It made the entire idea of a white rapper seem exotic, and it turned Em’s whole narrative into a struggle-to-redemption myth. Dre’s cosign was a reason to take Eminem seriously. If some major had snapped Eminem up and thrown him out into the world without context, he would’ve come off as an instant novelty. Still, Dre’s imprimatur was unbelievably important to Eminem. Dre Presents… The Aftermath, he’d met general indifference. He’d been the first out the door of the crumbling Death Row empire that he’d co-founded, but when he tried to reinvent himself on the 1996 compilation Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, and it was off to the races.īy the late ’90s, Dre himself was struggling. He released his Slim Shady EP in 1997 and got it into the hands of Dr. And then he came up with the Slim Shady character, a cartoonishly deranged alias that he used to vent about everything and everyone that ever pissed him off.
When Infinite, his no-label 1996 debut album, died on arrival, he went into profound depression and even attempted suicide. His race - something that would later help him become the most popular rapper in history - started out as an obstacle, a reason for audiences to ignore him. He worked dead-end jobs, and couldn’t even hold onto them. Marshall Mathers grew up broke and bullied in working-class Detroit, a tough place for a corny-looking white boy, scrawny and always ornery, to be. In retrospect, The Slim Shady LP, like pretty much every Eminem album that would follow, is an ugly, queasy, deeply fucked piece of work, a pent-up bugout from a victimized kid who couldn’t get his mind around the idea that he was victimizing other people.Īnd Eminem really was a victimized kid. When people like Billboard editor Timothy White denounced Eminem at the time, it seemed like moralist hilarity, a holdover from the Tipper Gore PMRC hearings from 14 years earlier. A lot of things about The Slim Shady LP have not aged well. To me, Slim Shady was a grand and performative artifice, a rap version of what David Bowie had done with his Ziggy Stardust alter-ego. That was the point of those papers I was writing, anyway. He exaggerated rap’s violent tendencies, stretching them out to such funhouse-mirror extremes that they revealed the absurdity of the entire enterprise. He told stories about tortures, decapitations, and Hieronymus Bosch hallucinations. Eminem, on the other hand, challenged the entire idea of authenticity. DMX would rap about poverty and struggle and depression, but he used them as adrenal fuel, and as signifiers of how real his own background was. Jay-Z would rap about his drug-dealing past in mythic terms, but it was part of his grand and escapist cinematic tableau. It acknowledged darkness, but the darkness was something to be overcome. Late-’90s pop-rap was flashy, aspirational music. And he became a star by undermining what rap was supposed to do. Then Eminem came along, flaunting his whiteness and his fakeness and his fucked-up sense of humor and his near-peerless technical dexterity, and he instantly became a star. When the Beasties became career stars, they did so by veering away from the rap mainstream, cultivating their own record-nerd pocket universe.) When rap reached maturity as a commercially dominant force in the late ’90s, white rappers were not a part of the mainstream conversation anymore. But before The Slim Shady LP, white rap successes were mostly short-lived novelties. Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” was the first rap single ever to get to #1.
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The Beastie Boys’ License To Ill was the first rap album ever to get to #1. And The Slim Shady LP was, as I was just learning to say, a rich text.Įminem was obviously not the first white rapper.
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Being an English major mostly involves learning how to bullshit, an ability that has served me well in my chosen profession. Most of the papers I wrote in college were bullshit. Those term papers were, in retrospect, largely bullshit. That’s what you did when you were a college English major when The Slim Shady Album came out. Dreģ0.“How the fuck can I be white? I don’t even exist.” I could write a term paper about a line like that. Bad Guys Always Die (from “Wild Wild West” Soundtrack) feat. The first song, "My Name Is," was the first appearance that Eminem made on the Billboard Hot 100.Ģ4. It received commercial and critical success, with critics praising Eminem for its unique lyrical style, lyrics of dark humor, and eccentric character. The Slim Shady LP debuted on the Billboard 200 at number two and on the Top R&B / Hip-Hop Albums chart at number one.
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