The Ugliest Number One Album in History
Who would have envisaged that the first blockbuster album (over 20million sold) of this century was riddled with tales of vicadin, rape, murdering your wife/mother, abuse, Columbine and homophobia? One which blurred reality with fiction and left listeners queasy at the thought of which tale was which. Eminem, it should be reminded, was a genuine pop star that hard the albatross of the Elvis syndrome of being white doing ‘black’ music.
‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ has to be the single most disturbing number 1 album in history, a victory of substance, however horrid, over style; a serious artist that sold albums by the lorry load, an artist that astounded and offended in equal measure and an artist that at some point genuinely scared Middle America. In 2000, America was fearful of such cultural devils, despite being pre 9/11, it was this fear that elected Dubya in the first place. America was tacking to the right, tacking to a hardline version of christianity and frankly a white kid with a hellish vocabulary doing music that a generation ago would have been called ‘race’ music scared the living daylights out of them. It’s worth listening to consider this; has such an album that is so hard to listen to, so repugnant in many ways, so confused as to whether it’s autobiographical, and so angry at being famous been so successful? I mean, an album that sold 1.7million copies in the first week is normally audio wallpaper. This album had a massive pop hit that tells the story of how one of Eminem’s fans keeps writing to him and the lack of response leads him to kill his pregnant girlfriend. Back to that ‘is it real?’ point; even if it isn’t, not many people’s dark fiction would tread so bleakly.
So what is the point? Well my point is that ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ should be seen as one of the greatest of the century we are currently living it. It should elevate Eminem to being a cultural deity forever, it should forever be cited of an example of how pop music doesn’t have to be sanitised, nice, moral and sugar sweet. It says as much of the audience as it does Eminem himself that we bought the album in droves – it shows audiences can be taken new places and should be seen as a sign of hope for those of us who want pop music to be challenging. We should never excuse an album as violent, misogynistic and homophobic as ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’, but as a piece of art it is peerless in it’s ability to shock and sell.
