Eminem The Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope)
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Eminem, whose given name is Marshall Mathers, is practically begging for someone to call him “the antithesis of humankind,” but outside the entertainment press, more people seem to be outraged by Bruce Springsteen’s “American Skin.” His third album, The Marshall Mathers LP, has moved 5 million SoundScannable units and squatted triumphantly atop the Billboard charts since its release in May. It sold 1.7 million copies in its first week alone, surpassing the previous mark for a solo act, set the week before by Britney Spears, by 400,000 units. Not that he didn’t warn her: in the first single he tells her he’s “been sent here to destroy you,” and later on the record he refers to her music as “garbage” and asks for his 16 bucks back.
Like last year’s Slim Shady LP, Marshall Mathers is violent, ugly, perverse, homophobic, and misogynistic in Boschian detail, and puerile teenypopper bashing is the least of it. In the first cut, the narrator rapes and kills his mother. In “Kim,” named for Mathers’s wife, he kills her for cheating on him; it’s a prequel to Slim Shady’s tour de force, “’97 Bonnie & Clyde,” in which he drives out to the pier to dispose of her dead body. He spins out his more pedestrian violent fantasies–like cutting off a kitten’s head–in equally graphic detail, and he makes a regular theme of horrendous gay baiting, which is barely tempered by his much-remarked-upon apparent endorsement of same-sex unions, “Who says a man and another man can’t elope?”–which at any rate is undercut by the video, where he makes a sour face to that line.
You said your girlfriend’s pregnant now
You’ve got some issues, Stan, I think you need some counseling
I just hope it reaches you in time
I just don’t want you to do some crazy shit.
