One at a Time: "The Slim Shady LP" (1999) by Eminem

#273 "The Slim Shady LP" (1999) by Eminem

This is the situation I've been dreading. I'm not closed-minded enough to dismiss any of the rap records on the top 500, but I also know that I haven't listened to nearly enough of the genre to actually talk about it in an even-handed enough way. I gotta admit, I was a little bit excited for the prospect of actually finding this album enjoyable - after all, this list is largely 1960s and 1970s old guy music. It's mostly stuff that they play on "classic rock" radio stations and that forty and fifty year old white guys listen to. Unfortunately, this wasn't the one to break that up, for me. To me, this album seems vulgar. And I'm by no means a prude person. 

"Guilty Conscience" seems like it's tackling people in difficult situation who have to make difficult choices, but it's not really, it just wants you to think that. Eminem sets that up with the first one, a down-on-his-luck guy who's about to rob a liquor store. This might have a little bit of a better effect if we got more information than he's "fed up with life and the way things are going." Eminem encourages him to "gaffle the money" and "shoot that bitch." The next verse he convinces "Stan" to roofie and take advantage of a 15-year-old girl at a party. He combats all of these points-of-view with Dr. Dre's lyrics, where he basically just says the opposite, until the last verse, where Eminem encourages a man who found his wife cheating to "cut this bitch's head off" and Dre agrees: "shoot 'em both, Grady, where's your gun at?"

Other songs on the album include "'97 Bonnie and Clyde," which seems to attempt to humanize the character that Eminem is playing on this record by killing off his daughter's mother, so that he's just a single father, "If I Had...," where he tells us how much his life sucks, and if he had a magic wand, he'd make "the world suck [his] dick," and "Just Don't Give a Fuck," where he tries to convince us how cool and badass he really is.

Misogyny and homophobia have long been ignored in mainstream music, going as far back as folk murder ballads in the '30s and '40s, but the examples throughout this album don't even attempt to rationalize themselves, and there is no subtlety to any of it. It's mostly just about killing "bitches" and about how hard a time Eminem has had in his life. It's basically a bunch of bullshit where he acts like a badass thug to sell records. I really did go into this open-minded and actually listened to this album almost twenty times over, but I guess there's a reason no one's ever recommended it to me.

In my opinion, it's the worse than the other three albums I've done so far:

1. "Tapestry" (1971) by Carole King
2. "The Bends" (1995) by Radiohead
3. "Honky Chateau" (1972) by Elton John
4. "The Slim Shady LP" (1999) by Eminem