The Marshall Mathers LP Review

This is the one where the technique and the subject finally became the same thing. He had spent a year being the most argued about person in music and turned that into a record about what happens when the joke gets loose, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Stan is the obvious monument, a three act story told in letters with the weather doing the work a chorus usually does, and it invented a whole way of writing rap narrative.

The Way I Am is the tantrum done as craft, one held breath across three verses. Kim is close to unlistenable on purpose and it is impossible to argue it does not work. Underneath all of it the beats stay grey and minimal, pianos and bass and almost no colour, which is exactly right for the temperature. The homophobia and the misogyny are real and the record does not get a pass for them. It remains, on sheer command of the form, untouchable.