Eminem

Some albums acquire landmark status as the years go by, because they were initially confined to the underground or reassessed by critics only later on. In OndaRock's list of milestones, dozens of titles are classics that earned their place in history thanks to fans and critics, who over the years managed to spread the good word even to less attentive ears: these weren't just albums, they were masterpieces that defined an era. In other cases, like Eminem's third album, "The Marshall Mathers Lp", it was immediately clear that this was a record destined to mark a period - the turn of the millennium - and a genre - hip-hop - in an indelible way. As the years passed, it also became something more, for reasons that were unpredictable at the time of its release. Eminem himself, who at the time had yet to turn twenty-eight, went on to gain an importance and a role that would have been hard to foresee at the start of the millennium, despite already being one of the greatest rappers alive. This milestone feature will explore just that, explaining to those who weren't there, or were busy listening to something else, the significance of an album that, in terms of content, impact on pop culture and cross-genre reach, still seems essentially impossible to replicate today.

The third album by the world's most famous (white) rapper

Hip-hop wasn't exactly new when Eminem released his debut album "Infinite" (1996). In the United States it had already been chewed over by a wide audience since the 1980s, with offshoots in Europe that led to the development of national scenes. In Italy, the first albums arrived in the early 1990s, with "Terra di nessuno" by Assalti Frontali (1992) as the trailblazer. Broadly speaking, hip-hop already had its global icons: the Nineties belonged to Tupac and Notorious B.I.G., the same decade in which Nas released what is perhaps the most critically acclaimed album in the genre, "Illmatic" (1994). In 1990, MC Hammer had opened the decade with a global smash in "U Can't Touch This", a single that sold 4 million copies in the US alone and hit #1 in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, and #8 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Nineties didn't need to rediscover hip-hop as such, since they'd already had their rap stars, both on the poppier, more danceable side and on the side more tied to traditional rap, to the streets, to hip-hop culture. Of course, here in Italy only a faint echo arrived: the aforementioned "Illmatic" received no certifications at all (in the US it went double platinum), and the same goes for Biggie's "Ready To Die" (1994) or "Life After Death", which sold very little here (six platinum discs at home versus absolute zero in Italy, and one gold record here versus eleven platinum discs in the US, respectively). Tupac fared slightly better, with "All Eyez On Me" (1996) going gold even in Italy - admittedly a modest result compared to the rare diamond certification it earned at home, plus platinum status in several other national markets.

Hip-hop, in short, was still mainly an American affair, and here on the fringes of the Empire it was known, even imitated and localized, yet it remained something a little exotic, eccentric, foreign to the local tradition and culture. Sure, we had our own commercial explosion of rhyming songs, with 1996 dominated by Articolo 31 and Sottotono, but it would be a stretch to say it was part of the average listener's musical culture by the end of the millennium. The album that would later be recognized as the masterpiece of Italian hip-hop, "SxM" (1994) by Sangue Misto, remained essentially a cult concern for insiders until the 2010s. It would take the late-Nineties coma and the early-2000s rebirth of the scene to give substance to something that had grown quickly and messily, amid all sorts of contradictions.

In 1996 in Italy, the biggest hit singles were largely electronic (like Robert Miles's "Children" and Underworld's "Born Slippy"), while hip-hop only made inroads through the crossover sound of the Fugees' "Killing Me Softly" or, at best, through the most crowd-pleasing single of Tupac's entire career, "California Love" (alongside another rap star, Dr. Dre). Hip-hop was present, certainly, but it barely made a dent in the musical diet of most Italians. With Eminem, though, things were about to change. "The Marshall Mathers Lp" would not only go platinum in Italy too (on top of going "diamond" at home and racking up countless other commercial milestones worldwide), it would also help permanently reshape the perception of what hip-hop could be in the United States and in many other national markets, ours included. The following album, "The Eminem Show", would go platinum a staggering four times over in Italy alone, while also becoming the best-selling hip-hop album of all time as well as the best-selling album overall in the US in its release year, 2002.

The foundation for this staggering success lies in the paradigm shift triggered by "The Marshall Mathers Lp" itself. Eminem's second album, "The Slim Shady Lp" (1999), was also a huge commercial success, but its sales figures pale in comparison to those of the two albums that followed. "Infinite" (1996), on the other hand, wasn't exactly a hit, so for his second album Eminem decided to hide behind an alter ego that was at once violent and cartoonish. A character, more than a person - one who would only be definitively (?) killed off on "The Death Of Slim Shady" (2024), almost thirty years later. A narrative device and a stroke of communicative genius, Slim Shady leapt off the screen, grabbed the attention of a huge audience, and won over an international crowd that had previously kept hip-hop at arm's length.

Late-Nineties music, however, drew towards rap (as a vocal style) and hip-hop (as a culture) a more cross-generational audience than ever before, including white listeners and rock fans. Nu metal (Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Deftones, etc.) is a style of heavy metal that achieved huge success in the mid-Nineties and opened the door to rap and hip-hop for a very wide, cross-generational audience of young people and teenagers of the time: these are the millennials, and they played a crucial role in Eminem's success and cult status, as well as in the success of "The Marshall Mathers Lp". It's the same audience that, in 2003, helped the debut album by Linkin Park, "Hybrid Theory" (2000), sell more than thirty million copies and become one of the biggest hits of the early 2000s. It's no small detail that the American band's music blended pop, rock and hip-hop elements, and that Mike Shinoda's vocal contribution could be filed under rap.

As often happens with complex phenomena, at a certain point all the variables seem to align: the pieces of the puzzle fit together magically, perfectly. By the end of the century, Eminem-as-Slim-Shady had established himself with a reckless, ultra-violent style, drawing plenty of important attention - first and foremost that of an increasingly invested Dr. Dre, who had already produced the second album and was riding high off the massive, concurrent success of "2001" (1999; six platinum discs at home, one in Italy, among other certifications).

The success of "The Slim Shady Lp" had already broken through hip-hop's boundaries, catching the attention of a pop audience. Its follow-up was written and recorded at a feverish pace, in two intense months that included sessions lasting as long as twenty hours, in the Detroit where Eminem grew up. Thanks in part to Dr. Dre's influence, the guest list is remarkable and adds to the grandeur of the project: former N.W.A. proteges Snoop Dogg and Xzibit show up, alongside English singer-songwriter Dido and many others.

"The Marshall Mathers Lp" turns the Slim Shady mask into a far more multifaceted, contradictory figure, embracing a complexity that resists simplistic readings and steers clear of being written off as mere provocation. The success of the second album made Eminem more critical of fame, of the music industry, and of his relationships with others in general, family included. It's a sprawling album, one in which different sides of the rapper coexist and where the line between pop star and rap star is blurred almost to the point of vanishing. It runs 72 minutes, compared to under 60 for its predecessor and under 40 for the debut.

Eminem has a lot to say, and it's sometimes abrasive and sometimes moving, sometimes profound and sometimes downright silly. "The Marshall Mathers Lp" can bring you to tears when it lays bare real feelings, and make you furious when it toys with misogyny and homophobia, but more often it forces the listener to live through jarring contrasts within the same song: a verse with a brilliant flow that states something unacceptable; a beat that will define an era paired with an irritating provocation; a slightly cheesy pop hook that nonetheless hits straight to the heart with surgical precision.

Eminem often makes himself both loved and hated at the same time, and even though the album takes its title from the rapper's birth name, in contrast to the alter ego at the center of "The Slim Shady Lp", it isn't simply about showing the other side of the coin - it's about revealing, in one sweeping panorama, the complexity of a tormented soul, the expressive richness of a musician who possesses both technique and heart, brain and instinct.

The pressure ahead of the release was unbearable, and Eminem dealt with it the only way he could: by isolating himself and demanding the utmost from himself. When the album was practically finished, but apparently without a viable lead single, he wrote "The Way I Am", almost as if apologizing for not being able to repeat the success of the hit "My Name Is". Still not satisfied, he went back and reworked the tracklist once more, adding "The Real Slim Shady", which would become his biggest hit single up to that point.

"The Marshall Mathers Lp" sold nearly 1.8 million copies in its first week, doubling the opening numbers of Snoop Dogg's "Doggystyle". Within four weeks it had reached 3.65 million copies sold. By year's end, it hit 8 million. Worldwide, it would go on to surpass 25 million copies. Critics received it positively, if with some reservations, upon release, but over the years the album has risen to the status of a classic: Rolling Stone and Melody Maker named it the best album of the year, Pitchfork would go on to rate it 9.4/10, and AllMusic gave it top marks, in good company alongside, among others, Sputnikmusic and XXL.

It took root especially among teenagers, the aforementioned millennials, because, as Dan Ozzi wrote on “Vice”: “Eminem was the one artist that seemingly every kid in high school could unanimously agree on. Of course he was. He represented everything that defined those school years: blind rage, misdirected rebellion, teenage frustration. He was like a human middle finger. Like an R-rated Dennis the Menace for the 56k modem generation.”

His influence on the world of rappers, especially white rappers, was enormous, because he proved it was possible to go toe-to-toe with the genre's biggest names without fear, as long as you had something to say, the flair and the technique required. “The Marshall Mathers Lp” has been included in Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time: first at #302, then at #244, and finally at #145 in 2020, testament to an ever-growing critical esteem even from a publication with a pop and rock soul. It also appears in Time's equivalent list of the 100 greatest albums of all time, as well as in numerous decade-end lists. We also find it in Robert Dimery's famous “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die”.

“The Marshall Mathers Lp” thus immediately won over a vast, international audience, helped along by an increasingly globalized music market and the driving force of a rapidly expanding internet (high-speed connection, known back then as “broadband”, arrived in Italy right at the start of 2000). A generation of teenagers at the time had already come into contact with hip-hop and rap, partly through crossovers with rock, heavy metal and pop, and so found it fairly natural to add to their musical diet a controversial rapper with a multifaceted style, who was also causing a stir at the time as an exceptionally problematic media figure. Exactly the kind of artist that thrills teenagers: hard for the previous generation to understand, un-PC and full of contradictions. Unacceptable to conservatives, which never hurts when you're going through the most rebellious phase of your life.

In 2000, many teenagers born in the second half of the 1980s were discovering the wonders of the internet and were lucky enough to hear Eminem's third album as it happened live: this was a millennial audience that would follow him through the following decades too, and that, once they started writing about music on blogs (first) and social media (later), would often point to Eminem as a central figure in their musical education, if not outright the greatest rapper of all time, full stop. Millennials' veneration of Eminem has even become a subject of debate and mutual incomprehension with Gen Z, as summed up by a few YouTube videos (this one or this other one, for example).

In the years that followed, a progressive crisis in the record industry and the fragmentation of the musical experience, which has culminated in today's division into often impermeable niches, has made it increasingly difficult for an album to truly leave its mark on a generation of listeners and critics. When “The Marshall Mathers Lp” hit the market in 2000, it set off a media machine that swept over an audience still tuning into radio and Mtv, still buying music magazines at the newsstand, still visiting the local record shop. Today's infinite variety, which lets everyone freely dig into any corner of music history, was back then still limited by information and listening experiences largely homogenized by a handful of dominant mass media. Even if someone released a new “The Marshall Mathers Lp” today, it would never get the same attention, and someone would end up writing a dismissive comment on Facebook just to let everyone know they'd never heard of it and had no intention of filling that gap. At the start of the millennium, on the other hand, it was practically impossible to avoid Eminem. In 2001 he would even show up on the Sanremo stage, in front of a disoriented and somewhat displeased Raffaella Carrà: a moment, itself unrepeatable today, in which the global and the national collided, an entertainment product that seems to come from another era and another world altogether.

Beyond the momentum carried over from “The Slim Shady Lp”, a more receptive audience of teenage millennials and the spread of the internet, “The Marshall Mathers Lp” was still a landmark album thanks to Eminem's incredible form at the time of its release and the strength of the 18 tracks it contains. Time to get into the specifics.

The killer, the rapper, the clown, the poet: the many souls of The Marshall Mathers Lp

The intro of “Public Service Announcement 2000” echoes the one heard on the second album, in a more aggressive version: 27 seconds that close with a vow to kill the listener, delivered in the deep, formal voice of Jeff Bass of the Bass Brothers, the production duo behind many of Eminem's tracks. It's a way of introducing the album, but also a setup for the first song, “Kill You”, a misogynistic bloodbath placed right at the start specifically to rile up those who took issue with his violent, corrupting lyrics. Which is, in short, what it means to be “a human middle finger”. The track hits its target and even drew criticism from Lynne Cheney, Second Lady during the Bush Jr. presidency. The lyric truly is a concentrate of bad taste that Eminem pushes to the point of absurdity, exploiting a taste for the macabre and the demented that is one of his key skills as storyteller and rapper. The chorus is a children's nursery rhyme poisoned with black humor.

You don’t wanna fuck with Shady

'Cause Shady will fuckin' kill you

I said you don’t wanna fuck with Shady

'Cause Shady will fuckin' kill you

The verses show off his ability to shift registers, developing the theme of success and its traps while continuing to explore the theme of multiple personality and blur the line between person and persona.

Next comes another masterpiece and (this is no small feat) one of the most important pop-rap tracks of the 2000s: the third single “Stan”, built around a sample of Dido's “Thank You”. The production of “Kill You” leaves all the space to Eminem, with a beat marked by a conspicuous pause and bare-bones melodies, while that of “Stan” carries the whole story: the sound of rain, a pen scratching nervously, ominous thunder paired with a dark, obsessive bassline; Dido's voice is a ghost appearing in the night, tender and fragile. But what makes the difference is Eminem's incredible turn as writer and rapper: the lyric tells the harrowing story of a deranged, obsessive fan who repeatedly writes to the rapper without ever getting a reply and, in a deranged crescendo, ends up killing his pregnant girlfriend and himself. Eminem plays the killer in the first three verses, in a mounting tension that's a masterclass in how a rapper can shapeshift by working on delivery and flow. In the fourth verse Eminem returns to being himself, or rather what we recognize as himself, and belatedly replies to the many letters, only to realize that Stan, his fan, is the very murderer he read about in the papers. Moving beyond the image of the provocateur and the clown, stepping into the shoes of both the killer and the shocked citizen, Eminem proves himself multifaceted and complex, even poetic. The fact that he pulls all this off in a melodic track, with a pop chorus but also long, dramatic verses, is yet another demonstration of his ability to cross-contaminate, reinterpret and subvert expectations. And “The Marshall Mathers Lp” has only just begun.

Sandwiched between two skits, “Who Knew” continues on the theme of the negative influence Eminem is accused of by the press and certain politicians, and naturally flows into the identity statement “The Way I Am”, a somber track set among funeral bells, with a chorus that once again tackles the theme of the rapper's multiple, or at least multiplied, personality: at the center of media attention, victim of a level of pressure with few precedents in international gossip, Eminem strikes back by defending his complex identity. “The Way I Am” was supposed to be the lead single, written to please the label, but it would end up being the second track released from the album. The role of launch hit fell instead to the following “The Real Slim Shady”, breezier and closer to the style of the second album. Backed by a hugely famous video, equal parts comic and un-PC, which has passed a billion views on YouTube, it would become one of Eminem's anthems and one of the decade's biggest hit singles. Somewhere between comic and caustic, the rapper declares himself imitated but inimitable.

And there’s a million of us just like me

Who cuss like me, who just don't give a fuck like me

Who dress like me, walk, talk and act like me

And just might be the next best thing, but not quite me

Despite seeming like an immediate, easy track, it's still a display of class and technical skill in rap. Beyond the usual complex rhyme scheme, the track is also remarkable for the precision of its flow, its shape-shifting delivery, and the clarity of every single word spoken: Eminem is a rap virtuoso, but he remains accessible, helped by a flood of references to the pop culture, especially TV and music, of the period. From Christina Aguilera to Burger King, by way of the TV show “To Tell The Truth”, which inspires the chorus, and Will Smith's cuss-free rap, Eminem builds the track on the everyday experience of his fellow countrymen, speaking their language and referencing what they already know.

Balancing out a track exquisitely aimed at the mainstream, the darker “Remember Me?” is marked by features from RBX and Sticky Fingaz, made famous above all by their presence on Dr. Dre's “The Chronic”. It's another rhyme scheme worth studying, full of multi-syllable and internal rhymes, with a few technically sensational lines such as:

Six sick dreams of picnic scenes

Two kids, sixteen, with M-16s and ten clips each

And them shits reach through six kids each

And Slim gets blamed in Bill Clint’s speech to fix these streets?

Back comes the caustic killer clown Slim Shady on the album's fourth single, "I'm Back", before a more intimate, personal moment like "Marshall Mathers", built around a sampled acoustic guitar and a music box and closed out by an electric guitar solo. It's another demonstration of Eminem's potential as an emotional, intense rapper too, in a bitterer, more desolate register than what we heard on "Stan". Contrasting with, yet also completing, the portrait of a double or even multifaceted rapper is the crude skit "Ken Kaniff". In this game of opposites and sudden swerves, the love song becomes an ode to drug addiction with "Drug Ballad" (feat. Dina Rae), while "Amityville" (feat. Bizarre) is really a rap chronicle of Detroit.

There's also room for a posse cut like "Bitch Please II" (with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Xzibit and Nate Dogg), little more than a curiosity in this context, before a remarkable closing triptych: the emotional and relational nightmare of "Kim" is a bleak, suffocating track, full of screams and tears, with a chorus sung off-key by Eminem himself, for an (unintentionally) unsettling result; "Under The Influence" with his D12 crew is, by contrast, another middle finger to those who criticize his crude, misguided lyrics, wrapped in a demented little tune that's hard to shake; "Criminal" has the difficult task of summing up the whole album, but actually focuses mostly on the criticism he's received, and shows off an impressive technique, with flow and delivery that shift dizzyingly, with sudden transformations sparked by the shouted title word.

Legacy: imitations and inspirations

The influence of Eminem on American and international rap is hard to overstate: the combination of commercial and critical success makes him a case more unique than rare in the first quarter of this century. A good deal of that consecration comes precisely through "The Marshall Mathers Lp". The theme of multiple personality, or simply the distance and overlap between person and persona, finds here its definitive fulfilment within hip-hop culture, and would later be taken up by artists as different as Nicki Minaj and Tyler, The Creator internationally, and in Italy by, for instance, Fabri Fibra and Marracash.

The ability to combine explicit lyrics and pop choruses on the same album, as well as technique and immediacy within the same song, proved an inspirational demonstration for many other artists. With this milestone, a new idea of what an album and a music career could be took shape in the minds of millions of listeners, one capable of embracing substantial cross-pollination and even abrupt changes of direction. For the millennial generation, this album and these songs would become a benchmark for everything to come in the following decades. Perhaps too much so, at times, to the point of being mocked by younger listeners or often misunderstood by those a few years older.

With "The Marshall Mathers Lp", a white rapper from Detroit, not yet thirty and with only one successful album behind him, managed to release a colossal record, over 72 minutes long, one he himself would never replicate. "The Eminem Show" (2002) would be an even greater commercial triumph, but it doesn't carry the same disruptive force, and not long after, the pressure and addictions presented a very steep bill. True to his class, Eminem went on to reinvent his career and churn out other hits, and occasionally other tracks worthy of his early days, but he never replicated an album like this one. "The Marshall Mathers Lp 2" (2013) in some way closed the narrative arc, and, as we've already written, Slim Shady was killed off in 2024. In between, over the quarter-century since his second album's first release, "The Marshall Mathers Lp" has continued to be cited among the best albums of this century, withstanding the toughest of tests, time. This writer's prediction is that not much will change even over the next quarter-century, but don't put too much stock in what I say on this, since I am, after all, a millennial.

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13/07/2025