The Marshall Mathers LP

• 1. Introduction

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  The Marshall Mathers LP arrived on the 23rd of May 2000, and within a single week it had sold 1.76 million copies in the United States alone. That figure made it the second-highest opening-week total in the history of the SoundScan era, surpassed only by NSYNC's No Strings Attached earlier that same year. For a rapper who had been struggling to provide for his daughter just a few years before, the scale of that reception was almost incomprehensible. But the numbers only tell part of the story. The album ignited Senate hearings, prompted a government in Canada to contemplate turning Eminem away at the border, and drew protests from religious leaders, LGBTQ advocacy groups, and parents across the country. At the same time, critics at publications from Rolling Stone to NME were calling it one of the finest records of the year. What kind of album could provoke that much fury and that much admiration at once? How did a rapper from Detroit come to occupy the center of American pop culture in the opening weeks of a new decade? And what was actually on this record that made it so impossible to ignore?

• 2. Before the Album

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  Eminem's path to The Marshall Mathers LP began with humiliation. His debut, Infinite, released in 1996, failed to find an audience, and out of that disappointment he invented the alter ego Slim Shady, first introduced on the Slim Shady EP in 1997. Placing second in the annual Rap Olympics brought him to the attention of Interscope Records, and eventually CEO Jimmy Iovine played the EP for hip-hop producer Dr. Dre. The two met and made The Slim Shady LP in 1999, a record noted for its over-the-top depictions of drugs and violence that debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200. At the 42nd Grammy Awards in 2000, it won Best Rap Album, while its lead single won Best Rap Solo Performance. Sudden celebrity changed the texture of Eminem's life in unsettling ways. He married Kimberly Ann Scott in June 1999, the mother of his daughter Hailie, even as his previous album contained a song referencing her death. He described his new unease with the people around him, saying he no longer trusted anyone because he could not tell whether they liked him as a person or wanted something from him as a celebrity. Billboard's editor in chief Timothy White accused him in an editorial of making money by exploiting misery. Those pressures, combined with a trip to Amsterdam shortly after The Slim Shady LP's release, in which he and friends engaged in heavy drug use, shaped the emotional raw material that would feed the next album.

• 3. Made in the Studio

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  Recording for The Marshall Mathers LP took place over a ten-month period in studios around Detroit, though Eminem described the actual creative work as a two-month "creative binge" with sessions that regularly ran twenty hours long. He called himself a "studio rat" who thrived in isolation and preferred working without advance planning. Dr. Dre confirmed that approach, noting that the two did not call each other in the middle of the night with ideas but simply waited to see what happened when they arrived. Much of the best material grew from chance. "Marshall Mathers" developed from watching guitarist Jeff Bass casually strumming. "Criminal" came from a piano riff Eminem overheard Bass playing in an adjacent studio. "Kill You" originated when Eminem heard a track in the background while talking to Dr. Dre on the phone, went home to write lyrics, then returned to record it together. "Kim" was the first song he completed for the album, written during a period of separation from his wife after he had watched a romantic movie alone in a theater. Originally he intended to write a love song while using ecstasy, but wanting to avoid sentimentality he wrote the opposite. He later told Kim about it, saying he recognized it was a disturbing song but that it showed how much he thought about her. "Stan" followed a different method entirely. His manager Paul Rosenberg sent him a tape of beats from producer The 45 King, and the second track sampled Dido's "Thank You". That sample suggested an obsessed fan, and unlike most of his songs, Eminem said he sat down with "Stan" and had everything mapped out before he began writing. Dido heard the finished version in a hotel room and later recalled being told in a letter that the track had been used and she was welcome to listen; her response was that it was amazing.

• 4. Music and Meaning

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  Dr. Dre and Mel-Man produced the majority of the album's first half, building what critics described as liquid basslines, stuttering rhythms, subtle sound effects, and spacious soundscapes designed to draw attention to Eminem's voice. The Bass Brothers and Eminem took over most of the second half, moving between the laid-back guitar feel of "Marshall Mathers" and the heavier atmosphere of "Amityville". The only outside producer was The 45 King, whose contribution on "Stan" was a slow bass line laid beneath Dido's sampled vocals. Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote that the album's lyrics blur the distinction between reality and fiction, humor and horror, satire and documentary. Neil Strauss of The New York Times observed that Eminem never makes it clear which character, Slim Shady or Marshall Mathers, is the mask and which is real, and argued there was no clean answer because something of each character exists in everyone. The album addresses Eminem's childhood struggles and family conflicts, his unease with his own fame, the media's treatment of controversial artists, and the perceived hypocrisy of American society. On "Who Knew", he responds to criticism about glorifying violence by pointing out that the same parents who blamed his tape for teaching children profanity also let their twelve-year-old daughters wear adult makeup. On "The Way I Am", he connects his own experience of media pressure to wider coverage of school shootings, specifically referencing the Columbine High School massacre and the 1998 Westside Middle School shooting, arguing that the press focused on spectacle while ignoring daily inner-city violence. The album also contains material widely criticized as homophobic, particularly a verse in "Criminal" that GLAAD condemned as encouraging violence against gay men and lesbians. Writing for The Advocate, editor Dave White countered that if Eminem's lyrics were to be read literally, the same logic would require taking literally every violent act he rapped about, including killing his own producer. Eminem himself acknowledged using the word in question more frequently once criticism began, and said he personally understood the term to mean something closer to "assholes" than a reference to sexual identity.

• 5. Release and Censorship

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  The album came out on the 23rd of May 2000 in the United States through Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope Records, and on the 11th of September 2000 in the United Kingdom through Polydor Records. Two distinct covers were prepared. The original showed Eminem on the porch of the house where he grew up, and he described mixed feelings about the shoot because of the good and bad memories attached to that place, before concluding that returning there and knowing he had made it was the greatest feeling he had experienced. The second cover showed him seated in a fetal position beneath a loading dock, with alcohol and prescription pill bottles at his feet. Will Hermes of Entertainment Weekly compared his appearance on that cover to a dysfunctional Little Rascal. Author Raiford Guins, in his book Edited Clean Version: Technology and the Culture of Control, described the clean version of the album as resembling a cell phone call with terrible reception and a hip-hop lyricist afflicted with an incurable case of hiccups. That version omitted some words entirely and replaced others with sound effects, though words including "ass", "bitch", "goddamn", and "shit" were left intact in most places. However, the radio edit of "The Real Slim Shady" was used instead of the album version, so "bitch" and "shit" were censored on that track. The song "Kim" was removed entirely from the clean edition and replaced with "The Kids", a South Park-themed track about drugs and American youth that also appeared on the special edition. Interscope Records insisted on censoring both the word "kids" and the word "Columbine" from a specific line in "I'm Back", even on the explicit version. Spin's Mike Rubin called this a curious decision given that other explicit content in the same region of the album was left untouched. Eminem's own comment on the Columbine material was that the specific incident was "so fucking touchy", but he added that no one had ever examined the shootings from the perspective of students who had been bullied to the breaking point.

• 6. The Sales Record

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  1.76 million copies sold in the first week set a new ceiling for hip-hop. The previous record holder for the highest single-week sales for a rap album had been Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle, which sold 806,000 copies in its first week in 1993. The Marshall Mathers LP sold more than twice that figure. In the second week it moved over 800,000 copies, followed by more than 600,000 in the third week and more than 520,000 in the fourth, reaching a four-week total of 3.65 million. It became one of very few albums to sell over 500,000 copies in four consecutive weeks. The album finished 2000 as the second best-selling record of the year in the United States with 7.9 million copies, behind only No Strings Attached. In Canada it was the year's best-selling album with 679,567 copies sold. The album spent eight consecutive weeks at number 1 on the US Billboard 200, placing it fourth on the all-time list of weeks at the top for a rap or hip-hop album. "The Real Slim Shady" peaked at number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the UK Singles Chart. "Stan" went further, reaching number 1 in both the United Kingdom and Australia. By 2016, the album had sold 11 million copies in the United States, where it is certified Diamond by the RIAA. Worldwide sales stand at 25 million, placing it among the best-selling albums of all time. A sequel, The Marshall Mathers LP 2, arrived on the 5th of November 2013.

• 7. Controversy on the National Stage

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  Lynne Cheney, who would later become the second lady of the United States, appeared at a United States Senate hearing to criticize both Eminem and his sponsor Seagram for promoting what she called "violence of the most degrading kind against women". She cited specific lyrics from "Kill You", including references to his mother and references to the Columbine massacre, and called for the music industry to impose age restrictions on the purchase of violent music. On the 26th of October 2000, while Eminem was scheduled to perform at Toronto's SkyDome as part of the co-headlining Anger Management Tour with Limp Bizkit, Ontario Attorney General Jim Flaherty argued that Canada should bar him from entering the country. Flaherty said he had read transcriptions of "Kill You" and been disgusted. Michael Bryant proposed allowing the show to proceed and then prosecuting Eminem under Canada's hate crime laws, even though those laws did not cover violence against women. Robert Everett-Green, writing in The Globe and Mail, summarized the situation plainly: "Being offensive is Eminem's job description." Eminem was granted entry. The controversy reached a symbolic peak at the 2001 Grammy Awards, where the album was nominated for four awards including Album of the Year. Eminem performed "Stan" as a duet with Elton John, who played piano and sang the chorus. Eminem later said he had not known John was gay and did not know much about his personal life, but felt that having an openly gay artist stand beside him made a statement in itself. GLAAD did not change its position and criticized John's decision. In a separate defense of the album, Johnny Cash, interviewed by Spin in 2001, pointed out that the most popular song of the 19th century was the violent folk ballad "Jesse James" and noted that no one had re-enacted the murder described in his own "Folsom Prison Blues". A study by Edward Armstrong, conducted in 2001 and 2004, found that eleven of the album's fourteen songs contained violent and misogynistic lyrics, and that nine depicted the killing of women through specific methods. The same study placed Eminem's score for violent misogyny at 78 percent, compared to 22 percent for gangsta rap generally.

• 8. Legacy and Lasting Reach

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  Rolling Stone placed The Marshall Mathers LP on its list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2003, ranking it at number 302. By the 2012 revised edition it had climbed to number 244, and by 2020 it had risen further to number 145. Time included it in its list of the 100 Greatest Albums of All Time in 2006, that same year Q ranked it 85th on its own greatest albums list, the highest position any hip-hop album held on that list. Christian Hoard, writing in The Rolling Stone Album Guide in 2004, said the record delved much deeper into personal pain than its predecessor and produced a minor masterpiece that merged exceptional flows with a brilliant sense of the macabre. A writer for Sputnikmusic called it unique in rap's canon, owing its spirit to rock and its heritage to hip-hop in a way rarely heard. Insanul Ahmed of Complex described it as a rebuttal to the hypocritical American mainstream that condemned rap music while commercializing sex, violence, and bigotry elsewhere. Jeff Weiss of The Ringer framed Eminem as an alienated voice of a generation, distilling the spirits of figures from Elvis to Kurt Cobain, and suggested the album may have been the last record capable of generating genuine shock in a media culture where everything had become performative. Max Bell of Spin named rappers including Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar, and Juice WRLD among those influenced by the album. Bonsu Thompson of Medium described the record as a masterful convergence of punk, bluegrass, and subterranean hip-hop that produced a singular form of Americana rap. In 2024, Damien Scott of Billboard, ranking all twelve of Eminem's studio albums, placed The Marshall Mathers LP first, writing that it is the definitive Eminem album, the one by which all others are measured, and that anyone new to his music should begin there. The song "Stan", which tells the story of an obsessive fan who kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend after the rapper fails to respond to his letters, entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a common noun, one of the rarer achievements of a popular record.