It feels a little weird to be writing about The Marshall Mathers LP more than ten years after the fact, due in no small part to how vastly Eminem’s social status has changed during that time. Marshall Mathers LP cemented his status as a rap icon and proved his lyrical genius beyond a doubt. But the amount of controversy he managed to build up within just a few short years was nothing short of astounding, especially when you consider how quickly it eventually died down. It’s been at least five years since anyone noteworthy has accused Eminem of “destroying America” or “destroying music”. But beyond that, it’s become an idea that’s almost ridiculous to imagine. A claim that Eminem is any kind of serious threat to America in the present day would probably be dismissed as quickly as a suggestion to reinstate alcohol prohibition, but it really is fascinating how the critical world seemed to instantly shift from demanding that Eminem be put in prison, to lauding him as the rap equivalent of The Beatles. Hell, he even appeared in a Super Bowl commercial last year. But even though he now has the acclaim that he truly deserves, he likely never could have gotten to where he is today without a lot of people hating him for a really long time. It’s probably no accident that the two most brilliantly composed songs on the album - “Stan” and “Kim” - are also the two most disturbing, and not just in Eminem’s usual “I’m going to say something cartoonishly horrible to get a reaction from you” fashion. When he talks about choking women and cutting people up in “Kill You”, he’s doing it because he knows that there are some people that basically force themselves to be offended about everything all the time, and he likes to fuck with those people. On songs like those two though... maybe he doesn’t actually have a fan who did what Stan did, and we can probably rest assured that he didn’t actually drive Kim out to the middle of the woods and slit her throat. But it’s not just a bunch of stuff that he makes up to get a reaction. These are real, tangible ideas that, regardless of how dark and twisted they are, could theoretically take place in real life. And that was what he had in Marshall Mathers LP that he lost somewhere along the line. The ability to not only bring out his own darkness, but also to find the darkness in the rest of us. These days, he can write about his drug problems and be poetic, but he’s not fighting anybody except himself anymore, and if anything, that’s a point where you shouldn’t really be trying to be poetic anymore. The Marshall Mathers LP was mind-blowingly honest because back then, he figured he had nothing left to lose. He always had the ability to be a brilliant lyricist, but in order for him to truly push the world in any direction, he needed it to keep pushing back.
By Jake Kurzmann
