Happy 25th Anniversary to Eminem’s second studio album & major-label debut The Slim Shady LP, originally released February 23, 1999.
Marshall “Eminem” Mathers is still one of hip-hop’s strangest characters. He’s one of the biggest superstars that the genre has ever spawned. He’s sold hundreds of millions of albums worldwide and has 15 GRAMMY awards to his name. That includes five ftrophies for best hip-hop album.
The Detroit native has been extremely influential to multiple generations of emcees. And yes, much of his power and appeal has come from the fact that he’s a white rapper that appealed to segments of the population that had never listened to hip-hop before he came around. Love him or hate him, he brought hip-hop to a wider audience.
Eminem is not the creation of an A&R or focus group targeted towards appealing to young white kids in the 18-25 demographic. He lived what he rapped about and he came up the “right” way, toiling in Detroit’s hip-hop underground scene, working small shows and open mic nights. He earned his stripes in ultra-competitive hip-hop cyphers and battles, finishing second in the 1997 Scribble Jam freestyle competition and participating in the Rap Olympics.
He also collaborated with his other underground peers at the time, recording with Shabaam Sahdeeq, Old World Disorder, and The Anonymous, and became an affiliate of the New Jersey-based Outsidaz camp. And he always kept his original camp close to him, rolling with the Dirty Dozen a.k.a. D12, which included Detroit underground heavies like Proof, Denaun Porter, and Bizarre. Along the way, he recorded Infinite (1996) and The Slim Shady EP (1997), the latter of which really got him noticed. And the genesis of his career as we know it began with The Slim Shady LP, which was released 25 years ago.
He’s also incredibly well-respected by his peers and many of the genre’s pioneers, showing respect for hip-hop’s architects whenever he gets a chance. When he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, he spent the vast majority of his acceptance speech reciting the names of his hip-hop influences, both as well known as Rakim and as obscure as Awesome Dre. He’s remained committed to the city of his birth, never leaving in favor of the more “fame-friendly” environs of Los Angeles or New York.
However, his discography overall is also an incredibly mixed bag. He’s released 10 projects over the past quarter century, and well over half of them are unlistenable, at least to my ears. His last endeavor,. Music To Be Murdered By (2020), was a bloated double album. Though it was chock full of filler, it’s still better then duds like Revival (2017) and Kamikaze (2018).
The poor quality of Em’s product in the second and decades of his career has at times led to a reevaluation of the beginning. In the realm of the arts, people like to believe that we live in more enlightened times, and tales of grisly murder, violence towards women, and the mocking of the LGBTQ community aren’t as easily waved away as they were even 10 years ago. Considering that these are often pillars of Em’s current catalogue, the question persists as to whether albums like The Slim Shady LP still “hold up.”
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I personally believe it does. But it’s complicated. It’s definitely an album of the time that represents where Eminem was at that singular point in his life just before he was about to make it big. It depicted the thought processes of a person dealing with extreme circumstances in his life, frantically searching for an outlet to channel his emotion and feeling. The Slim Shady LP succeeds in demonstrating how music can be the salvation for a troubled soul.
As the title suggests, The Slim Shady LP is a repackaged and expanded version of the Slim Shady EP. It features about half the songs that appear on the EP, plus eleven new tracks. And the album is largely ruled by the “Slim Shady” alter ego that Eminem created. While Em was working to make his name as an emcee, he was going through serious substance abuse issues and some major obstacles on the home front. As a means to cope, Em famously created the “Slim Shady” character, assuming the guise of a rapper who could say all the foul, violent, drug-induced thoughts that ricocheted around his head.
Even in 1999, amongst a rap listenership that had been saturated with ultra-violent gangsta rap, Eminem’s lyrical content was shocking. This is best exemplified in “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” a holdover from The Slim Shady EP, a warped reinterpretation of both 2Pac’s “’96 Bonnie & Clyde” and Bill Withers’ “Just the Two Of Us.” The song finds him calmly narrating the aftermath of committing a triple murder of his baby’s mother, her new boyfriend, and her stepson to his own young daughter. Originally written as Em’s way to piss off the real-life mother of his child, the image of Em storing the bodies in the trunk of his car and then disposing of them in what I imagine is Michigan’s Lake St. Clair has endured throughout his entire career.
But it’s the current underneath the shocking imagery that endures and makes The Slim Shady LP still resonate two-and-a-half decades later. “’97 Bonnie & Clyde” isn’t really about the imagined killing of his baby’s mother; it’s about the love that Em has for his daughter, and how she remained his anchor as his relationship with her mother disintegrated.
There’s a river of depression that runs through The Slim Shady LP that reflects a man desperately looking for a way to cope. It can be heard on “If I Had” (another holdover from the EP and a reinterpretation of Barenaked Ladies’ “If I Had $1,000,000”), where Em reflects on the obstacles that life continues to present to him and his desire to have enough money to make it all go away.
Em’s pain is most apparent on “Rock Bottom,” a mournful track where he reflects on the desperation that goes along with living in poverty. Written shortly after a period when Em had been fired from his job, overdosed on pills, and was evicted from his home, it’s the song where his despair is the most tragically palpable. Rapping to a sample from Big Brother and the Holding Company’s “Summertime,” he contemplates using any necessary means to escape his dire situation. His description of his surroundings and mindset is particularly evocative, as he raps, “My life is full of empty promises and broken dreams / I’m hoping things look up, but there ain’t no job openings / I feel discouraged, hungry and malnourished / Living in this house with no furnace, unfurnished.”
Even Em’s use of humor throughout the album underscores his feelings of hopelessness. “Brain Damage” serves as Em’s origin story, as he relates a pair of tales that explore how he became so mentally disturbed. Though the song is darkly funny, featuring tales of ruthless bullies, unsympathetic teachers, and a principal who participates in his ass-kicking, what resonates is the trauma of being bullied through high school and his infamously “complex” relationship with his mother.
Though Em’s partnership with Dr. Dre has also become a central part of his career, Dre did very little production work on The Slim Shady LP. The Bass Brothers (Mark and Jeff Bass), a Detroit-based duo that’s worked with Em since the beginning of his career, , do most of the work behind the boards. Dre’s production work on the album remains memorable, as evidenced by the mega-hit that was “My Name Is…,” the album’s first single and one of Em’s best known recordings.
Dre also produced and appeared on “Guilty Conscience,” the album’s second single. The song’s “hook” is that Dre and Em each function as the angel and devil perched on the shoulders of the different scorned men, looking to lead them down the right or wrong path. The endeavor has aged extremely poorly. Em’s attempts to mine humor out of Dre’s allegedly vicious beating of rapper/TV journalist/radio DJ Dee Barnes is particularly repugnant.
However, “Role Model” is Em’s best collaboration with Dr. Dre that features Em explaining why he isn’t someone to be emulated. It’s also the song in which Em best tackles how others perceive him. “Some people only see that I’m white, ignoring skill.” he raps. “’Cause I stand out like a green hat with an orange bill / But I don't get pissed, y’all don’t even see through the mist / How the fuck can I be white? I don’t even exist.”
The less-heralded entries from The Slim Shady LP are some of its stronger components. “Cum On Everybody,” as evidenced by its fairly juvenile title, is the album’s parody to a late ’90s hip-hop club track. Em is in full self-deprecating mode, uncomfortable with fame, saying the most outlandish shit possible in order to end his career just as it begins. He raps, “I tried suicide once and I’ll try it again / That’s why I write songs where I die at the end / ’Cause I don't give a fuck like my middle finger was stuck / And I was waving it at everybody, screaming, ‘I suck!’”
The album’s pure lyrical highlight is “Bad Meets Evil,” one of Em’s earliest recorded pairings with fellow Detroit-born lyrical brawler Royce Da 5’9”. The two tag-team throughout the song, throwing stiff haymakers over the guitar-driven, Old West-themed track. Em raps likes a man possessed, even as he raps about possessing Royce: “I translate when my voice is read through a seismograph / And the noise is spread, picked up and transmitted through Royce’s head / Trap him in his room, possess him and hoist his bed / ’Til the evilness flows through his blood like poisonous lead.” Meanwhile, Royce shows some of the ferocity that he would become known for throughout his career, rapping, “Whipping human ass, throwing blows, cracking jaws / With my fists wrapped in gauze, dipped in glue and glass / I’m blazing emcees, at the same time amazing emcees / Somehow, emcees ain't that eyebrow-raising to me.”
It’s fitting that the album ends with “Still Don’t Give A Fuck,” Em’s defiant pledge that neither money nor fame will change him. He raps, “My brain's gone, my soul's worn, and my spirit is torn / The rest of my body's still being operated on / I’m ducked the fuck down while I'm writing this rhyme / ’Cause I'm probably gonna get struck with lightning this time.” He emerges from the crucible of his life thus far battered and bruised, but stronger and more resolute that he won’t compromise his character.
And, for better or worse, Em never changed who he is throughout his 25-year recording career. He remains a committed lyricist, and a master at putting together words and phrases. What’s faltered is the presentation. These days he’s mostly retired. Aside from the occasional guest appearance on other rappers’ tracks, he’s more likely to be in the stands of Detroit Lions’ games than in the studio.
I don’t know if Em can escape his current musical malaise. It’s not as simple as “going back to his roots” of The Slim Shady LP, because in many ways, he’s never left them. But the obstacles that he now faces clearly have nothing to do with poverty (he’s worth over $200 million). Instead he’s in the grips of artistic stagnation. From The Slim Shady LP on, his career has been about reacting to his surroundings and translating what he feels into his art. Until he finds a way to become re-inspired, I’ll have to be content to enjoy the times he was able to take the pain in his life and transform it into something worth listening to.
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Editor's note: this anniversary tribute was originally published in 2019 and has since been edited for accuracy and timeliness.