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Arriving on February 23, 1999, The Slim Shady LP marks the beginning of Eminem and serves as a warning shot from the man who would become the most dangerous MC on the planet. Compared to its latest versions, The Slim Shady LP feels unobtrusive and almost rare, but offers a rare and surprisingly fleeting glimpse of the pre-celebrity version of the pop-culture terrorist that would put MTV on its heels.
Listen The Slim Shady LP: Extended Edition now.
What was thrilling for some – and appalling for others – was the authenticity with which Eminem managed to introduce himself Loony Tunes version of Hannibal Lecter that would give you one of 40 and you would club to death with the bottle. This sometimes joyous threat has been imitated countless times since, but no one can do it as well because Em has made it so beautiful.
My name is…
It would have been easy to think of it as a gadget. The single "My Name Is" from the album gets its title from a tag. When the brackets are coherent, they are often not very melodic and lyrically unacceptable to sing in public. The album is ruthlessly violent and filled with Eminem who is doing a colorful character work. But it was, and often succeeds in being, totally hypnotic. Few rappers were as engaged as Eminem during his titanic tour.
We had to get used to it, but The Slim Shady LP would win Grammy for Rap's best album the year after it was released. This award only exists since 1996 and has so far been awarded to Naughty By Nature, Fugees, Diddy and, in 1999, Jay Z. To say that the arrival of Eminem was a disturbance would be a euphemism.
Bonnie & Clyde transforms the love duet between Bill Withers and Grover Washington, Jr, into a fantasy of revenge in which Em takes his wife and takes his daughter with her. "Bad Meets Evil" is built like an old Westerner; girls overdose at rave parties on "My Fault"; and a guy from Connecticut makes grotesque jokes to Ken Keniff. Even if you pay close attention to it, it's one of the craziest things ever recorded. This is not a self-depreciation. This is not an excessive sharing. It's not sensationalist, it's beyond anything.
Twenty years later, The Slim Shady LP is perhaps the most unique version of Eminem's discography. While his pbadion for pop culture was finally coming to Ja Rule and boys' groups in 1999, he was definitely more on television. His gadgets are based on crime shows, soap operas, school court fights, minimum wage and Lugz. At the dawn of a new millennium, Eminem would be catapulted to the rank of superstardom and find himself in the impossibility of re-inhabiting that world or that view.
A few months of world domination
The solemn introspection sought by Eminem in his latest publications never matched what he did on The Slim Shady LP, and partly through production, supervised by Dr. Dre, Mark and Jeff Bbad, and Eminem himself. The drums give the impression that the LP looks like a boom bap album, especially when one thinks of the ominous intensity of the synths that would define Peak-Eminem's sound. But this is often wonderful and we end up getting some of the most unique songs (if not the greatest) that the man has ever written.
Take "If I Had", which has always been one of the most distinct titles of the album; indeed, removed from the context of The Slim Shady LPThis is one of the most surprising moments in Eminem's career. His anger and his penchant for perversity are more or less inspired by his resigned anxieties. It's one of Eminem's rare songs on which he almost totally breaks this false reality, and this song becomes a goal through which we can see the much less serious remnant of the album.
Eminem would never stop talking about pills and alcoholic beverages, but it has nothing to do with talk about home parties and jobs on Builder's Square (one of the most dated references in the album ). It is particularly strange to hear nursery rhymes about Tylenol PM at the very beginning of her career. Of course, several months after the release of the song, many other Marshall Mathers complaints would never be relevant again in his life. He worried about shifts at work, his phone line was cut off and did not have a million dollars.
The Slim Shady LP is the first participation in one of the best series of three albums in the history of rap – perhaps the greatest of all time. The Eminem that would emerge on Marshall Mathers LP the following year, and again on The Eminem show, would be blaze and more confident; he would be even more angry and often much less amusing. But this early exposure of his idiosyncrasies at their earlier stages is essential to understanding an MC that was a few months away from world domination.
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