#275 - Eminem - The Slim Shady LP (1999)
MUSIC HISTORY COMPILED BY ADAM BERNARD:
BACKGROUND – EMINEM
Marshall Bruce Mathers III, aka Eminem, aka Slim Shady is an American rapper and record producer. He is credited with popularizing hip hop in middle America and is critically acclaimed as one of the greatest rappers of all time. Eminem's global success and acclaimed works are widely regarded as having broken racial barriers for the acceptance of white rappers in popular music. While much of his transgressive work during the late 1990s and early 2000s made him widely controversial, he came to be a representation of popular angst of the American underclass and has been cited as an influence for many artists of various genres.
Eminem was born in 1972 in Missouri after 73 hours of labor that almost killed his mother in the process. His parents were in a band called Daddy Warbucks, playing hotels around the Dakotas and Montana before they separated. During his childhood, he and his mother shuffled back and forth between Detroit and Missouri, rarely staying in one place for more than a year or two. When they did settle in Detroit, he was one of 3 white families on the block, and often was beaten up for it. Eminem's home life was seldom stable; he frequently fought with his mother, whom a social worker described as having a "very suspicious, almost paranoid personality" He became interested in storytelling, and wanted to be a comic book artist before discovering hip hop. The first song he heard was Ice T's "Reckless" after an uncle he was close with got him the Breakin' soundtrack as a gift (this Uncle was also a musical mentor to him, and Marshall stopped speaking for days after his Uncle committed suicide in 1991). He began rapping at age fourteen and released his first album, Infinite in 1996 on an independent label. It achieved very little commercial success and was largely ignored by Detroit radio stations. The commercial disappointment from this experience greatly influenced his lyrical style: "After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier. A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. Motherfuckers was like, 'You're a white boy, what the fuck are you rapping for? Why don't you go into rock & roll?' All that type of shit started pissing me off." His personal struggles and abuse of methadon and alcohol around this period culminated in a suicide attempt.
The commercial disappointment also inspired Eminem to create the alter ego Slim Shady: "Boom, the name hit me, and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it." Slim Shady served as Eminem's vent for his frustration and rage to the world. In the spring of 1997, he recorded the eight-song extended play Slim Shady EP. During this time, Eminem and his girlfriend Kim Scott lived in a high-crime neighborhood with their newborn daughter Hailie, where their house was burglarized numerous times. After being evicted from his home, Eminem traveled to Los Angelesto participate in the Rap Olympics, an annual nationwide rap battlecompetition. He placed second, and the staff at Interscope Recordswho attended the Rap Olympics sent a copy of the Slim Shady EP to company CEO Jimmy Iovine. Iovine played the tape for hip hop producer Dr. Dre, and he recalled, "In my entire career in the music industry, I have never found anything from a demo tape or a CD. When Jimmy played this, I said, 'Find him. Now.'" Some urged Dr. Dre not to take a chance on Eminem because he was white. Dr. Dre responded, "I don't give a fuck if you're purple. If you can kick it, I'm working with you." That leads us to today's album.
After the success of The Slim Shady LP, Eminem went from an underground rapper into a high-profile celebrity. Interscope Records awarded him with his own record label, Shady Records. Eminem, who had previously struggled to provide for his daughter, noted a drastic change in his lifestyle: "This last Christmas, there were so many fucking presents under the tree... My daughter wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth. But she's got one now. I can't stop myself from spoiling her." His third album, The Marshall Mathers LP proved he wasn't a one-album wonder, and his following releases - The Eminem Show in 2002 & Encore in 2004 solidified his status as one of the top hip hop performers of the time, and of all time. He released a compilation album called "Curtain Call" in 2005 because he needed a break as an artist, didn't know what the future held, and speculated it could be his last release. While on that break in 2007, he was hospitalized due to a methadone overdose (more on that in FF 5). He released his next album, "Relapse" in 2009, followed by "Recovery" in 2010. He released another 4 albums during the following decade, and was part of the Super Bowl LVI (56) halftime show last year alongside Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige, and 50 Cent.
With global sales of over 220 million records, Eminem is one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He has had thirteen number-one albums on the Billboard 200: nine solo, two with D12 and one with Bad Meets Evil. He was the best-selling music artist from 2000 to 2009 in the US according to Nielsen SoundScan. He was also the best-selling male music artist in the United States of the 2010s. He has sold 47.4 million albums in the country and 107.5 million singles in the US. The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show, Curtain Call: The Hits, "Lose Yourself", "Love the Way You Lie" and "Not Afraid" have all been certified Diamond or higher by the Recording Industry Association of America. Eminem has over ten billion views of his music videos on his YouTube Vevo page, and in 2014 Spotify named him the most-streamed music artist of all time. Among Eminem's awards is 15 Grammy Awards, eight American Music Awards, and 17 Billboard Music Awards. Billboard named him the "Artist of the Decade (2000–2009)". In 2013, he received the Global Icon Award at that year's MTV Europe Music Awards ceremony. Last year, he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Class of 2022), alongside Duran Duran and Dolly Parton.
ALBUM BACKGROUND – THE SLIM SHADY LP
Eminem’s breakthrough into the mainstream. It was pretty much all or nothing for him at this point, and the huge success of the album, led by the single “My Name Is”, catapulted his career forward. The album is noted for its cartoonish and overly violent lyrics as well as its sharp lyricism. It did very well critically and commercially and is considered a classic by most.
Given his subsequent superstardom it may be easy to overlook exactly how demonized Eminem was once his mainstream debut album, The Slim Shady LP, grabbed the attention of pop music upon its release in 1999. Then, it wasn't clear to every listener that Eminem was, as they say, an unreliable narrator, somebody who slung satire, lies, uncomfortable truths, and lacerating insights with vigor and venom, blurring the line between reality and parody, all seemingly without effort.
At a time when many rappers were stuck in the stultifying swamp of gangsta clichés, Eminem broke through the hardcore murk by abandoning the genre's familiar themes and flaunting a style with more verbal muscle and imagination than any of his contemporaries. Years later, it's those lyrical skills and the subtle mastery of the music that still resonate, and they're what make The Slim Shady LP one of the great debuts in both hip-hop and modern pop music.