Mathers is pig-sick of the whole damn deal, being on the defensive all the time, justifying his talent, parlaying the blame. “Never knew I would ever get this big/I never knew I would affect this kid/I never knew I would get him to slit his wrists/ I never knew I would get him to hit this bitch…” “You want me to fix my words up/While the President’s getting his dick sucked”, he roars on ‘Who Knew’. On the contrary, celebrity status has just multiplied the opportunities for humankind to roll over and expose its ugly, self-serving underbelly, and magnified the fact that life is just one long letdown.ĭuring the gruelling assault course of lyrical genius that pours itself into the 18 tracks on this album, Marshall Mathers is used, abused and betrayed by – deep breath – the press, his fans, his fellow rappers, pop music in general, the government, his mother, TV, his girlfriend, his friends, his record company, radio, other members of his family, God, his own fucked-up self… In other words, it’s not a lotta laughs being Eminem.Ĭondense it to its essence, and misanthropy boils down to what Mike Tyson said on CNN: “People suck.” And in taking Tyson‘s instinctual bon mot and spinning it into storytelling of breathtaking skill and dexterity, Marshall Mathers turns the torchlight on the deepest malignancy at the heart of our rotten society: rank, festering hypocrisy. Like that other great modern pop misanthropist, Robbie Williams, Mathers has discovered that there is no inner gratification in fame. ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ is real twisted shit – one long, disillusioned whine. Surely this was the classic case of success being the sweetest revenge for all those years of broken homes and bully beatings. A perfect parable of how the freaks shall inherit the earth, the more controversy stuck to the gloriously revved-up repugnancy of ‘Slim Shady’ like turd to a blanket, the more attention he gained and the more rekkids he sold. Basically South Park times a million, ‘Slim Shady’ was a cartoon orgasm, high on the sheer audacity of turning a mirror to society and selling that grotesque reflection back to the very suburbs and ghettos from whence it came. His first, of course, was ‘The Slim Shady LP’, an hilarious collection of scurrilous fictions based on the proposition that the grossest equals the mostest. His name is Marshall Mathers, you know him as Eminem and this is his second major album. We are fortunate right now to live in a time of great misanthropy, and we are blessed with the smartest mouthpiece for that perfect loathing that maybe there ever was. Just don’t hang out with him, that’s all. An equal prejudice employer, he hates us all. No time for such petty factional concerns as racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, narcissism, xenophobia… the misanthropist is the real deal.
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