hosp-ital…”
It wasn’t the only lighter moment on the record. “Business” was perhaps Dre and Em’s greatest work together as a duo, and one of the better examples of Dre’s post-2001 style. The Eminem Show also found his relationships with women evolving, although not necessarily in the most positive ways. “Superman” suggested a fame-informed transactionalism that seemed colder and more detached than the kind of dependent anger of his earlier work.
This time around, though, he was cognizant of many of the criticisms he was receiving, ducking and weaving and trying to make sense of the seismic impact of his still-snowballing popularity: “A visionary, vision is scary, could start a revolution, polluting the airwaves a rebel/So just let me revel and bask, in the fact that I got everyone kissing my ass.” “White America” tackled his race head-on. Whereas it had been laughed at on The Slim Shady LP (“How the fuck can I be white? I don’t even exist…”), his outsized success forced him to come face-to-face with the intrinsic advantages he was suddenly aware of.
In other words, despite its lead single, The Eminem Show was a more ambitious move, wrestling with the issues raised by his success in a serious way. At the time, it received criticism for abandoning some of the more irreverent cartoonishness in favor of capital-I Importance. He helped foster this impression, no doubt, with the increasingly dramatic production choices of songs like “Til I Collapse” and its extended intro, and “Sing for the Moment,” which took musical steps towards stadium-sized performances.
But what could have been an increasingly dour record is saved by his increasingly elaborate rapping, which reaches its apex on “Til I Collapse.” What should have been a leaden monster, as the bass-heavy funk of the Bass Brothers and Dr. Dre was dropping away in favor of arena-ready epics, was saved by Nate Dogg’s urgent hook and some of the most elaborate-yet-purposeful rapping of Eminem’s career. —David Drake
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Eminem has sold over 50 million records domestically. Internationally, that number is up around 200 million.
This level of success has, understandably, had a distorting effect on how the rapper’s music is perceived. When an artist’s work becomes as popular and ubiquitous as Eminem’s has, there are going to be many, many interpretations of that work. And just because you think you’ve got a handle on Em’s story doesn’t mean there isn’t a very popular alternate perception. After all, this is Marshall Mathers, the guy who invented the term “Stan.” Suffice it to say, you find out quickly talking to Em fans—and who in hip-hop does this not describe, really?—that your take really is one of many.
Revisiting Em’s rap repertoire for this project has been an eye-opening experience. Spanning almost 20 years and 21 releases, his songs and albums have more unexplored nooks and crannies than most casual fans realize. His career has also taken a more complicated shape than its initial arc implied.
Eminem is one of the few rappers still releasing new music who can motivate large numbers to engage with his music. His artistic milieu, in many ways, is that of the album, even if he arose in the internet era that has done so much to lessen the importance of the form. So without further ado, here’s our ranking of every single Eminem project.
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, DJ Khalil, Charley Hustle, Resto, Mr. Porter, Rico Love, Kasanova, Sarom, CertiFYD, AraabMuzik, Just Blaze, Doc McKinney, Illangelo, Frank Dukes, DJ Premier, Stevie J, Sean Combs,
Features: James Horner, Royce da 5′9″, Gwen Stefani, Rob Bailey and The Hustle Standard, Busta Rhymes, KXNG CROOKED, Tech N9ne, Denaun, Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Rico Love, Slaughterhouse, The Weeknd, 50 Cent, Logic, The Notorious B.I.G., and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony
Sales: 100,000
In the mid-2010s, we saw a trend of movie soundtracks being executive produced by rappers. The high point was the Black Panther soundtrack, overseen by Kendrick Lamar, which featured an eclectic mix of some of the brightest talents from the West Coast. At the other end of the spectrum, we had the clumsy Great Gatsby soundtrack, supervised by Jay-Z, with a collection of songs that felt too scattershot to make an impact.
Nestled in between—perhaps a notch above Future’s Superfly soundtrack and just below J. Cole’s Creed III album—is the Eminem-produced Southpaw soundtrack. The soundtrack came during those peak Slaughterhouse years, where Em’s production choices were chunky and rock-inspired, while the rhymes were more technical than personal.
Em only appears on four tracks, but his influence is all over this project. From metal-inspired posse cut “Beast (Southpaw Remix)” to Slaughterhouse’s “R.N.S,” the soundtrack attempts to present a sound that features a blend of ruggedness, dramatics, and inspiration that aligns with the film. They ultimately both kind of fail, as they try to grasp a seriousness that doesn’t really match the material.
The most successful moments on the Southpaw album occur when everyone just relaxes a little bit. “All I Think About” stands out, showcasing Em and Royce rapping in a vibrant and loose kind of way. While What About the Rest of Us,” featuring Action Bronson and Joey Badass, has a great lunchtime table energy that I wish Em would adapt more. However, these moments are rare; much of the album carries a tight, aggressive energy. Em was originally supposed to star in Southpaw, but dropped out. Maybe he just wasn’t that into the material. —Dimas Sanfiorenzo
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, DJ Premier, Boi-1da, The Maven Boys, Just Blaze, Luis Resto, Emile Haynie, John Hill, Conrad Clifton, Mr. Porter, Marv Won, Statik Selektah, WLPWR
Features: Slaughterhouse, Yelawolf, Kobe, Sia, Kon Artis, Swifty McVay, Bizarre, Kuniva, Skylar Grey, Royce da 5’9″, Big Sean, Danny Brown, Dej Loaf, Trick-Trick
Sales: 300,000
What started off as a joke with “Lyrical miracle, spiritual individual, criminal, subliminal in your swimming pool” during Shady Records’ 2011 BET Hip-Hop Awards Cypher turned into a full-blown obsession by the time the label anniversary compilation Shady XV hit the shelves. This is to say that Eminem became far more concerned with complex rhyme schemes than creating compositionally compelling songs.
The nine new Eminem songs across the Shady XV compilation album are some of the most hollow and forgettable of his career. It’s these kinds of song structures—or lack thereof—that would cause disgraced comedian Chris D’Elia to create his own video mocking Marshall Mathers’ overly technical flow. “Shady XV” and “Right For Me” are particularly heinous offenders, whirlwind of nothingness with Em rhyming without any cohesion or narrative trajectory.
Unlike 2006’s The Re-Up, the stable of Shady Records was more promising this time around. It’s a shame that signees Slaughterhouse and Yelawolf are relegated to two songs each. (Slaughterhouse’s DJ Premier-produced “Y’All Ready Know” and Yelawolf’s country-laced “Down” are a couple of highlights.)
Despite largely falling flat, the label’s head honcho still has a moment or two of saving face. As far as Eminem’s melodramatic pop tracks go, “Guts Over Fear,” with Sia, is one of his most overlooked. Serving double duties as both the compilation’s lead single and the theme of Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer, the track serves as a rare moment of self-awareness on Shady XV. It sees Marshall Mathers contemplating where to go next in his career, concerned that he has nothing new left to say. “Sometimes I feel like all I ever do is find different ways to word the same old song,” he raps on the opening verse.
The closing track, “Detroit Vs. Everybody” is an epic passing of the torch for the Motor City, with fellow veterans of the city Royce da 5′9″ and Trick Trick paying it forward to recognize the next generation of D-Town spitters in Big Sean, Dej Loaf and Danny Brown.
Eminem’s presence across Shady XV exists in two ideological playing fields. At once, he has redeemed himself as a label head, finding his first batch of bankable artists since 50 Cent. On the other hand, the project would usher in an unpleasant era in his rap career, where rhyming was king but rapping itself was something of an afterthought. —Mr. Wavvy
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Rick Rubin, Skylar Grey, Luis Resto, Mr. Porter, Mark Batson, Emile Haynie, Frequency, Aalias, Just Blaze, Alex da Kid, Fredwreck, Rock Mafia, Hit-Boy, Illa da Producer, Scram Jones, DJ Khalil
Features: Beyoncé, Phresher, Ed Sheeran, Alicia Keys, X Ambassadors, Skylar Grey, Kehlani, P!nk
Sales: Platinum
Speaking with Elton John for Interview Magazine a few days ahead of its release, Eminem described his approach to Revival in such a way that outlines its pitfalls: “I’ve tried to make a little something for everyone.”
Revival falls flat in pandering instead of innovating. It is an album that struggles to find cohesion. The rapper would acknowledge his struggle to draw inspiration during an interview with Rick Rubin and Malcolm Gladwell’s Broken Record podcast.
“When you start out in your career, you have a blank canvas, so you can paint anywhere that you want because the shit ain’t been painted on yet…by the time you get to your seventh and eighth album, you’ve already painted all over that,” he said. “There’s nowhere else to paint. So it’s like, where do you go? And people are always expecting something different from you.”
Even the track Eminem was describing here, “Walk on Water” with Beyoncé—about not knowing where to go next in his career—is a rehashing of an idea he explored just a few years earlier on “Guts Over Fear.”
Revival revisits approaches of past Eminem albums to far more underwhelming results. Rock-heavy tracks like “Remind Me” and “Heat” emphasize the “trash” in trailer trash. Mr. Mathers hits listeners over the head with cringeworthy lyrics such as “Your booty is heavy duty like diarrhea” and “You got buns, I got aspergers.”
Where the aforementioned tracks attempt to recapture the rap-rock success of The Marshall Mathers LP 2, others find the rapper chasing the “Love The Way You Lie” dragon in the album’s inordinate amount of pop features. “River” with Ed Sheeran feels like it was lost in the Tumblr era. “Need Me” feels like Eminem featured on a P!nk track, a song with an acute soccer mom sensibility. “Nowhere Fast” with Kehlani has a name that speaks for itself.
However, no track is more egregious than “Untouchable.” Eminem attempts to tackle systemic oppression on this conceptually-ambitious song, rapping from the perspectives of both a white policeman and later a black man. Although well-intended, the song feels more performative than resonant. This led former Shady Records recording artist Joe Budden to call the track “one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard,” and accuse his former label head of “[using] the plight of Black people to sell a fucking record.”
For all the pitfalls of Revival, the album ends on a strong note. The duo of “Castle” and “Arose” show that Eminem is still capable of crafting deeply personal, emotionally resonant songs when he hones in on a tight concept. Both tracks see Eminem reflecting on his near-death experience at the hands of his pill addiction with a creative narrative, rapping in a letter to his daughter Hallie on the “Castle,” and to his family whom he would have left behind had he overdosed on “Arose.” Revival shows flashes of greatness, but they’re buried under layers of misfires. —Mr. Wavvy
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Luis Resto, Hi-Tek, Lance Nicholas, Mr. Porter, Witt & Pep, Red Spyda, Kanye West, Trackboyz, Dr. Dre, Mike Elizondo
Features: Obie Trice, Young Zee, B-Real, Bugz
Sales: 2x Platinum
Judging from the string-laden theatrics of opener “Git Up”—which feels like the spiritual successor to 2001’s temper tantrum anthem “Fight Music”— it would be easy to assume that D12 World would continue the gully, cartoonish violence of the Detroit group’s previous album, Devil’s Night, and be yet another record filled with self-motivational songs designed to give the bullied the courage to knock out their bullies. With an alliteration-heavy, tongue-twisting verse, Eminem sounds particularly fired up and more thuggish than ever before, rapping: “Hands around our Colt handles, hold them like Roman candles.”
Yet this early promise isn’t really built on enough, with D12’s second studio album suffering from an identity crisis due to production that’s far too sugary. The title track is produced by Kanye West, but a goofy Middle Eastern flute harmony and lazy bars about “crashing your moms’ jeep” mean it’s an instant-skip. Hearing D12’s most horrorcore member Bizarre talk about killing women while wearing a Jason Vorhees mask, over glitzy production that feels like a knock-off Jazze Pha beat (“I’ll Be Damned”) is also strange. The song is a perfect crystallization of the project’s identity crisis. Throughout, it’s like an Interscope executive is advising D12 to tone down their hardcore instincts and remember to appeal more to the Billboard charts.
Led by the goofy single “My Band,” which is a sort of frat-boy mocking, lightly subversive take on the excesses of rock and roll fame, the project tends to capture Eminem on autopilot, more concerned with being a comedian than scratching blood out of America’s indulgences, like he did before with 2002’s cutting The Eminem Show. “Yesterday, Kuniva tried to pull a knife on me / Cos’ I told him Jessica Alba’s my wife-to-be” Em spits on “My Band” in a flat tone, suggesting the jokes aren’t as galvanizing to Slim Shady’s spirit anymore and he’s talking shit with less incisiveness. Arguably, on various occasions, Kon Artis and the late Proof (who recorded their raps separately due to a falling out) have better verses than their leader.
However, despite the overall patchiness, D12 World definitely has a few restorative moments, particularly “How Come,”where the group analyzes their up-and-down internal relationships in real-time. This song offers more honesty than most of the other tracks combined. Eminem powerfully suggests his fellow group members have shown less loyalty since he became the biggest pop star on the planet: “Now I feel a vibe, I just can’t describe it / Much as your pride tries to hide it / You’re cold, your touch is just like ice and your eyes is a look of resentment.”
The ferocious beat to the B-Real-featuring “American Psycho II,” which sounds like a demented take on a ‘60s superhero theme tune, also inspires Eminem to soar, as he bravely threatens to avenge an attack by gang members in LA on his rap friend Xzibit by making them drink a liquor bottle filled with urine.
This album marked the end of D12 as an Eminem-backed group—but even if the results are more disappointing than memorable, there’s just enough fiery moments to ensure it’s not a complete waste of time. Perhaps though, the primary takeaway here is that when rap superstars like 50 Cent (with G-Unit) or Eminem try to elevate their day one friends into rap stars, they’re naturally going to hit a brick wall by trying to keep everyone happy, making a brutal cut off point grimly inevitable. —Thomas Hobbs
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Luis Resto, Rikanatti, Witt and Pep, Focus…, The Alchemist, Akon, Dr. Dre, Dawaun Parker, Disco D, L.T. Moe
Features: Obie Trice, Stat Quo, Bobby Creekwater, Cashis, Bizarre, Kuniva, 50 Cent, Lloyd Banks, Proof, Swifty McVay, Mr. Porter, Akon, Nate Dogg,
Sales: 2x Platinum
Originally conceived as a mixtape, The Re-Up serves as a showcase of Shady Records’ talent pool, from established acts like 50 Cent and Obie Trice, to ushering in newcomers Ca$his, Stat Quo and Bobby Creekwater. Unfortunately, the compilation reveals that Eminem’s instincts as a label head aren’t as sharp as his rapping.
Eminem’s personal life was in turmoil during the time of The Re-Up’s release. Two thousand six saw the loss of his best friend, Proof, his remarriage and subsequent divorce to Kim, and an escalating pill addiction. His verses feel strangely detached. Instead of offering introspection or vulnerability at this trying time, Eminem dives into empty gangster talk and paranoia. You can hear the numbness in Em’s voice throughout the project—the project sounds like someone trying to move on with their life without processing their pain.
Years later, Eminem would remember this period as one of his lowest points in his addiction journey. “I remember things started getting really, really bad when me, 50 and G-Unit did BET’s 106 & Park,” he wrote in a cover story essay for XXL in 2022. “That’s when the wheels started coming off. One of the hosts was talking to me and I could not understand a word she was saying. 50 had to cover for me and answer every question.”
“No Apologies” is a diamond in the rough on The Re-Up. A rehashing of two past freestyles mashed together, the track is a rare moment where Em offers something raw and compelling.
“My head hits the pillow, a weeping willow, I can’t sleep, a pain so deep it bellows, But these cellos help just to keep me mellow, Hands on my head, touch knees to elbows,” he raps on its second verse.
The new label additions fail to drum up any music to write home about, with the exception of Stat Quo’s Dr. Dre produced club-heater “Get Low.” If anything, this track is a reminder that the good doctor’s presence is deeply missed, serving as his only appearance throughout the project.
Instead of elevating the next wave of Shady Records talent, The Re-Up backfires by exposing the weaknesses of its roster and Eminem’s own creative struggles during a difficult period in his life. All three new artists, Ca$his, Stat Quo and Bobby Creekwater, left the label without ever releasing a studio album and as of 2024, not a single artist from the compilation aside from Eminem himself remains on Shady Records. —Mr. Wavvy
Label: WEB Entertainment
Producers: Eminem, Mr. Porter, Kevin Wilder
Features: Proof, DJ Head, Eye-Kyu, Mr. Porter, Thyme, Three
Sales: N/A
Before he became the record-breaking rap juggernaut we all know and love, there was struggle rapper Eminem, a high school dropout who couldn’t even sell 500 copies of his debut album. But everyone’s gotta start somewhere, right?
Em, who had been honing his rap skills as a member of groups like New Jacks and Soul Intent, was first discovered by production duo the Bass Brothers (Jeff and Mark Bass) years before appearing on Dr. Dre’s radar. Mark heard Em on local Hip Hop radio station WJLB and was struck by his ability to “put rhymes together rhythmically that looked like a drum solo.” From there, he and his brother decided to launch a record label, WEB Entertainment, in order to put Em’s music out. Its first release: Infinite.
Arriving just a couple of months after the death of 2Pac, the album made its debut in November 1996. Sold locally—or attempted to be sold locally, at least—the 11-track project failed to make noise, shifting just a few hundred copies. But this wasn’t a huge surprise given the project’s lack of direction and lackluster production. Mr. Porter’s dusty loops and lo-fi aesthetic offer consistency but the dated underground ambience stunts the album’s growth.
It isn’t just the production that impedes Infinite. Eminem’s delivery oddly lacks urgency, which in turn rubs off on his lyrical competency. Just listen to “313.” Besides the unfortunate hook (“What you know about a sweet MC?”), the verses are littered with corny lines (“You could date a stick of dynamite and wouldn’t go out with a bang”). Then on “Tonite,” he face plants right into one of hip-hop’s cringiest tropes, rhyming “miracle” with “lyrical.”
The tone nuances of a young Marshall Mathers feel familiar, though; his rhyme schemes stand out on occasion too. Like on “It’s OK,” when he spits: “Caught up in bouts with the root of all evil/ I’ve seen it turn beautiful people crude and deceitful/ And make ’em do shit illegal for these Grants and Jacksons/ These transactions explain a man’s actions.”
Infinite forced Eminem to rethink the approach to his art. Opting to try something very different, a trip to the bathroom sparked the idea for his Slim Shady alter-ego which inspired a game-changing new musical direction and birthed a Rap God. The rest, as they say, is history.—Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Shady/Interscope
Producers: Mr. Porter, Eminem, Havoc, Bangladesh, DJ Khalil, Magnedo7, Supa Dups, JG
Features: Slaughterhouse, Bruno Mars
Sales: Gold
There aren’t too many rappers who can keep up with Eminem on the mic.
One MC, however, who has always been able to step up to the plate and prove himself a worthy sparring partner and reliable wingman for Eminem is fellow Motor City MC Royce Da 5’9”. The pair, who first met in 1997 at an Usher concert in Detroit where Royce and his group Wall Street were performing, formed the duo Bad Meets Evil towards the end of the ‘90s. Dropping a few underground cuts during this time, the duo were officially introduced to the world in 1999 on Em’s major label debut, The Slim Shady LP, on the track “Bad Meets Evil.” It’s here that Royce unknowingly (or maybe knowingly) spoke into existence the title of his and Em’s future project: “He’s Evil, and I’m Bad like Steve Seagal/ Against peaceful, see you in hell for the sequel”.
Showcasing the same lyrical intensity, seamless chemistry and potent penmanship found in their earlier works, but with added range thanks to some personal growth and new experiences, Hell: The Sequel secured Bad Meets Evil’s place amongst the GOAT duos debate. Topping the Billboard 200 chart in June 2011, with first week sales of 171,000 copies, it was helped on by lead single “Fast Lane,” an adrenaline-fueled, high-octane display of blistering lyricism on which Em and Royce take turns getting their lyrical guns off, spraying listeners with more punchlines than they know what to do with.
Other standouts include opener “Welcome 2 Hell,” bonus cut “Living Proof,” and “Take from Me,” a spurring PSA that hears both Em and Royce lash out at friends, fans and crooks with a fondness for stealing. “The Reunion” and “A Kiss” offer comic relief, while “Loud Noises” introduces Eminem fans to Slaughterhouse (Royce Da 5’9”, Joe Budden, Joel Ortiz, Crooked I) who at the time had just signed to Shady Records. “Lighters” is by far the project’s most divisive track, a cheesy, Bruno Mars-featured bop manufactured for pop radio, while it turned some Eminem die-hards off, it seemed to find an audience—the record was certified double Platinum.
Hell: The Sequel didn’t just quench the thirst of fans desperate to hear Bad Meets Evil reunite, it also provided a safe space for Em and Royce to mend fences and rekindle a friendship that was fractured for a time following a very public fallout.
Now, the real question: will they ever drop another project together? — Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Denaun Porter, Scott Storch, DJ Head, Jeff Bass, Mike Elizondo, Luis Resto
Features: Dr. Dre, Obie Trice, Truth Hurts, Dina Rae, Rondell Beene
Sales: 2x Platinum
Despite the commercial success of D12’s debut, Devil’s Night, is an underrated album. Even if you choose to fast forward through all of Proof, Kuniva, Swifty McVay, Bizarre, and Kon Artis’ contributions, Devil’s Night features some of Eminem’s best 16s. Riding high off the huge success of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem’s rapping is more confident than ever; here was an artist at the height of his powers.
Thematically and stylistically, Em picks up where MMLP leaves off. Since he isn’t labored with carrying an entire song, his verses are laced so tight they’re simultaneously effortless and intricate. “Ever since I spit some shit/On Infinite/I been giving it/A hundred and ten percent,” he says on “Shit Can Happen.” And yet, Em is absent from the best song on the album, “That’s How,” where all the other group members take turns telling stories in four bars. Like this one, from Kuniva: “Choking your wife all in front of your peeps (bitch!)/She toss a brick through the window of your Jeep/Get back together by the end of the week, that’s so sweet/(Slim and Kim argue too much.)”
The thing is, as overshadowed as they’ll always be by Em, the rest of the D12 are perfectly solid rappers. Especially Proof and Swifty. (Kon Artis has also had a successful career as a producer, under the moniker Mr. Porter.) These guys have a lot to say, even when they’re not just speaking of the devil. —Insanul Ahmed
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Luis Resto, Mark Batson, Tim Suby, !llmind, Royce Da 5’9″, Andre Brissett, Dawaun Parker, d.a. got that dope, Alex Villasana, Skylar Grey, Mr. Porter, The Alchemist, Dem Jointz & Trevor Lawrence Jr., Erik “Bluetooth” Griggs, Ricky Racks, Jayson DeZuzio, IllaDaProducer, mjNichols, BlackNailz, J.LBS, TheLoudPack, Mike Zombie, Luca Mauti, T-Minus, Frano, Lonestarrmuzik, S1, Black Bethoven, Mark Batson
Features: Young M.A, Royce da 5’9″, White Gold, Ed Sheeran, Juice Wrld, Skylar Grey, Black Thought, Q-Tip, Denaun, Anderson .Paak, Don Toliver, Kxng Crooked, Joell Ortiz, DJ Premier, Ty Dolla $ign, Dr. Dre, Sly Pyper, MAJ,
Sales: 2x Platinum
Entering the 2020s, Eminem is clearly fed up of trying to keep up with contemporary trends; instead, he would rather ridicule all their shortcomings (like he did so much with the anti-mumble rap Kamikaze two years prior). Therefore Music To Be Murdered By is more a chance to go back to basics and find creative ways to kill his imitators akin to legendary horror filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock (whose cryptic yet jolly voice Em samples throughout), back when he shocked audiences by pulling away the shower curtain with 1960’s Psycho.
There’s a dimly lit atmosphere to “Darkness,” where Em shows the loneliness that goes with being a rap legend, and “Little Engine” uses what sounds like a 16-bit synth line lifted from a ghost game on the Super Nintendo to rap edgy bars about the Manson Family’s murder of Sharon Tate and boast of how his own victims are often “on a flight too, but it’s a staircase.” Beyond pushing dissenters down stairs, Music To Be Murdered By sags because of its instinct to deliver syrupy stadium ready, sing-song hooks, courtesy of guests like Ed Sheeran, Don Toliver and Anderson Paak. Had Eminem stuck with the concept of rooting his bars in the macabre, it would have hit far more profoundly. But it’s undeniably impressive hearing Em keep pace with Juice WRLD (who idolized Slim Shady growing up) on “Godzilla” and this hit song is proof of Em’s impact on even the Soundcloud rap generation.
The fact Eminem quickly followed up Music to be Murdered By with a Side B and 16 new songs is perhaps an admission that he didn’t think Side A quite went hard enough. The sequel of sorts certainly has its moments, particularly “Discombobulated,” where a classic Dr. Dre piano line is paired up with spooked out bass and the music inspires Em to showcase a deliciously, line-pushing sense of humour: “I just took an AIDS test and the doctor said to think positive, what the fuck?” Yet the problems from Side A tend to persist and the menacing content doesn’t sync up with the poppy production. “Black Magic,” in particular, will have you scratching your head and wondering why Em uses the cherub-like vocals of Skylar Grey so often, especially when their seriousness lessens the impact of all the twisted punchlines he’s rapping. On Music To Be Murdered By Side A and Side B, Eminem reminds us of his abilities, sure, but he doesn’t quite nail the primary concept. In Hitchcockian terms, it’s more a Topaz than a Vertigo: so maybe not Em’s best, but destined to still have its advocates, who swear it’s better than the critics claimed.—Thomas Hobbs
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Just Blaze, DJ Khalil, Mr. Porter, Supa Dups, Jason “JG” Gilbert, Emile, Boi-1da, Jim Jonsin, Script Shepherd, Nick Brongers, Alex da Kid, Makeba Riddick, Havoc, Magnedo7
Features: Kobe, P!nk, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, Slaughterhouse
Sales: 8× Platinum
In 2010 Eminem was staggering toward a creative crossroads, having to adapt to a completely new way of making music and also follow up 2009’s Relapse, a conceptual serial killer record that—while his hardcore fans rejoiced in all the madness—the masses found somewhat irritating due to the faux European accents and non-stop references to perverse gore. The most critically acclaimed Eminem projects were created in a haze of psychedelics, chronic-filled blunts, and prescription pills, resulting in a hyper-animated flow and an MC who offered even more creative ways of eviscerating his enemies than the average episode of Itchy and Scratchy.
But this process “almost killed” Eminem following a drug overdose in 2007 and he knew things desperately had to change. While the brilliantly defiant “Cold Wind Blows” and its screeching organ is a natural continuation of Relapse’s stubbornly disturbed spirit, the rest of Recovery’s music is noticeably more mature and sounds like someone slowing down in order to restore their sanity. Massive lead single “Not Afraid” is the best reflection of this shift, with its howled out hook and gooey refrains about breaking free from cages obviously the result of a freshly sober creative process. It’s undeniably interesting to see Eminem in this different light.
But while these life changes are powerful on a personal level, the mature, guitar-driven stadium rap-rock production choices they tend to result in feels far less dangerous than the circus rage beats Eminem worked best on previously. The soppy, lovelorn storytelling of a track like “Spacebound” just doesn’t really go anywhere and meanders. And the Rihanna-duet, “Love The Way You Lie”, and its sickly piano-line, also feels like a blunt shift from the Eminem we’re all used to. Although he raps with that trademark anger, the actual lyrics are a little cheesy and don’t match all the vocal intensity; arguably, for the first time in his career, Eminem’s bark just doesn’t match up to his bite.
The intoxicating stomp of “Cinderella Man” is a reminder of what Eminem can produce when his back is against the wall. He seems to be talking about a greedy music industry, combatively rapping: “That boy’s hot enough to melt hell, burn satan too / Fry his ass and put his ashes back together with glue.” Yet so much of Recovery’s fire lacks a real target and, although technically proficient, it’s a project where Eminem seems a little lost, working out a new way of doing things and giving us a grown-up yet ultimately gimmicky sound that doesn’t quite fit his personality. — Thomas Hobbs
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Web
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Luis Resto, Mark Batson, Mike Elizondo
Features: 50 Cent, Nate Dogg, D12, Dr. Dre, Stat Quo
Sales: 5x Platinum
This is just a weird album.
Riding the wave of nearly universal acclaim that began with the conciliatory The Eminem Show and peaked in the one-two punch of the 8 Mile Soundtrack and the part he played in unleashing 50 Cent’s Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ on the world, Eminem faced some interesting new expectations during the lead-up to his fifth album. There was talk on the street that he would deliver a conventional hip-hop classic.
Despite adhering rigidly to certain cultural conventions of hip-hop, Eminem’s actual output had always lived on the fringes of the genre. He likes a very particular kind of musically lush, rhythmically stiff beat. And his emotional pendulum has always swung violently from unabashed goofiness to an extreme sort of self-seriousness and rage, rarely landing in hip-hop’s cooler, more nonchalant sweet spot. But in 2004, he was the undisputed king of mainstream rap—with the beefs under his belt to prove it—and his subject matter and tone on both of the aforementioned album’s suggested a more conservative direction.
Whoa, were we wrong.
What he delivered with Encore is a sprawling mess of schizophrenia awesomeness. The album starts quite straight-forwardly, tackling expected autobiographical business in short order. From “Evil Deeds” to “Never Enough” to “Toy Soldiers” to “Yellow Brick Road” to “Mosh,” Em addresses all the hot topics of family, rap beef, politics and, perhaps most pressing, his regrettable use of the N word as a teenager. Cool, thanks for clearing all that up.
But that’s where things start to get zany.
The next six songs are just a totally self-indulgent bizarre ride to the far side of…I don’t even know what. Whether it’s his scathing singing freestyle ode to ex-wife Kim Mathers, “Puke,” or the comical rebuke of Benzino, “Big Weenie,” or the club banger parody “Ass Like That,” listening to it, you get the sense that you’re witnessing the biggest artist in the world baiting his fan base to balk. Eminem had always skated close to Weird-Al novelty territory—stuff like “Mushroom Song.” But when he sings “poo-poo, ca-ca” on “My First Single,” it’s maybe the first time in his career that you actually believe that he just doesn’t give a fuck. And then there’s the juvenile stream-of-conscious epic “Rain Man.” Can’t forget that one. The most meandering, strange and “audience-less” song of his entire career (maybe the career of any artist of his stature?) this is definitely not a song for you or me. But the real question is if it’s even for him. Then again, this is an enigmatic fellow we’re talking about. This might be the most “Marshall” music ever.
Things sober up towards the end, and Em gets back inside the box with the more traditional “Spend Some Time,” “Mockingbird,” and “Encore.” But even that material can’t shake off the surreal feeling of, “Did the middle of that album actually happen? Did Eminem, world famous superstar, really just rap an entire conversation with Dre debating what constitutes a homosexual act? Was that real?”
Understandably, many fans found Encore to be a real head scratcher. But that’s exactly the point, and that’s what makes it so great. Under the weight of expectation Eminem bucked and delivered this amazing exercise in absolute freedom. Given carte blanche to create—so many miles into the stratosphere of success that literally anything he made was guaranteed to sell millions—this inscrutable, genius oddball made a manic, bipolar masterpiece. —Noah Callahan-Bever
Label: N/A
Producers: Eminem, Luis Resto, Dr. Dre, Kon Artis, Mike Elizondo
Features: D12, Obie Trice
Sales: N/A
It’s not really fair to compare an incomplete body of work, released without the artist’s consent, to proper studio albums, but the music on the Straight From the Lab EP is strong enough that it deserves inclusion on this list. Also, because it answers the question, “What would it sound like if Eminem made a ‘normal’ rap album?”
Leaked by a friend of Eminem’s younger brother, Nate Mathers, who found a CD of works-in-progress lying around the house, this collection represents a snapshot of the solo material Eminem was creating during the post-8 Mile, pre-Encore era. Clearly influenced by his time with 50 Cent, surging with confidence from his unhindered success, these songs find Mathers making what is by far the most straight-ahead hip-hop of his career.
Similar in their dark tone to the production work he’d been providing for the likes of Jay-Z, Nas and 50, songs like “We As Americans” and “Monkey See, Monkey Do” eschew the use of metaphors and humor that accent most of his work in favor of declamation and explanation. Even the collection’s twisted love/domestic violence ballad, “Love You More,” barrels straight ahead—replacing the clever conceits of “Just The Two Of Us” and “Kim” with unflinching passion and honest, extremely honest, urgency: “You fuck other people and I fuck other people/You’re a slut but I’m equal, I’m a mut… So it’s off and on, usually more off than on/You’re the only one I fuck without a condom on.”
The dichotomy of “Canibitch” and “Bully“, the collection’s two diss records, really demonstrates the change in Eminem’s song writing that happened when he started hanging around 50 Cent. The former, recorded shortly after The Eminem Show, is a goofy cartoon takedown in which Em channels Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story” and spins a ridiculous Looney Tune that involves him impersonating Canibus and driving to Canada with Dr. Dre (and running over Jermaine Dupri along the way) to stomp out “Stanibus.” The latter, on the other hand, is a deadly serious dissection of Benzino, Ja Rule, and Irv Gotti that contemplates the violent, and potentially deadly, outcome of rap beef: “If I get killed for this rap, I got a million in cash that says that I will get you back in Hailey’s name.” That’s a long way from threatening to peg Fred Durst with the bottle of dye that he bleached his head with.
One can’t help but wonder how different Encore might have been had these songs not leaked; had Eminem recorded the entire album in the shadow of Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ and 8 Mile rather than the following year. But that’s fanfiction for another day.
It may only be a collection of sketches of an aborted album. But the Straight From the Lab EP was sourced from one of the most exciting moments of Eminem’s career and its value cannot be overstated. —Noah Callahan-Bever
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Doc Ish, Dawaun Parker, Mark Batson, Trevor Lawrence Jr.
Features: Dr. Dre, 50 Cent
Sales: 5x Platinum
Relapse is an enlightening look into the depths of the human soul. Not since Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 masterpiece Requiem For A Dream had pop culture offered such a harrowing view of the vicious cycle of drug addiction. The album may be relentlessly dark, but so is Eminem’s life. He desperately tries to be himself again, but can’t: He might be off drugs, but they’ve permanently changed who he is. Watching an artist you’ve known for a decade deal with basic identity issues makes for a fascinating—though not always enjoyable—listen.
Yet, Relapse was so hated on that even Eminem started believing it was wack. He publicly bashed it on Recovery‘s lead single “Not Afraid” where he admitted, “Let’s be honest, that last Relapse CD was ehhh/Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground.” Perhaps he did. Relapse is marred by a series of obvious flaws: The accents are frustrating, “We Made You” used the outdated “my funny first single” formula that just wasn’t funny anymore, and what was once just a running serial-killer side theme in Em’s music came front-and-center at the weirdest time possible. And yet, there’s still so much to be found in the 22-track deluxe edition and the seven bonus songs on Relapse: Refill.
Yes, the album could have used more editing, but as sprawling as it is, there’s still 13 to 15 great songs worth of an album here. “3 a.m.” felt forced the first time you heard it, but within the context of the preceding “Dr. West” skit it made a lot more sense. More importantly, it highlighted the vitality of Eminem’s music—the peerless intricacy of his lyricism. Accents or no accents, few rappers could string together bars like these:
“You’re walking down a horror corridor/It’s almost 4 in the morning and you’re in a nightmare, it’s horrible/Right there’s the coroner/Waiting for ya to turn the corner so he can corner ya/You’re a goner, he’s onto ya/Out the corner of his cornea he just saw you run…”
Casual fans may have checked out of the album when it goes into a rough patch after the first three of songs, but things really pick up towards the end—and on the additional songs. “Déjà Vu,” “My Darling,” “Careful What You Wish For,” and “Elevator” are some of Em’s best late-period material. Songs where he takes a focused look into what addiction, fame, and more money than he knows how to spend have done to his life. The songs are littered with harrowing honesty that longtime Em fans often take for granted.
Relapse wasn’t quite the “Shady’s back!” moment we were all hoping for. But in truth, that moment will never come. For lots of reasons—as he admitted in a Complex interview, for one, Ambien has left holes in his brain—he’ll never be the same old Marshall again. Yet it remains a fascinating entry in his catalog because even when he isn’t himself, there’s no one quite like him. —Insanul Ahmed
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Mr. Porter, Dem Jointz, Fredwreck, Don Cannon, Cubeatz, Cole Bennett, Benny Blanco, Luis Resto, White Gold, Narza, Callus, Skylar Grey, D.A. Got That Dope
Features: Big Sean, JID, Jelly Roll, BabyTron, White Gold, EZ Mil, Skylar Grey, Sly Pyper, Dem Jointz, 2 Chainz, Grip, Westside Boogie
Sales: Gold
Legends never really die, or so the saying goes. But if Eminem’s latest record is to be believed, then Slim Shady has well and truly left the building.
It’s never easy to say goodbye, but at least on this occasion the not-so-dearly departed left loved ones with a parting gift in the form of farewell album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce). Essential listening for any Eminem die-hard, it’s the album they’ve wanted for years, a zany return to the dark side of his brain, although his deranged alter-ego meets his match after Marshall Mathers finally gets sick of his shit.
A chaotic clash of the titans, Eminem’s 12th studio LP harks back to the glory days of the concept album. More intentional than his other conceptional release Relapse, he made it a point to alert fans to his creative and very calculated strategy a day before its release, putting out a PSA informing his followers that “if you listen to the songs out of order they might not make sense.” With that said, Em’s storytelling on TDOSS is top-tier.
From the moment he spits on the grave of Slim Shady and lets off a fully loaded clip of rebellious lyrical acrobatics on the opening track, “Renaissance,” it’s obvious Eminem’s ready to face his greatest adversary, while throwing the occasional shot at fickle rap fans (“You nerdy pricks would find somethin’ wrong with 36 Chambers”). The album actually feels like an extension of Kamikaze, but instead of Em taking aim at his critics, it’s Slim Shady’s time and he just wants to use it to piss all over cancel culture.
From little people and the blind and handicapped to the gay and trans communities, no one is safe from the rapper’s evil spawn, his inappropriate rants worse than ever before. Purposely nosediving the boundaries of political correctness, he does his best work (or worst, depending on how you look at it) after plowing a 16-year sober Marshall with drugs and alcohol. On “Trouble,” with only 40 seconds to get his shit off, he manages to offend every marginalized community possible without fear of consequence. “You gonna cancel me, yeah? Gen-Z me, bruh?” he taunts an incapacitated Em.
The main theme of the album centers around a conflicted Eminem deliberating over just how much his twisted alter-ego was responsible for his gargantuan fame. Facing some hard truths and cleaning out his closet once more, it couldn’t have been easy for him to pick the chainsaw back up, especially being that those memories come with some serious demons including his battle with substance abuse. But at 51 years old, he’s confident in his sobriety — and it actually makes him a sharper MC. Not convinced? Just listen to “Fuel.” His dizzying display of wordplay trickery is mind-blowing; it should be in the contender for verse of the year.
His songwriting hasn’t lost a step, either. “Temporary” is a masterclass in penmanship. Pulling at the heartstrings of fans, particularly those who have been following Em since his daughter Hailie was in preschool, it imagines a world where the rapper is no longer alive and she has to navigate life without him. The chilling piano backdrop, paired with Skylar Grey’s stirring chorus, lubricates the eyes, but it’s Em’s vulnerable honesty that busts the tear ducts wide open.
Eminem might be all smiles after ending the life of his crazed alter-ego on the cinematic “Guilty Conscience 2,” but it’s a bittersweet moment for fans. The Death of Slim Shady is among some of his best work in over a decade, restoring the feeling of Eminem in his prime and picking up where some of his classic albums left off. But with Slim now dead, we can only hope the quality of his future works aren’t affected by the loss. — Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Dr. Dre, Rick Rubin, DJ Khalil, DVLP, Frequency No ID, StreetRunner, S1
Features: Kendrick Lamar, Rihanna, Skylar Grey, Nate Ruess, Jaime N Commons, Sia
Sales: 4× Platinum
Eminem holds the unique distinction of being the single most Monday-morning-quarterbacked artist in hip-hop. Every one of his releases—with the possible exception of 8 Mile, which was his fastball-down-the-middle (to mix a couple sports metaphors right off the bat)—has been relentlessly second-guessed by pundits and critics. He’s not serious enough. He’s too serious. He talks too much about his personal life. He needs to talk more about his personal life. He needs more Dre beats. He needs more outside producers. Yada yada yada…You’ve heard it all. So has he.
Somehow, despite all the know-it-alls knowing it all, Eminem’s managed to make the specific artistic decisions that have yielded a catalog that’s revered by fans, as well as contemporaries, and has sold so many records, that a tower of his CD jewel cases would reach a height eight times higher than the earth’s atmosphere. So at 41—rich as shit, famous as fuck, still living in Detroit, still stuck in the ’90s, and still rapping as well as anyone’s ever rapped—he made an album for himself.
As such, if you are not an Eminem fan—which is to say that you’re turned off by rage, the casual hurling of homophobic epithets, pointed, pervasive misogyny, and beats that fall out of the spectrum of what is considered “hot” hip-hop production—this is not going to be the album to sell you on him. Go listen to The Eminem Show or 8 Mile, and step into a world.
If, on the other hand, you are an Eminem fan—which is to say that you’re able to compartmentalize your gender and sexual politics in order to enjoy hyper-articulate, hyper-tortured self-examination (and self-immolation), and get a kick out of hearing the art of rap pushed to its technical limits over quirky music unlike anything any other artist would choose—then, well, The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is here to scratch your itch.
Where Eminem’s 2010 album Recovery sought to fit in, to reassert him within the context of the pop and hip-hop music of the time, MMLP2 shirks the pretense of conforming. (Although songs like “The Monster” certainly don’t shirk the pretense of appealing.) As was the case with the original Mathers album—which stuck out like a green hat with an orange bill, musically—this body of work exists for the purpose of exorcizing the noise in his brain via shock and awe.
And it does both. However, where MMLP leaned more heavily on shock to spark controversy, the sequel’s preoccupation is inspiring awe to spark conversation. Conversation about who’s the best rapper. “Awesome” in the truest meaning of the word, “Rap God” is at the same time an exhausting exhibition in wordplay—one that is perhaps without peer in terms of pure execution—and also a clever reflection on his career. “Well, that’s what they do when they get jealous, they confuse it/It’s not hip-hop, it’s pop, cause I found a hella way to fuse it/With rock, shock rap with Doc… ‘I don’t know how to make songs like that, I don’t know what words to use’/Let me know when it occurs to you/While I’m ripping any one of these verses, that versus you, it’s curtains.” Never let it be said that Eminem dumbed it down to double his dollars. Besides the head-spinning verbiage, the physicality of his rapping is so fierce you can’t help but imagine veins in his neck throbbing and spit flying around the booth. This is not “cool.” This does not care about being cool. This is about an almost frightening level of, a near-religious devotion to, craft. This is about testing one’s own limits, about personal-best.
Equally ambitious, on the album’s intro, “Bad Guy,” Eminem uses his gift for narration to turn what appears at first like a hokey conclusion to his epic “Stan” into a poignant moment of personal revelation. Thirteen years later, Stan’s little brother, Matthew Mitchell, the one who got egged on the autograph in Denver, is comin’ back on some G Rap shit, like he’s avenging his brother’s death. ‘Cause he is, in fact, avenging his brother’s death—by kidnapping and killing Eminem. But at the moment of truth, the music shifts and Em wakes from what he realizes is his own morbid dream. Stan, Matthew, and even Slim Shady are all projections of his subconscious, his own insecurity embodied. He admits to creating these coping mechanisms to deflect his own discomfort with the hypocrisy of his art—to have been bullied as a child only to to grow up to bully (gays, in particular) as an adult, to in dehumanizing women in his work while putting his daughters on a pedestal at home, to lament his own celebrity while still white-knuckling it to the end.
And it is in these honest, introspective moments that the album is most satisfying. The mirror-effect songwriting on “Legacy” illustrates Em’s journey from self-hate to self-respect through the tool of hip-hop. “So Far…,” a madcap roasting of the idea of a glamorous celebrity life, is one of the most entertaining story songs he has ever recorded. Marrying Joe Walsh’s acerbic, arena-rock reflection on celebrity, “Life’s Been Good” with Schooly D’s “PSK (What Does It Mean?)” samplewise, the story finds our world-famous hero befuddled by modern technology. In Walsh’s comic timber he belts, “Got friends on Facebook, all over the world/Not sure what that means, they tell me it’s good…” Later, after being stalked by a fan in the frozen food aisles of Costco while fighting a nosebleed, he escapes to his car, only to get caught at a red light with a finger in his nose by two young women who recognize him. They laugh. Norman Mailer once described being the heavyweight champion of the world as akin to God’s big toe. Being the best rapper alive is not dissimilar. Apparently, when no one’s looking, even God gets toe cheese.
MMLP2 matches its candor with rare moments of emotional maturity. On “Stronger Than I Was,” Eminem revisits the sung styles of “Hailey’s Song” to parse his long on-again-off-again relationship with the love/hate of his life, Kim—and finds the silver lining of personal fortitude in their shared, torturous history. He hasn’t exactly forgiven her, but he is certainly appreciative of the exercise. Far more shocking is “Headlights.” In a bombastic, over-the-top pop ballad, Em, a father of teenagers, has a moment of realization: parents are just people, struggling to sort it all out like the rest of us. And so he reaches a place of forgiveness with the most frequently recurring villain in his body of work—his mother. “Why’re we always at each other’s throats?” he ask. “Especially when Dad, he fucked us both!” For the first time on record, Eminem acknowledges the fact that, for all of his mother’s damaged-and-damaging shortcomings, she did, at least, stick around.
Though it is unlikely, in fact, impossible, that the second Marshall Mathers LP will recreate the moment in pop music that its predecessor brought about, to focus on that is to miss the point. The reception of an album is a byproduct of the music, inevitably affected by time and circumstance—it is not the music itself. That Eminem has managed to revisit his career-defining work, 13 years later, and not just carbon-copy it, but advance many of the themes and ideas it introduced, with such deft, studied mastery of his craft, is nothing short of a victory. A pretty great one.
If that’s the kind of thing you like, of course. —Noah Callahan-Bever
Label: Web Entertainment
Producers: Mark and Jeff Bass (executive producers), Mr. Porter, Kuniva, DJ Rec
Features: Bizarre, Fuzz
Sales: N/A
The Slim Shady EP opens with a dramatic dialog that sounds like a scene taken straight out of a horror movie. Late one dark and stormy Detroit night, a deep, distorted, devilish voice calls Eminem’s name, awakening him from his slumber. He tries to ignore it, but the voice just won’t be silenced.
“Wake the fuck up, motherfucker,” the demonic spirit commands as Eminem screams in anguish, “What do you want from me?” The voice laughs mirthlessly, asking “Remember me?” in a sarcastic tone. “I killed you,” Eminem replies in disbelief as the psychodrama continues. Next the voice instructs Em to look in the mirror, apparently to confront the monster that lurks within him. Eminem’s denials take on an air of desperation, as if he’s clinging to his last shred of sanity while the voice taunts him, “You’re nothing without me.”
Marshall Mathers’ pitch-perfect performance on this spine-tingling skit is just a little bit too convincing. Although the rest of the 1997 EP indulges in the sort of over-the-top comic violence we hear on numerous rap records, this introduction of the Slim Shady persona, delivered without the slightest hint of silliness, is a singular instance in hip-hop. The demonic discourse on Snoop Dogg’s “Murder Was The Case” seems casual by comparison. Not even Scarface on the Geto Boys’ classic “Mind Playing Tricks”achieves such verisimilitude of madness on wax.
The skit casts a pall over the entire EP, so that by the time we encounter horrors like “Just The Two Of Us,” in which a deranged father and his young daughter dispose of the mother’s body and plan their future as a fugitives, there’s no way to laugh it off. The EP’s cover depicts Em smashing a mirror to pieces—a chilling, evocative image reminiscent of the album art for Black Flag’s Damaged.
Eminem elaborates on his aberrant alter-ego on the EP’s first song, “Low Down, Dirty”: “Wearing visors, sunglasses and disguises/’Cause my split personality is having an identity crisis/I’m Dr. Hyde and Mr. Jekyll/Disrespectful/Hearing voices in my head while these whispers echo.”
Hip-hop thrives on exaggeration, and while it may be an overstatement to say that Eminem suffered from multiple personalities, there was no shortage of real drama in his life at the time he recorded The Slim Shady EP. After a tumultuous childhood, young Marshall Mathers found an outlet for his feelings through hip-hop. But his 1996 release, The Infinite, a competent but unremarkable effort that was mostly produced by The Bass Brothers and released through their indie label Web Entertainment, failed to get airplay on local radio stations in Detroit. At the time, Mathers saw few other options to support his young daughter aside from working dead-end restaurant jobs. The apparent failure of his music career plunged him deeper into drugs and despair.
The Slim Shady EP, which features production by The Bass Brothers as well as D12 members Kuniva and Mr. Porter, must have felt like Eminem’s last shot to achieve his dreams, and he held nothing back. Although he did give voice to life’s pressures on certain tracks from The Infinite, it was only after he began to sound truly unhinged that his work caught the attention of the hip-hop underground, and eventually, Dr. Dre. The legendary producer was sufficiently impressed with the EP that his first release with Em was called The Slim Shady LP, preserving not just the title but three of the EP’s illest cuts, “If I Had,” “Just Don’t Give A Fuck,” and “97 Bonnie & Clyde,” a reworking of the disturbingly twisted masterpiece “Just The Two Of Us.”
So the demonic voice proved prophetic about at least one thing: before the emergence of Slim Shady, Eminem’s rap career seemed to be going nowhere. Afterwards, he became America’s worst nightmare—a white kid from the wrong side of the tracks who truly does not give a fuck about anything except using his mastery of hip-hop to spread his own unique strain of mental illness like audio anthrax spores. —Rob Kenner
Label: Shady/Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Eminem, Mike WiLL Made-It, Boi-1da, Tay Keith, S1, Illa da Producer, Ronny J
Features: Royce Da 5’9”, Joyner Lucas, Jessie Reyez
Sales: Platinum
Remember on ‘I’m Shady’ when Eminem said he was going to write his biggest “fuck-you-letter”? Well, Kamikaze was it.
Waving that lingering middle finger at his biggest critics, Eminem’s surprise album pulled zero punches. Arriving just eight months after Revival, his most panned album to date, he let fans and detractors know exactly what his intentions were right out the gate: “I feel like I wanna punch the world in the fucking face right now.” Unhappy with the reception his ninth studio album received, Em goes full-on rhyme psycho, obliterating anyone who had a bone to pick with him and his music, while also using the opportunity to “get the anger out.”
Starting exactly as he meant to go on, “The Ringer” unapologetically sets the tone for the rest of the 13-track album, delivering a high-energy lyrical tirade on everyone from Machine Gun Kelly, Vince Staples and Charlamagne tha God to all the Lils (Yachty, Pump, Xan), and despite his manager urging him to wind his neck in (“Paul wants me to chill”), he doesn’t stop there. His relentless onslaught extends to politics, jabbing at former Vice President Mike Pence, and, of course, Donald Trump (aka Agent Orange)—who allegedly sent the Secret Service to Em’s house over terrorist claims.
As the album progresses, it’s evident Em really took the Revival slander to heart, as well as comments made about him being over the hill. The court of public opinion and media gets roasted throughout—there’s even a skit where Em tells Paul he’s heading over to a journalist’s house who wrongly critiqued him—as does the Recording Academy (“Tell the Grammys to go and fuck themselves”), but it’s his fellow entertainers who bear the brunt of his rage.
Tyler, the Creator, Lord Jamar, DJ Akademiks and Joe Budden all get it on “The Fall,” with Em warning the latter (who was signed to Shady Records at the time) to “fasten it” while bringing up some of his controversial past transgressions (“The closest thing he’s had to hits is smackin’ bitches”). Die Antwoord takes a jab on “Greatest,” while “Not Alike” with Royce Da 5’9” doubles as a scathing takedown of mumble rappers and MGK.
Kamikaze isn’t all about settling scores, though. Eminem does take some time to dissect the traumas he’s suffered at the hands of unhealthy relationships. On “Normal,” he expresses a desire to find drama-free love, distancing himself from the toxic partnerships he raps about on songs like “Love the Way You Lie,” “Tragic Endings,” and, of course, “Kim.”
One of the most vulnerable moments, however, comes on “Stepping Stone,” where Em decides it’s time to have a long overdue and very difficult conversation with D12. Facing the elephant in the room that had plagued the group ever since the death of Em’s best friend and the group’s co-founder Proof, he gets a lot off his chest here, admitting that he can’t be responsible for the group’s success anymore. “I love all of you men/ But I just can’t be the guy everybody depends on for entire careers ‘cause that’s not even fair,” he spits, before confirming that “D12 is over.”
Ultimately, Kamikaze is a utopia for lyric nerds who love to dissect bars. A calculated effort that requires listeners to do a lot of heavy lifting and unpacking—which is something rap used to pride itself on—it proved Eminem is still one of the best to ever do it despite his Revival hiccup. —Will “ill Will” Lavin
Label: Interscope/Shady
Producers: Eminem, Red Spyda, Denaun Porter, Mike Elizondo, Chucky Thompson, Nas, DJ Premier, Guru, Luis Resto
Features: Obie Trice, Jay Z, Freeway, 50 Cent, Xzibit, D12, Nas, Macy Gray, Boomkat, Rakim, Young Zee, Gang Starr
Sales: 6x Platinum
The release of 8 Mile, the semi-autobiographical movie that told the story of Eminem’s coming up through Detroit’s famed battle-rap scene, marks the absolute high-point of his artistic confidence level, and his world-level dominance of rap music, and pop music in general. So, though he only raps on five of the 16 songs on the soundtrack, and is only credited as a writer or a producer on seven, Eminem’s style and persona come through in every second of every minute of the album. If only in the way that all the songs fit into the scheme of the whole, and the way you can hear the other artists positioning themselves in his environment, or reflecting themselves off his presence.
The five songs Eminem raps on, all self-produced, capture a master lyricist at his peak. The megasmash “Lose Yourself” is of course the most well-known, with a patch of vomited-up spaghetti staining a sweater and leading to the defiance of gravity and the absolution of self in an eternal now. But the title track, and “Rap Game” and “Rabbit Run” and the dark, seething “Love Me” stand right with it in quality.
“Love Me” is monumentally great. His Shady Records signees Obie Trice and 50 Cent join him on it—and to a man, to a line, to a word, the rapping is phenomenal. Somehow, on a song where Obie delivers a couplet as instantly memorable as “But in the meantime/It’s Jimmy Iovine time…” and 50 makes every rap fan choke on shocked laughter with, “I’m convinced, man/Something really wrong with those hoes/I thought Lil Kim was hot til she started fuckin’ with her nose,” Em wins the day by twisting his words around themselves til they’re like some kind of crazy grapevine climbing up a trellis.
“My noodle is cockadoodle/My clock’s cuckoo/I got screws loose/Yeah, the whole kit and kaboodle/It’s brutal…”
That’s Em at his best, which is pretty darn close to rap at its best, period. That is someone with a great gift for rhyme, an elevated understanding of the way vowel sounds and consonant sounds play off each other, someone able to discern rhythms and patterns in words that most of us can’t even hear—not until he arranges them in order and pronounces them in a way that highlights their melodiousness. That’s a guy like that just showing off. Just having fun. But knowing that in putting his fun down on record, he’ll let millions of other people share in the fun. In the beauty, really, to put it a little more loftily.
The miracle of the album, though, is how the other songs fit in with Em’s. Young Zee’s frosty, slinky, “That’s My Nigga Fo’ Real,” with its emotive chorus balancing between comedy and pathos in a way familiar to any Em fan. The two R&B songs, Macy Gray’s “Time of My Life” and Boomkat’s “Wasting My Time,” soulful and mournful, world-weary but with a wry hip-hop smile. They’re both terrific. And you can hear why Em chose them. They suit him—they sound like a damaged loner walking home down 8 Mile Road, not much to look at, baggy sweatshirt and jeans. But secure in the knowledge that when it comes down to it, if it comes down to it, he’s armed with a wit and a sense of savvy that can get him over anything. —Dave Bry
Label: Aftermath/Interscope
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem, Mark and Jeff Bass, Mel-Man
Features: Dr. Dre, Royce Da 5’9″
Sales: 5x Platinum
Once Eminem hit MTV with “My Name Is” in early 1999, shit was a wrap.
Overnight, he went from an underground punchline rapper with a taste for the transgressive and a gift for the absurd into a household name.
The album that followed set the blueprint for his career. The Slim Shady LP was the first domino, the moment that he became an icon to a generation of teenagers who felt abused, abandoned, uncounted—or could, at the very least, identify with some of these feelings. The Slim Shady LP ended up being directly and unintentionally responsible for Em’s thematic approach going forward, the way his work began to curl in on itself in a reflexive, ever-intensifying paroxysm of raw self-interrogation. It set the stage for some of the central conflicts of his career: the tension between fiction and realism, between documentation and glorification, and of course the way his race magnified these conflicts and transformed him into one of the genre’s true superstars.
But though he went from obscurity to fame so suddenly, getting to that point was arduous, fraught with struggle and failure, beset by angst and anguish. And a lot of that makes it into The Slim Shady LP. At the very least, this gives reason why the album is what it is: a morbidly cartoonish blend of pulp and shock tactics, the defense mechanism of a person living in society’s brutal, vulnerable underbelly. It’s also darkly hilarious, at moments, deeply sad in others, tinted by juvenilia, and shot through with underclass rage directed upward, outward, inward.
The Slim Shady LP has a fascination with the things polite, middle-class society knows not to talk about. Everything you weren’t supposed to say, Eminem would say. And it was this that forged such a deep connection with his audience, a sense that he was speaking to something the media had otherwise ignored, which made his more absurdist rhymes seem scarily real. Songs like “If I Had” and “Rock Bottom” channeled the frustrations of those in a dead-end job well before Kanye’s “Spaceship” launched, the former articulating the mind-numbing boredom at the heart of poverty, the sense of being stuck: “Tired of stepping in clubs wearing the same pair of Lugz.”
A darkness pervades the record beyond its class aggression; the anger points everywhere, including the women in his life (his father is absent, and so spared). Em embodies some horrific characters. In “Guilty Conscience,” he’s encouraging robbery, statutory rape, and murder. On “’97 Bonnie and Clyde” he’s taking an infant child to help dispose of her mother’s body. Even at his most optimistic, as on the borderline-slapstick flight of fancy “My Fault” (Em meets a girl at a rave party who proceeds to swallow a whole bag full of psilocybin mushrooms), the song ends with his character sobbing and praying that this girl he just met come back to life.
The song that best captures his worldview, though, is “Brain Damage,” which is ironic because it’s also one of the most exaggerated, comic book-esque moments. (It ends with the protagonist’s brain popping out of his head and getting stuffed back inside.) But it sets up a world where a character is completely alone and unprotected: picked on by bullies, his teachers leave him vulnerable (and add insult to injury by piling on more work), and his school principal joins the bully in beating him down. When he goes home, his mother continues the stream of abuse. The message is clear, for those who feel alone and abandoned: Eminem understands how you feel.
Although Eminem was a locus for all these different ideas, he didn’t invent any of them, of course. Although to the mainstream press—and a substantial portion of white America—he might as well have. What was his at this point—before he embraced 2Pac’s exposed-nerve, autobiographical subjectivity in full, pushing his own story from the underpinning to the main event—was an exceptional gift for writing, an prodigious ability to exercise certain archetypes with seemingly effortless flair. Along with similar rappers like Redman, he was adapting the particulars of an underground movement into a mainstream expression of personality.
He had lyrical style. Although now attention is often drawn—by himself and fans alike—to the effort that goes into his bars, what made him initially so appealing here was how he made it seem as if he’d emerged from the womb just talking like this. —David Drake
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre (executive producer), Eminem, Mark and Jeff Bass, The 45 King, Mel-Man
Features: Dido, RBX, Sticky Fingaz, Dina Rae, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit, Nate Dogg, D12, Bizarre
Sales: 11× Platinum
The Marshall Mathers LP was Eminem stepping into the prime of his career. It was a lightning rod for controversy in the year 2000 when CD sales hit their all time peak. At a time when the Billboard charts were dominated by squeaky-clean pop acts like ‘N Sync 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—culminating when he performed “Stan” at the 2001 Grammys alongside Elton John. 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.
In many ways, MMLP picked up where his previous album, The Slim Shady LP, left off—many of the new songs mirrored older ones. There’s another “Public Service Announcement” (once again voiced by Jeff Bass of The Bass Brothers), Em calls “Drug Ballad” his “love song” the way he called “Cum On Everybody” his “dance song,” and the “holy-shit-this-guy-is-out-of-his-fucking-mind-but-also-amazing” song “Kim” is a prequel to “’97 Bonnie & Clyde.”
Unlike his debut, however, the album got past being seen as silly or cheesy. In 1999, we didn’t know what to make of this angry blonde dude because it was hard to tell when the jokes started and ended. In 2000, things became clearer as he delved further into autobiographical territory. We started to hear the seriousness in the stories about how he used to get “beat up, peed on, be on free lunch, and changed school every three months.”
The album sounded different too. Dr. Dre provided only three beats on The Slim Shady LP; here he and his partner Mel-Man handled most of the first half of the album, with Eminem and The Bass Brothers taking over for most of the second. Even when it came to the production credits, duality remained a running theme for Eminem (or is that Slim Shady?)
The brutal honesty and specific clarity in the rhymes was striking, but Em’s anger is the hallmark of this album. This is roll-your-windows-down, turn-your-system-up, throw-up-your-middle-finger-and-let-it-linger-music. Em’s words are so precise and he’s so in control of his pen, yet he’s so emotionally erratic. (Maybe a lasting effect of his infamous Amsterdam acid trip, upon which he claims he wrote so much of the album that he considered calling it Amsterdam.)
He rages against everyone; past tormentors, magazines that made fun of him (“Double-XL, Double-XL!”), his mother, his wife, and even manages to aim an AK at Dre’s face, just because. He’s so damn good at it you hardly want to hear anyone else rapping. There isn’t a long guest list, but every voice other than Em’s feels like a distraction you want to fast-forward past. How could we listen to anyone else when Em was spontaneously combusting before our very ears? The rage was magnetic, hypnotic. “Blood, guts, guns, cuts, knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts!”
The anger spews in every direction as he takes reckless shots at pop culture’s other famous figures. Maybe because Em was still a battle rapper at heart, one in need of a bullseye to aim his verbal darts at. He spends a lot of time lashing out at his critics, too. In retrospect, his overzealous use of homophobic slurs seems knowing and jokey, a smirky kid reveling in his ability to piss you off—like when you tell someone to turn down their music and they respond by turning it up and yelling, “WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!”
Despite the album’s artistry and massive success, in a weird way, it’s hard to call it an “influential” album. Sure, there are lots of white rappers today and Em certainly inspired part of that, but all of them shy away from Em comparisons. And none of them—stylistically, musically, and definitely lyrically—can hold a candle to Eminem at his peak. Really, no one of any race can compare.
Bar for bar, line for line, Eminem is and always will be a rapper’s rapper. But this isn’t the typical “rap” album, it’s so far removed from hip-hop’s sonic center and typical subject matter. It’s an Eminem album, and this is when Eminem became EMINEM. And Eminem isn’t your regular rapper, not your regular pop star. He’s what he’s shown to be on the back cover of the album, a freak genius who likes to write raps. There he sits, Marshall, and he sits alone. —Insanul Ahmed
Label: Aftermath/Interscope/Shady
Producers: Dr. Dre, Eminem (executive producer), Jeff Bass, Mr. Porter
Features: Obie Trice, Dr. Dre, Dina Rae, D12, Nate Dogg, Hallie Jade Mathers
Sales: 12x Platinum
The Slim Shady LP made him a star. The Marshall Mathers LP was a masterpiece, a moment when he opened up his own life and bared his soul on record. The Eminem Show was a response to the backlash, and that response was to push everything to a new breaking point, each illustration receiving depth of shading and color.
Eminem was a bona fide superstar, increasingly conflicted about his place at the top of the charts. His relationships—with his fans, with the media, with his daughter, with white America—became more complex. His rapping became more intricate, his vocals more impassioned. In the lead-in to the album’s release, there was concern that he might be approaching mannerism if he tried to follow up “My Name Is” and “Real Slim Shady” with a similarly-themed lead single. He pulled it off, though, with “Without Me,” his rapid, increasingly dense lines snaking through the beat with fluency that makes the whole thing feel second nature. Each line has its own carefully composed cadence: “A little bit of weed mixed with some hard liquor/Some vodka that’ll jump start my heart quicker than a shock when I get shocked at the hosp-ital…”
It wasn’t the only lighter moment on the record. “Business” was perhaps Dre and Em’s greatest work together as a duo, and one of the better examples of Dre’s post-2001 style. The Eminem Show also found his relationships with women evolving, although not necessarily in the most positive ways. “Superman” suggested a fame-informed transactionalism that seemed colder and more detached than the kind of dependent anger of his earlier work.
This time around, though, he was cognizant of many of the criticisms he was receiving, ducking and weaving and trying to make sense of the seismic impact of his still-snowballing popularity: “A visionary, vision is scary, could start a revolution, polluting the airwaves a rebel/So just let me revel and bask, in the fact that I got everyone kissing my ass.” “White America” tackled his race head-on. Whereas it had been laughed at on The Slim Shady LP (“How the fuck can I be white? I don’t even exist…”), his outsized success forced him to come face-to-face with the intrinsic advantages he was suddenly aware of.
In other words, despite its lead single, The Eminem Show was a more ambitious move, wrestling with the issues raised by his success in a serious way. At the time, it received criticism for abandoning some of the more irreverent cartoonishness in favor of capital-I Importance. He helped foster this impression, no doubt, with the increasingly dramatic production choices of songs like “Til I Collapse” and its extended intro, and “Sing for the Moment,” which took musical steps towards stadium-sized performances.
But what could have been an increasingly dour record is saved by his increasingly elaborate rapping, which reaches its apex on “Til I Collapse.” What should have been a leaden monster, as the bass-heavy funk of the Bass Brothers and Dr. Dre was dropping away in favor of arena-ready epics, was saved by Nate Dogg’s urgent hook and some of the most elaborate-yet-purposeful rapping of Eminem’s career. —David Drake
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