Soon enough, popular rappers would be everything from middle-class college dropouts to theater kids and teen drama TV stars. The fact that this one found such a wide audience demonstrated that audiences would accept tales with unique perspectives. Marshall Mathers’ life experience was specific, of course, but every rapper has a story of their own. Instead, there were bizarre trailer-park narratives (in fact, Eminem was living in a trailer months after the record was released), admissions of suicidal ideation ("That’s why I write songs where I die at the end," he explained on "Cum on Everybody"), memories of a neglectful mother, and even a disturbing story-song about dumping the corpse of his baby’s mother, rapped to his actual child (who cameos on the song). The Slim Shady LP didn't feature typical rags-to-riches stories, tales of living the high life or stories from the street. The Slim Shady LP opened up space for different narratives in mainstream rap music. It Made Space For Different Narratives In Hip-Hopīefore Kanye rapped about working at The Gap, Eminem rapped about working at a burger joint. Here are a few of the most important ones. This makes Slim Shady inimitable there aren’t many mainstream rappers complaining about their precarious minimum wage job, as Em does on "If I Had." (By the time of his next LP, Em had gone triple-platinum and couldn’t complain about that again himself.)īut there are aspects of SSLP that went on to have a major impact. So much of SSLP, on the other hand, is tied into Eminem’s particular personality and position. 1 - have a more direct throughline to the state of mainstream rap music today. Other records from that year - releases from Jay-Z, Nas, Lil Wayne, Ludacris, and even the Ruff Ryders compilation Ryde or Die Vol. While the above are reason enough to revisit this classic album, pinpointing The Slim Shady LP 's influence is a more complicated task. (If you’re playing at home, he paired "foreign tools" with "orange juice" and "ignoring skill" with "orange bill.") Eminem created a dizzying array of complicated compound rhymes and assonances, even finding time to rhyme "orange" - twice. Did he mean the outrageous things he was saying? Where were the knowing winks, and where were they absent? The guessing games that the album forced listeners to play were thrilling - and made all the more intense by his use of three personas (Marshall Mathers the person Eminem the battle rapper and Slim Shady the unhinged alter ego) that bled into each other.Īnd, of course, there was the rhyming. It was also a record that played with truth and identity in ways that would become much more difficult once Em became world famous. In fact, he talked so much about his real-life childhood bully on the album that the bully ended up suing him. The Slim Shady LP is a record of a rapper who was white (still a comparative novelty back in 1999), working class and thus seemingly from a different universe than many mainstream rappers in the "shiny suit era." And where many of those contemporaries were braggadocious, Eminem was the loser in his rhymes more often than he was the winner. It also left an indelible imprint on hip-hop. While it was Eminem's second release, the album was the first taste most rap fans got of the man who would go on to be the biggest-selling artist in any genre during the ensuing decade. Eminem’ s biting major label debut The Slim Shady LP turns 25 on Feb. Another artist also exploded into stardom in 1999 - one who would become a big enough pop star, despite not singing a note, that he would soon be feuding with Xtina. A quarter century has passed since the mainstream music world was first introduced to a bottle-blonde enfant terrible virtuoso who grabbed everyone’s attention and wouldn’t let go
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |