Day 46-48: "The Slim Shady LP" - Eminem (1999)

Here's a fun fact about the process of writing this blog for you.  I've sat with this blog post window open for the last 3 days. It's not that I haven't had time to write about this album.  It's taken me more than 48 hours to even figure out how to talk about it.  Everything about it leaves me massively conflicted, and I've probably tried about five different approaches to writing just anything, before finally committing to getting something down, if only so I can put this past me and move on to some fun albums which are coming next in The Pile.  So here we go.

listen to me here

Before I go off the deep end, lets start with a fun little weird anecdote.  I was 22 when this album came out, having heard "The Real Slim Shady" on Radio One while not working very hard at my job. I'd already developed a fondness for hip-hop, and the song was smart and funny and edgy and captivating and I was hooked by it immediately.  

Now, people have in the past accused me of occasionally not paying attention to small but important details.  When I went out to the HMV on Fargate in Sheffield to buy this album that lunchtime, it's possible there was some evidence to back up those claims.

Yes, I do own this album twice, and yes the first time I purchased it I did accidentally buy the version where all the swearing was omitted.  In my defence, I didn't even know that was a thing at the time - to my mind, the name for rap albums where all the swearing was removed was "instrumentals".  The fact that a 'clean' version of this album existed at all still blows my mind.  And given the content of the record, how clean is 'clean' - it's possible that just taking the naughty words out of this album might not be enough to render it even close to 'clean' by modern standards.

I can't deny that I think Eminem is intensely talented.  This album, and The Marshall Mathers LP, are both a tour de force of angry, pointed, lyrically dense rap tunes with great hooks.  He blew up, became a household name and made a pretty decent movie of the back of his drive and talent.  And its almost impossible to accuse him of any kind of cultural appropriation - his street level bonafides are as legit as they come.

But for all it's pomp and power, eighteen years on from its release nearly every track on this album is filled with the the kind of messages you'd expect to see associated with 4chan and the alt-right;  casual misogyny and homophobia are woven throughout this record like a stench, and every single incidence of it in every song stood out to me when I listened back to it.  Every casual homophobic slur, or off hand threat to inflict unspeakable violence to women in the name of a quick joke felt like the kind of content you'd expect from some random egg on Twitter who showed up in your mentions because you dared to suggest that using racial slurs isn't the same thing as free speech.

The thing that really lives with me on a personal note is not so much the content of the album, but the fact that I was 23 and listened to it and just totally accepted it.  I loved this album, and while I'm not saying I was crazy about it because finally I had found someone who reflected the hatefuls views I thought had been missing from my life up to that point;  I was just totally fine with not registering how bad it was and just glossing over it because I loved the album so much, and because I wasn't the one being attacked in any of the songs.

I don't know whether people have a "Come to Jesus" moment where they consider for themselves for the first time "hey, maybe people punching down on groups which have been marginalised for years for the sake of entertainment isn't OK".  I don't think I did.  I just started meeting more people and talking to more people and being outside of my bubble and realising that there are a bunch of people in the world for whom this type of thing is just another part of a long chain of things that are popular, victimise them and make them feel less valid as members of society.

So now I have to wrestle with this.  Part of me still thinks this is a classic album, a profile of a young genius at work, almost certainly the best rap debut of all time.  But out of context, I don't want people to know I've listened to and enjoyed this album.  I don't want to have enjoyed it, even.  

I guess I will leave it to The Onion to, as it so often does, demonstrate that the link between satire and reality right now is so blurred as to be indistinguishable.