The Marshall Mathers LP

Product Details

His second album finds Eminem struggling to contain the pressures of success. And he's dealing it with it disgracefully. The Detroit rapper's multiple identities are more mixed up than ever, with Marshall Mathers fighting for prominence against his alter egos: Eminem, Slim Shady, Kenneth Kaniff and his public image. Don't be fooled by the album title: apart from the eponymous "Marshall Mathers" (which runs the lyrical gamut from maudlin to maniacal) you won't learn too much about "the real Slim Shady" here. As fiction bleeds into reality, Eminem aggravates the wound to increase the flow. The Dr Dre/Mel-Man productions on this record don't have the slap-happy bounce of those from the Slim Shady LP; all drums and bass, they're ghostly, minimised slabs of roto-funk. Except, of course for the gleefully self-referential single "The Real Slim Shady", for which Dre appropriately cuts in some of the picked-guitar from his own "Forgot About Dre". Eminem's own co-productions with F.B.T. veer from the bounce to the ounce of "Drug Ballad" to the full-metal jacket of "Kim", where you get to find out all the gruesome details of how Eminem's paramour ended up in the back of that trunk (from Slim Shady's "'97 Bonnie and Clyde"). And believe me, it ain't pretty. If anything there's a lesson to be learnt here: money, success, drugs, murderous intent, mental trauma and schizophrenia are all just as American as apple pie. --Chris Campion