Eminem’s second major album, The Marshall Mathers LP, was released in 2000. In it, he hits you with lyrical complexity and detailed narratives of figures in the news and popular culture at that time (i.e. Biggie, Tupac). You may find Eminem’s lyrics getting stuck in your head, because he's one of the most quotable MCs alive, managing to make his lyrics consistently funny and ridiculously far over the top. He rarely uses the same rhyme pattern twice, and he changes his vocal style again and again throughout the album, sometimes in the space of one verse - he uses six different voices in one stretch of the track "Criminal." His explicit lyrics make his audience consistently wonder if they should be cringing, as they simultaneously can’t seem …show more content…
Dre and Mel-Man, while Eminem and his Detroit crew, F.B.T. Productions, dealt with most of the rest. The sound shifts between a bright, melodic funk that's very R&B-ish (i.e. "The Real Slim Shady"), and slow, hardcore raw hip-hop (i.e. "I'm Back"). Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP may be described as a work of musical genius, yet socially inept, as he seems to take societal lows to an entirely different standard. His insistent, wearisome bashing of the homosexual community almost begs you to hate him: "I'll stab you in the head, whether you're fag or les/Or a homosex, a hermaph or a trans-a-ves. . . ./Hate fags? The answer's yes." Eminem has previously pronounced that he was sent to "piss the world off", but he seems well aware that this attitude he projects is also essential to his appeal. It creates a boundary between his fans and outsiders. The key element to The Marshall Mathers LP is its intensity. Eminem didn't water down his sound to become such a success. This album was more intense, cruder, scarier, funnier, more shocking, and infinitely more soul-bearing than his first major album …show more content…
The album opens with the track "Kill You," in which he threatens his mother, further adding to the list of controversial topics he raps about within The Marshall Mathers LP. Eminem is a kid who was brutally beaten up in school and raised by a mother whom he said things about like "A mother did drugs, tar, liquor, cigarettes and speed/The baby came out disfigured, ligaments indeed/It was a seed who would grow up just as crazy as she/Don't dare make fun of that baby/'Cause that baby was me. ./How the f*** you supposed to grow up when you weren't