Never has the “early, funny stuff” cliche held such weight in pop: we’re at a stage now where the new stars coming through are still heavyweights now, and the sclerotic Marshall Mathers of the mid-10s haunts this swaggering, sparkling kid. But “The Real Slim Shady” is still an Eminem who knows how to tell a joke – though how much he’s joking is open to question – and he’s the most technically audacious and exciting rapper to have hit number one yet. By a considerable distance – take the “Now there’s a million of us…” climax, thirty-seven staccato monosyllables from “just like me” to “not quite me”, a pattern of triple stresses reeled out and back like a man casually doing tricks on a yo-yo. Or the animals – cannibals – canteloupes – antelopes – can’t elope rhyme set, as bravura in its wordplay as anything you’d find on an underground mixtape. Or the entire first verse (”Act like you never seen a white person before…”) and its teetering jenga of internal rhymes. Or the single’s best gag, delivered barely as rap, just as a great one-liner: “Will Smith don’t gotta cuss on his raps to sell records / Well I do / So fuck him and fuck you too”
And then you might take a step back. That sumptuous rhyme set builds to a homophobic punchline, that first verse is the most technically superlative domestic violence gag you’ll ever hear, and Will Smith, like Britney and Christina and Fred Durst and boy bands, is a very, very soft target, even in 2000.
Your response to that might be “so what?” – Eminem’s command of his track is so total, and his presence so strong, that introducing my own sense of morality or discomfort to proceedings can feel a little like cheating. The man is selective in the taboos he breaks, but breaking them is part of his deal. That was certainly the appeal of Eminem on his breakthrough single. “Hi… My Name Is”, where the Shady persona felt like pure id, a mix of horrorcore tropes, grand guignol shock tactics, a real and festering resentment at a shitty childhood poking through… and an odd, self-deprecating streak where Shady is half-pathetic and very much part of a fucked-up world, not simply a response to it.
“The Real Slim Shady” comes on as a sequel, the second in a series of straight-to-video shockers: Slim Shady Goes To Hollywood, maybe. But that’s the problem with horror franchises – the monster is what people pay to see, and the longer the series runs, the more he becomes the hero. In “The Real Slim Shady” his enemies now stop being the world and himself and start being more specific parts of pop culture. Which is where the “soft targets” problem comes in. Eminem is announcing his arrival as a pop fixture – and the success of his first album had made that inevitable – by taking on the weakest of imaginable enemies. He knows his tribe, and their prejudices well, but this stuff is the opposite of shocking. He’s consciously consolidating the audience he’s found. But the arrival of Slim Shady in the real world loses something. In the twisted universe of “My Name Is” he’s a force of chaos, a self-destructive trickster. Here he presents himself as just another cultural commentator, needling away at the entertainment biz’ foibles and hypocrisies. What’s his actual critique of those “little girl and boy groups”? They annoy him, and maybe Christina Aguilera slept her way to the top. It’s less Loki, more Perez Hilton.
That’s not to say he’s insincere about his distaste for pop – and certainly much of his audience, his crowd of mini-Shadys, also felt it for real. It’s not even to say he’s unsympathetic – in Popular terms, the allure of “The Real Slim Shady” is much boosted by the relative lulls on either side of it: however gross or lazy this single is in places, it gets points just for sounding alive and motivated. Pop fans – obviously I am one – can be as brittle as anyone about slights to their chosen music, which is often corny, distasteful, exploitative or just idiotic. Nothing could be more shrill and misguided than insisting everyone like that stuff. And in the case of 13- or 14-year old Eminem fans, you might as well ask them to stop watching slasher movies, or trying to score pot off their older brothers. Or wanking. “The Real Slim Shady” is as pure, as toxic and as well-made a shot of teenage exploitation as “Born To Make You Happy” was.
But there’s something else that’s changed since “My Name Is”, too. The point of Slim Shady is that he’s a nihilist, he doesn’t give a fuck what you think. But strip away the cartwheeling delivery and the Dre production – whose simple, jolly bounce is a hook in its own right, and a great example of how Eminem used sound effects to establish and bolster his comic persona – and what do you have left? Behind the jokes, “The Real Slim Shady” is a surprisingly defensive single, giving rather a lot of fucks, and mostly concerned not just with taking down pop’s star system but with establishing Eminem’s counter-arguments and get-out clauses.
These run along familiar lines – real life is just as fucked up as Shady’s raps, and lots of people are thinking or saying privately what he has the balls to say out loud. (He saves the question of whether any great responsibility goes along with this great power for his next number one.) This is a third role for Shady – not psychopathic id, or biz outsider, but a kind of frustrated everytroll, speaking for a silenced mass who express themselves mainly by buying his records. It’s a persona that’s halfway between the political outsider – Slim Farage – and the shock-tactic comedian – Andrew Dice Shady. And not knowing which way it might tip – into comedy or cultural politics or, in Eminem’s case, something more nihilist and personal – is part of the appeal.
It’s an appeal with parallels – you can look forward to Anonymous but also backwards to punk, and this – plus stardom and proficiency – was why Eminem was such critical catnip. “Half of you critics can’t even stomach me” – but the other half adored him, for his volatility, and the sense that here, at last, was a story we hadn’t seen before, one whose ending we didn’t know. Well, we know it now: not just for Eminem, whose peak and slow decline I’ll have to write about in depth, but for Shady, whose blend of psychopath, critic and everyman once seemed dangerously new and now feels exhaustingly, inescapably, familiar.
“Now 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 it just might be the next best thing but not quite me!” Fifteen years on, this seems just as true but far less funny. Eminem didn’t invent trolling, or stay good at it for long, but his signature brand of it has thrived in the Internet century. Wreathed in lulz, self-righteous if challenged, somehow bitter about a culture it has a box seat in, vengeful against mothers, lovers, women who have the gall to speak or fuck or simply be noticed. The real Slim Shadys haunt Twitter mentions tabs, newspaper comments boxes, subreddits, social media from YouTube to YikYak, anywhere axes can be ground. Marshall Mathers no more caused our culture than Elvis caused the sexual revolution, but like Elvis he could feel some crackle in the air and he knew how to draw that lightning down through himself. He was hard to ignore, he has become hard to enjoy.
Score: 7
[Logged in users can award their own score]
For some reason I was under the impression that “My Name Is…” had been the #1 and not this (recall I was not paying attention at the time at all). These live in the shadow of the bunny for me and aside from cursory half-listens on KISSTORY to confirm that they’re not as good as the bunny I’ve not listened to them out of fear they’d not be as good as the bunny.
Eminem is very definitely someone I’ve never got into because of the sense of story there is around his music; I dunno if it’s overemphasised by the critics but I’ve always got the sense that the music relies on you knowing the biography, the history, the news stories. I find that a bit disappointing, really, but we’ve got plenty more of it to come and I’m sure that sort of #transmediastorytelling #transmedia #storytelling is just as exciting and invigorating to some people* as it is not to me.
*I will refrain from being rude and saying ‘mostly music writers’
Is Eminem talking about fans who were inspired to dress and act like him, or complaining about hordes of copycat studiedly transgressive white rappers popping up? I always thought it was the latter – but found it a bit confusing as there clearly weren’t any.
Yeah, while I remember this being absolutely everywhere, I don’t really think of it as having been a #1. Strange.
So, is it like Spartacus the slave, where he needs other people to stand up and shout “I am Slimshady” ?
Reached #4 in the US. His first US #1 was still two years away, as was his best work. TRSS was typical of Eminem’s early hits: mildly amusing on first listen, progressively annoying as time went on. Only 4/10 from me.
Yeah, this is a triumph of substance over some very slight / mean-spirited / trollish content. But I guess you’re not going to get too far in a project to catalogue 60 years of chart-popping top if substance is all you’re after. I listened to this back-to-back with Oops!…I Did It Again just now and (for me) that was really grating by about a third of the way in, whereas I could listen to TRSS on repeat for ages, nasty nonsense though it almost certainly is!
Jeez, I can’t believe these songs are all 15 years ago. I’ve reached that advanced age where it all starts to seem like basically yesterday…
Like the lyrical content generally, the “real Slim Shady” shtick was both clever and thoroughly asshole-ish – in fact it’s meta-asshole-ish, which (again) is clever if nothing else. Some performers welcome imitators & followers (Lady GaGa, Moz, Madonna, Bowie…), recognising (a la “Rubber Ring”) that they used to be down there themselves. What Eminem’s doing here is telling all his imitators to fuck off, when he didn’t even have any imitators – he’s staging the spectacle of a snotty Ziggy, saving himself by pissing off the fans, and then asking his fans to buy into it. Like the squeaky yammering tone of his delivery, which makes a performance of Being Irritating – I mean, it’s like somebody telling Joe Pesci he was irritating (“I’m irritating? You telling me I’m irritating? I’m sorry, did I irritate you? Am I irritating you right now? What, am I an irritating person?”… only over and over again for four whole minutes). (Thinks: what would you get if you alternated the most irritating voice in pop music with a bland, syrupy Radio 2 voice bleating life-affirming wibble? Sounds crazy but it might just work…)
All very clever. Now please take it away and let me never listen to it again. 7 in the abstract, 4 for putting this horrible man between my ears again.
I can remember seeing the video for this at the time and finding it bewildering – which may be the point, but also because I wasn’t paying attention to the lyrics beyond the most obvious ones. What I did/do appreciate about Eminem is his flow and wordplay and his willingness to give voice to an angry, marginalised male underclass which I recognised in part from my experience working as a teacher – even if the content is ‘problematic’.
‘You taught me language, and my profit on ’t /Is I know how to curse.’
“Y’all act like you never heard a white person before
His rhymes are a bore, punk kid tryin’ to be hardcore”
It took about fifteen minutes for some American girl called Emily Ellis – who sounds vaguely like Christina Aguilera, and knows it – to go on Las Vegas’ KLUB radio with an answer song to / parody of this. Yeah, the flow isn’t as good because of the need to mix in the original rhyme schema – which shows how skilful Eminem was to pull it off in the first place – but it’s sufficient counterpoint to provide a choice.
Eminem’s track is – as Tom noted – a lightweight attack on his perception of the pop establishment; Eliis slights Eminem as little better (“you ain’t nothin but a product / packaged to be bought up / you know, a year from now you won’t be thought of”). Personally, I was always going to side with Ellis on this one – my favourite Eminem song is the non-single “Mosh”, the only one where he gets his head out of his own arse and tries to attack an actual establishment – but Eminem scores a few points for enabling Ellis’ version to exist.
5.
Where to start with this one?
Let’s face it, My Name Is … had one hit wonder written all over it at the time. Even when Guilty Conscience repeated the trick Eminem didn’t look like he was going to have any sort of enduring career, let alone reshape the musical landscape.
It wasn’t so much this song that did it (it was basically My Name Is Part 2) as The Marshall Mathers Album – the second biggest selling long player of the year as a whole – that did it. That album does of course have a better remembered bunny to come (but I suspect we’ll end up talking about the non bunnied sampled artist then) as well as a relatively modest charting non bunny I’ll come to shortly.
My first instinct was to ignore Eminem even though I didn’t actively dislike his stuff. As a rock fan it was hardly my bag and as a gay man there were other reasons to steer clear. And yet in January 2001 I sneaked in with a copy of the Marshall Mathers LP and listened to it through headphones so my Mum couldn’t ask me why the hell I was listening to a rap record.
I found the record a revelation, albeit an unsettling one. Eminem made no secret about his different personaes; not just Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady but within song characters Steve Berman and Ken Kanniff without always drawing a line where one ended and the other began. It was also an uncomfortable listen because it held up a mirror to a world everybody would prefer to think didn’t exist – it had been done before by the likes of Public Enemy and NWA but this was the true infiltration into the mainstream.
The most interesting tracks (and it’s been a long time since I heard the record for reasons I will come to) were the ones where the brattish Slim Shady delivery was dropped completely and Marshall Mathers came to the fore. This gave us the unlistenable murder fantasy Kim but also the album’s best track Marshall Mathers (although the homophobic swipe at Insane Clown Posse loses it a mark) and second single The Way I Am which takes a brutal swipe at the attention that comes with fame.
The problem I have with early Eminem is that hip hop the genre has moved on so much in a short time that the tracks now sound quite horrifically dated. It’s to Eminem’s credit that as the genre evolved so did he; he seems as comfortable in the Kanye West era as he did when Dre and Snoop Dogg ruled all. It should be added that – against considerable odds – his violent past never came back to claim him.
#6: funny you should mention those two as back-to-backing. Massively popular at my uni hall at the time was a mashup, almost certainly acquired off a nascent Napster and called some variant on “Oops… Slim Shady Did It Again”. Basically placing The Real Slim Shady’s lyrics over Oops’ backing, it pretty much shot its bolt in the first few seconds.
Re. imitators – I think he’s having it both ways, laying claim to a tribe and putting himself above them (as well as dissing any possible imitators) – but that’s partly because I see this as a pair with, er, “Bun”, because I’ve had them both on the playlist, so I’m more interested in his self-image vis-a-vis fans than I am in his self-image vis-a-vis rivals.
But the rivals things is complex. The impression I get is that prior to a beef with Canibus around the time of The Eminem Show, Eminem didn’t really get much into public battles or feuds – despite obviously having the skills to handle them. Part of it is his genuine reverence for rap and him just not liking (or wanting to sell, at least) that sort of material, part of it is probably that as a white guy in a predominantly black genre (and becoming a superstar within that), Eminem is cautious about the language he uses and the stances he takes. The gulf in talent is what mainly differentiates him from Vanilla Ice, but also unlike him Eminem works out his own archetype, drawn partly from horror, rather than trying to imitate the existing archetypes in black hip-hop. (The obvious comparison point is INSANE CLOWN POSSE of course)
The lack of a great imitative white rap boom after Eminem is the dog that didn’t bark in his entire story, of course.
“My Name Is…” was a strong debut. Deliver your rap as a letter of introduction, get Dre to present your USP in such a convincing and almost universally accessible way and watch it sail into the choppy waters of the charts, foaming with frothy pop and trance. Eminem could not fail to be noticed. The fact that it missed #1 is almost incidental. It was Slim Shady’s world and we were merely living in it.
By the time “The Real Slim Shady” hit the top, I figured this guy would be dominating things for a long time. How disappointing is that? Compare with the man he sets himself against; Will Smith, pays his dues in West Philly and has two separate careers before hitting the top spot here, and this Missouri-born, Michigan-Raised upstart is parachuted in, seemingly overnight, and gets to crossover, seemingly five minutes after he picks up a mic. None of this is at all accurate. D12 had been in existence for at least 5 years. Eminem had paid his dues, while holding down a string of menial jobs to keep the money rolling in and feed his family. This wasn’t middle-class cultural appropriation, but a truly loquacious talent, given his moment in the sun by the good grace of Jimmy Iovine at Interscope and Dr Dre at Aftermath.
From a more enlightened and right-on perspective, there’s plenty of subject matter in TRSS to clutch one’s pearls to. But that’s hardly the point, unless you happen to be one of his targets. TRSS is a scattergun blast of little stinging disses, designed for playground playback through the mouths of 13 year old wannabes. In the context of the 2000 pop landscape, TRSS stands out like a recently hammered thumb. (8)
#9 re “Mosh”, which I like – my favourite Eminem track of all is his other semi-political one, “Square Dance”, which is his/Shady’s response to the war on terror, slipping between a Canibus diss track, weird Bush-imitating funny voices, and a paranoid fantasy about getting drafted. I can’t think of any track that catches the surreal, accelerated feeling of post-9/11 politics and news quite as well.
#10 “(but I suspect we’ll end up talking about the non bunnied sampled artist then)”
This reminds me of a question I’ve had for a while. Tom, are artists whose only appearances on #1 hits are in the form of sampling:
a) unbunnied;
b) bunnied until the first of those samples appear; or
c) bunnied if and only if credited?
(Amusingly, these would’ve all led to different answers for Enya were it not for “Orinoco Flow” – both “Ready or Not” and a 2004 bunny sample the same Enya track, and she gets a “featuring” for the latter but not the former.)
As for this single, I can’t mark it. It’s a magnificent piece of deeply problematic craftsmanship – “Dreadlock Holiday” feels like the comparison, but I’m not sure even that’s sufficient! It’s a 10-grade execution of a 1-grade idea to me.
This is obviously filling a particular cultural hole that would’ve been filled anyway, and the only way I could criticise Eminem for that is if his singular brilliance at doing so made that hole bigger. Do the trends explained in the final paragraph – and I know a lot of people who are firmly on the receiving end of the damage from them – happen just as much without him? If they do, I’ve no right not to give Eminem the (very) high marks his technical merit warrants.
#15 Strictly speaking artists aren’t bunnied, only tracks are! If there’s an obvious upcoming place to discuss an act, I guess leave it till then, but it’s entirely up to you. So if you fancy chatting about Ms Florian Cloud de Bounevialle O’Malley Armstrong (for it is she) then do so any time.
Hmm…Dido marries Eno. Think of the carnage on the marriage certificate!
#17: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; some names should be legally considered child abuse.
Back when he still sounded like Choo Choo from Top Cat.
TRSS is currently scoring 8.3, which seems to go against most of the comments here. I thought this was accomplished and witty, with a properly catchy (“please stand up”) chorus, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Tom has pulled out the best rhymes, which really are quite spectacular. Dated? Of course it’s dated, it’s a 15 year-old pop record.
As for the dubious lyrics, I think we’ll find a few more – and worse – as Tom goes on.
I think this works better than many of his ‘Hey! I’m Eminem and I’ve got a cutting new single with a hilarious video to trail my forthcoming album!’, maybe because it wasn’t quite as well worn as it would be become. A few of this lines are pretty cutting and can still raise the occasional smile. Eminem would make far, far better records than this, but the album this is from is still maybe his best. I’d have to disagree that this era of his music sounds dated, the references natch, but I wouldn’t say the production sounds particularly ancient. But then I’m far from a hip hop expert.
I was much more concerned with the release, this week, of ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay. I loved it. The way it soared and chimed and entangled itself around me. I still feel pretty much the same now. But more of them in good time.
‘Dated’ is an odd concept, mainly because it’s almost always used as a negative (60s split screen films are ALWAYS described as ‘dated’). Lyrical references that are of the moment (with the possible exception of political ones) are usually a plus for me; the idea that anyone cared that much to get angry/snipey about Britney, Xtina and Fred Durst dates this very nicely.
En route from the 2 Live Crew to 4chan…technically brilliant, kind of self-consciously puerile fun, and with riffs that count. What’s not to love? Eminem was (and is) so annoyingly inconsistent – his catalogue a real mixture of brilliant, sometimes provocative, but characterful tracks on the one hand, and forgettable or just silly charmless “teenage boy thinks farting is sophisticated and funny” nonsense ones, on the other hand. TRSS succeeds in (somehow) staying on the right side of the line. 7
#17 That makes sense, I noticed a bit of uncertainty in whether or not to hide the elephant in the room that was Westlife when talking about Boyzone, and they eventually got flat-out mentioned in one review of one of Boyzone’s interchangeable hits!
The next bunny might be a good place to talk about Dido, actually, because I always considered the artist responsible to be in the same pop game as her (and certainly the two would’ve rubbed noses at the top of Radio 2 and local radio playlists at the time!) – easy listening with some diluted dance music. Having just listened to that bunny again for the first time in years, though, that one might need a rethink…
For all the macho / psychotic posturing, this always seemed whiney to me. Maybe it was the nasal voice, maybe it was the fact his targets were so tame it felt like a petulant puppy fighting a ball of wool.
And yet the wordplay is so beguiling. At his best, Eminem’s use of rhyme and metre is dizzying in its dexterity. And here, he combines that with a sense of humour that’s absent from his later, fame-scarred material.
It’s very much a document of its time, though. A pop phenomenon that felt necessary to clear the decks, but which feels gimmicky and dates now.
I’m swinging wildly between two opinions here. It’s either 7 or a 4 for me. So I’ll split the difference and go 5.
I wonder – genuinely, not by way of posing an answer to my own question – if the question of the lack of obvious mini-Ems could be connected to this: if you did a Venn diagram of hip-hop fans and Eminem fans, how big would be the overlap section be? What do we think? (As mentioned above, there’s no doubt that he himself identifies as 100% hip hop).
Does anyone have anything statistically useful, indeed, on this?I had a look a couple of the obvious sources. Last.fm’s ‘similar artists’ are mostly people who have worked with Mathers, at least until you get to ‘medium similarity’ Jay-Z. YouGov have him ‘correlated’ with Gorillaz, The Prodigy, RHCP, Green Day, JT.
Bar the bunny, I don’t think I enjoy any of his songs. I wrote a couple of hundred words along the lines of ‘introducing Dre’s new white protege?’ for The Face in the build-up to the release of My Name Is… (we were meant to get an interview, but it didn’t work out). I quite liked My Name Is… for a couple of weeks, then found it grating.
I get that his rhyming is fiendishly clever, but it has no charm, brings me no joy. I don’t like him as prankster and I don’t like him grim-faced.
#26 Jay-Z has worked with him – Eminem is on The Blueprint, on “Renegade”. But I think your general point holds – The Blueprint (and then his mini-beef with Canibus, as mentioned above) is pretty much the last time Eminem feels like part of the main current of hip-hop, and even that track was originally an Eminem track which Jay ended up doing a verse on (so it sticks out like a sore thumb on The Blueprint). Part of this is that – spoilers! – his style gets less flexible, and he stays locked into Dre-esque productions by him and producers who seem only to collaborate with him, which suit him but sound less and less like anything else going on in rap. On his last couple of records there’s a single collaboration each with a current notable figure (Wayne on Recovery, Kendrick Lamar on Marshall Mathers 2) but that’s it.
But this is an awkward call to make – for one thing, even today he outsells almost anyone in hip-hop, as Alfred Soto pointed out on Facebook. But he feels like a wealthy satellite in orbit around the genre.
Surpised this hasn’t got more love. I think it’s great, in particular the sheer bloody relentlessness of the thing. Apart from a couple of bars at the beginning and end there literally is not one single second where you get a break from Em’s needling, perfectly controlled drip drip of offensiveness.
I’m not going to count, but my strong suspicion is that this is the number one with most words we’ll ever encounter
Nothing at all statistically useful, but I do have an anecdotal sense that there were lots of people who were into Eminen at this time who had very little feeling for other hip hop either before or afterwards. Some possible reasons for this I won’t speculate on, but possibly it was also that there was something perculiarly accessible about Dre’s beats, which had an almost nursery rhyme-like quality and also that the skill and dexterity of Eminem’s rhyming, while in actual fact not massively above that of the top layer of other rappers, was somehow a LOT more obvious to a non expert audience
(Much as when All Saints showed up and people started talking about their “2000 bunny” in hushed tones and I had no idea which of two singles they meant, I am a bit baffled as to what “the bunny” is on this thread – Eminem has two massive critical smashes that got to #1 and are acclaimed by people who don’t usually have much time for him. They are very different. I look forward to finding out which one people mean, I guess! I am not saying yet what I think of either, obviously.)
Actually, Renegade is a good example of what I mean. Em’s verses are so swaggering and extraordinary on first hearing that it took me ages to notice that what Jay Z was doing in his seemingly much more relaxed conversational style is just as skillful
(Re30: Ah, again, I only actually know of a limited number of future No1s, so there are songs I’m sure are bunnies, others I suspect might be and some I have no idea about. But I, at least, was talking about the one that has something in common with an Aqua track discussed on Popular. And I’ll leave it at that for now).
Tom @ 14: good shout, Square Dance is probably my favourite too. “I’m 28, they’re gonna take you ‘fore they take me!’ In fact all my favourite Eminem songs are the ones that build to an hysterical paranoid peak (e.g. The Bunny).
What can I say about Eminem? I was a big fan, saw him on his Slim Shady tour (“I am now about to drown myself, MANCHESTER!”), played The Marshall Mathers LP to death, though later while revising for university exams (a wonder I learned anything with that racket going on).
The last proper pop star in the Elvis/Michael/Madonna global game-changer mould, the only chart topper you’d seriously consider in the running for the greatest rapper of all time (except maybe one and he’d probably say his greatest strengths were not as a vocalist) . At his best he was like a Shakespearian anti-hero, speaking his own language, impossible flows of ludicrous, lurid vitriol, waving his fist at the shittiness of life, a bad seedpod sowing the seeds of evil in every young mind, a youth corruptor of whom Jagger and Rotten could only have dreamed. At his worst: Jeremy Clarkson with talent, ‘I’m sticking it to the establishment by bullying these marginalised groups’. Actually, at his very worst, he was just really boring but that comes later and probably not on here.
On TRSS, there’s a bit of his best and worst, the cheeky, parent-baiting South Park meets Fight Club side (‘spitting in your onion rings’) and as Tom detailed, plenty of impressive vocal set-pieces but also, as many have pointed out, loads of pettines. Eminem is a reactionary prude who’s peeved about ‘the president getting his dick sucked’, kids seeing sex on the Discovery channel, gay marriage, pop stars giving head, pop music. He comes across like Brighton Rock’s Pinkie: sex disgusts him, he fears and despises women, he longs to lash out at the powerful but ends up all too often bullying the weak and kicking round his bunch of followers. All this comes to me now, years after the fact, at the time, it seemed like great obnoxious fun but even that ‘hi, I’m back to fuck shit up’ vibe he’d do much better on (I think) future bunny from his next album.
7 because in every single person there *is* a Slim Shady lurking but no more than 7 because on this evidence that’s not necessarily a good thing.
I hadn’t paid much attention to ‘My Name Is…’ for some reason, but TRSS was inescapable. I’m a little surprised it only got to #4 in the US because the vid. was as big as it was possible to get on US MTV.
Anyhow, I’m feeling a little torn. I loved TRSS at the time. It was exciting to have an Axl Rose-level talented-but-no-fakin-I-AM-a-vicious-little-snake guy on the scene again, and this record was so fiendishly rewindable – you had to to catch all the jokes – and so well targeted that both the TRL-ers and poppers (who had senses of humor) liked it as well as those who actually did resent (or worse) the whole TRL/tween/pop-wave that had taken over since 1998. It felt massive, as though Em. was a one-man alternative nation restoring the pre-1998 regime. The harpsichord part *sounds* like it’s heralding the restoration of a literal ancien regime – musical wit to match the verbal fireworks.
Yet, listening now (certainly without the vid.) TRSS is thinner and not as engaging as I remember (I guess that this is what people are meaning to get at when they call it ‘dated’).
I’ve given the track an 8 for now, but may go higher.
“The last proper pop star in the Elvis/Michael/Madonna global game-changer mould”
Yeahhh, I dunno if you’ve been reading The Wicked And The Divine but all the stuff in that about incredible excitement when a new god/archetype shows up reminds me a lot of the real actual contemporary reaction to Eminem (and Cobain and Madonna and others, but Eminem is the one I was most There for) – someone incredibly hard not to reckon with. There’s one more 2000 Popular debutant to come who it’s impossible to imagine modern pop without but her game-changingness was more tied up with a scene than with (at this point) herself.
There was a real crest of this kind of white boy naughtiness masquerading as rebellion at the time — #33 mentions Fight Club and South Park, and I’d throw in Blink-182 and the American Pie franchise, too. I think that makes this something particularly of its time (but in the best way; it’s an excellent song, even if he contorted his cartoonishness into more interesting shapes elsewhere), but the other problem was one caused by its own success. The debate upthread about whether this crosses over with “real” fans of hip-hop seems easily resolved to me: it did, and the latent respect rappers maintained for Em ensured he would pop up with very ordinary verses on rap records for years to come. And dovetailing with Tom’s point on contemporary trolling in the OP, there’s also the clear influence and acknowledged influence he had on, e.g. OFWGKTA.
But as well as attracting actual rap fans, he also had a ton who weren’t interested in anything but — I think it’s thanks to them that he has maintained such extraordinarily large sales over time — but also many who were introduced to this sort of thing thanks to him. We’re about to hit the last big dovetailing of black music and chart music, and although Eminem seemed a shockingly singular voice at the time — people would call him the best going, which was silly; his talent was very easy to spot, but it was a limited skill set — but within the next few years, Ludacris would be getting #1 chart hits in the US. And unless you really needed to hear a white kid on the mic, why would you be checking for Em when Luda was funnier, 50 was more threatening, and Jay and Outkast more inventive? White boy naughtiness was legitimately an interesting thing in hip-hop for a while, but folks either tired of the schtick, or, through it, discovered more interesting things.
It’s time to mention Eminem’s odd chart fortunes in the United States. “The Real Slim Shady” was his first top ten, after which none of The Marshall Mathers LP’s singles get remotely close — not even the ubiquitous “Stan.” His imperial period starts in 2002 when the first three The Eminem Show singles hit the top ten. The peak is “Lose Yourself,” his first U.S. #1 in winter ’02 seemingly forever, keeping Missy Elliott’s “Work It” at #2 also forever (the mightiest one-two combo in American chart history?). He produces a track on The Blueprint, produces and contributes to D12’s album, and is unstoppable for the rest of the decade. In 2010 and again in 2013 he scored multiplatinum albums in America: a rare feat in the streaming age. He’s the only artist in the last decade whose popular success is incommensurate with his critical regard. I don’t mean in the Michael Buble sense either. As late as 2013-2014 “The Monster” was a massive #1 hit yet few critics beside Christgau (still a defender) give a damn.
To continue on from Alfred@37. In terms of number one singles, the UK had managed a 6-1 lead over the US by 2005, since then the gap has narrowed to 7-5 . All to play for.
#26 – it would be interesting to see what the public reaction would have been if Eminem had been announced as a Glastonbury headliner instead of Jay-Z or Kanye. Both got huge backlashes for being the ‘wrong kind of music’ (and Kanye for dodgy lyrical content) – I suspect Eminem would have been far more acceptable to a lot of traditional glastonbury-goers.
I can’t really put myself up as an expert on hip-hop. I have the rap albums you’d expect a provincial rocker to have. I’ve got some Beasties, an awful lot of GLC (who are only a novelty rap act if the Stones are a novelty blues act), some Public Enemy, Straight Outta Compton and I think some Cypress Hill (basically, if it sounds like it should be on the San Andreas soundtrack…), so please don’t blast my head off if I get this wrong, but there is some truth in how Eminem was the rapper who appealed to non-rap fans.
I always rather liked My Name Is, and this was a fun follow up. The problem for me with Eminem was his voice. It was whiny and annoying and (although I’m not entirely sure what makes a great rapper) I was always rather surprised by the claims he was the greatest rapper ever. But what would I know? The point of this song is that is feels like a rather snotty ‘fuck you’ to things that annoyed him. And what’s so bad about that? Hell, I worked in McDonalds once, and someone who had sworn at my Mum for no reason? Let’s just say their coke had a little extra in it…
Aaaanyway, the idea that Eminem was ‘the future of Metal’ (which was something a faked-up NuMetal kid – more on which later, else the Bunny’ll keep hoppin, hoppin, hoppin – told me once) died a death when he headlined Reading 2001’s rock day and brought a whole new meaning to the word ‘tedious’, despite Marilyn Manson popping up to make hip-hop shapes. The last thing I heard – and this is some time ago, rap fans – he was rapping about how someones arse made his peepee go doing doing doing. Oh dear.
This one? As I said, I rather like it, but I don’t think I’d ever want to listen to it a lot. Seven is about right.
#35 that’s a generous reading of the LeAnn Rimes story
I’m afraid I can’t really be objective about this one. It appeared at precisely the wrong place and the wrong time for me. I was fourteen and just at the point of seriously coming to terms with my sexuality. Like a lot of gay people, my peers knew it long before I did. My classmates (the male ones, anyway) loved this song and Eminem in general, so his every hateful utterance was digested and spat right back in my direction. Not only that, despite being in a Catholic school (also no fun for all the obvious reasons), the charts really were my religion at this time. Here was a widely celebrated number one that told me in no uncertain terms that the thing I was afraid I was, was something disgusting and laughable.
Was it all irony? Frankly I couldn’t care less whether Eminem was more Jim Davidson or Al Murray the Pub Landlord. The vast majority of the people who routinely called me a faggot in school are perfectly lovely, non-homophobic people now. Everyone gets shit for something in school, maybe all Eminem did was give them the particular stick they used to beat me with. But I can’t see past the ugliness of with this record to appreciate the talent that could so easily have been employed *without* casually trampling on a generation of vulnerable youths on the way up.
To add insult to injury, he also kept the glorious Gotta Tell You by Samantha Mumba off #1 here. The monster.
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Wonderful. Starts hard and just keeps going. The thing I remember most was how much it pissed off my parents’ generation – always a noble cause – while displaying a level of technical ability that made it impossible to dismiss. It’s the ultimate answer when someone starts waxing lyrical about the merits of, say, the Sex Pistols.
Of course offense is a necessary piece of this – and I remember Eminem catching public outrage in a way that others were struggling to. http://www.theonion.com/articles/marilyn-manson-now-going-doortodoor-trying-to-shoc,459/ was, at the time, funny because of how true it felt.
Soft targets? Maybe, though the Christina and boyband cases aren’t punching down as such. The homophobia side plays into a wider narrative about liberal responses to race and culture – honestly hip-hop at the time was full of aggressive, violent homophobia (going far beyond what we’ll hear from Eminem) that a certain strand was unwilling to criticise for fear of seeming racist; while I’m under no illusions about his intentions, I think Eminem ultimately did some good by bringing that somewhere where it couldn’t be ignored.
In the forthcoming bunny (I can only think of one, massive and memorable, so I’m unsure where Tom is coming from) we should get to talk about the Pet Shop Boys, which is one way of answering that side on Eminem’ s own terms.
@43 – just curious who you’re referring to when you say hip hop at the time was generally as homophobic as Eminem?
#37 I count three bunnies(!) – Easter?
#42 incredible payoff. Justice for Mumba.
I was also a gay teen conflicted over Eminem, but I loved ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and The Marshall Mathers LP. I suppose I invoked some kind of South Park defence – he was a cartoon, etc. I don’t feel so comfortable nowadays with a heightened understanding of white male privilege and the real-world problems adjacent to bigotry-as-entertainment.
And even then I couldn’t ever listen to that disgusting murder anthem ‘Kim’
#37-38 I think Eminem’s relatively poor showing on the Hot 100 during this time was due to the same reasons as Britney’s and the big 3 boy bands’ relatively poor showing at the time: a heavy skew away from single sales and toward radio airplay. Certainly all of these artists had a boatload of album sales and MTV play in the US at the time. Despite my own habit of religiously quoting from it, the Hot 100 really needs to be taken with a huge dose of salt until the download era kicks in near the end of the decade (at which time it can be taken with a smaller dose of salt).
While on the subject of Eminem and chart oddities, how about the fact that his biggest UK seller is unbunnied … and is also one of the biggest sellers for his singing partner, who has quite a few bunnies herself (including a 10-weeker no less!).
#44 When asked about homophobia in his songs Eminem’s response was that he was belittling other people (normally other rappers) by insulting their masculinity rather than attacking the gay community as such – although of course the implication that homosexuality is something to be ashamed of is pretty offensive. He probably got the best word in on his next album when he began a track, `Have you ever been discriminated against/ I have, I’ve been protested and demonstrated against`. To be fair homophobia in hip hop was rife at the time and in recent years he has distanced himself from that. I also think he might have appreciated the Pet Shop Boys’ joke at his expense a few years down the line.
I’m sure you can find plenty of collections of homophobic statements made by rappers in cyberspace, I’m not going to go searching for one. I believe Nas was one of the worst offenders.
#46 I didn’t know “Love The Way You Lie” was his biggest seller here – it did get to number one everywhere in the universe other than Britain though. A dreary record, if memory serves.
#43 Yes, I’m not claiming it’s punching down, more punching weakly (if stylishly). Like I suggest in the review, if the most imaginative thing you can think to say about a female star is that she must suck industry dick then you’re not exactly stretching yourself. It’s similar to the discriminated/demonstrated quote in #47 – “people are mean because of what I said so now I’m the one being discriminated against” is real starter-kit troll stuff. Eminem isn’t an ideas guy, basically – which is fine, nor are a lot of great rappers, and his delivery at this point makes up for it. But after 15 years rubbing shoulders with my fellow whiney dudes on the internet, I’m sick of the ideas he does have, all they do is annoy me, so I have been sent here to, er, give him a few lukewarm Popular write-ups.
Re. the homophobia: I don’t know if Eminem is less or more homophobic than his peers. It seemed to me he was on a lot more gay people’s radar as being so, but he was on everyone’s radar a lot more than most rappers. What is the case, I think, is that his use of homophobia in his tracks was a little different from battle rappers who would casually use slurs to put down opponents – which is presumably what Eminem is claiming in the paraphrase in #47. But that isn’t at all what’s going on in the original “My Name Is” before Labi Siffre made him change the lyrics, or in his next No.1 – there’s no battling going on there. Or frankly, in “if we can fuck dead animals and antelopes then there’s no reason why a man and another man can’t elope”. I dunno if it’s better, I dunno if it’s worse, than using the f-word as a lazy diss, but it’s not the same.
Does it matter if he was more or less homophobic than his rap peers? At the end of the day, he’s the one who broke out and permeated popular culture in a massive way. The attitudes he espoused may have been questioned, but they were broadly tolerated – and widely broadcast – because he was considered cool and edgy, and also because he was much more marketable (read: white and pop culture referencing) than the likes of Tupac and Notorious BIG.
If you want to create a sliding scale of offensiveness within the rap scene, that’s a discussion I’m not particularly interested in. All I know is that in terms of the music that was playing on the radio, on music television and in my common room, his was by far the loudest and most hateful, and whatever shades of nuance might have been behind it (I recall some mealy mouthed justifications whenever he was challenged, but it’s not like he was doing GLAAD adverts) were in my experience completely lost on the majority of his audience.
In that sense my distaste is as much for a media that built him up so much and challenged him so little as it is for the man himself, whose personal feelings I can’t and have no interest in speaking for. It might have been necessary to go through Eminem to get to the position we’re in today where (I hope) artists like him wouldn’t get a free pass. But I’m sure as hell not going to thank him for it.
@49 sorry, you’re absolutely right. I just don’t much like the argument that all rap is equally bad and most rappers are as homophobic (and misogynist for that matter) as Eminem when I don’t think that’s actually true? It kinda gives Eminem a pass I think. And at the very least it ignores actual gay and female rappers