It almost felt good to hate it as much as I did, since at least I was feeling something. I hated it with my entire being, physical and mental and spiritual. I hated it with a cleansing, purifying, soul-deep fire. I absolutely fucking hated The Marshall Mathers LP 2. (It’s a 4.) After the emotional catharsis of his Recovery singles, Eminem simply wasn’t going to make the same impact by going into rappity-rap mode, especially as his rappity-rapping grew increasingly cluttered and labored. The song was a statement of intent, but it wasn’t really a hit, debuting at #3 and quickly sliding down the chart afterwards. Rubin sampled Billy Squier and the Beastie Boys, while Eminem went into his pinched and purposeful yammer mode, talking about bringing real hip-hop back, whatever that means. Two days after that commercial, Eminem released lead single “Berzerk,” a Rick Rubin production that clearly aimed to bring back the big-beat minimalism of the music that first captured adolescent Eminem’s imagination. So it was a big deal when Eminem announced the impending release of The Marshall Mathers LP 2 in a TV ad that ran during the fateful 2013 VMAs. After its release, Eminem tried to build up the roster at his Shady Records label, putting out a few semi-successful records from similar-minded rhyme-animal types and releasing a Bad Meets Evil album with his old Detroit partner Royce Da 5’9″. But the thing resonated - eight million units moved, two chart-topping singles, biggest album of its year. But for the record’s biggest song, Eminem had to get back together with Rihanna and make another song that sounded a lot like “ Love The Way You Lie.” It wasn’t broke, and he didn’t fix it.Īt least from where I’m sitting, Eminem’s 2010 album Recovery is a boring, frustrating slog, a turgid manufactured blockbuster trapped between its self-help sermonizing and Eminem’s innate snot-bubble obnoxiousness. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 would’ve been a big deal simply by existing, and three of its singles made the top 10. The 2013 record had none of the transgressive, zeitgeist-choking immediacy of the one from 13 years earlier, but its release was still an event. In the fall of 2013, Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP 2, explicitly calling back to the 2000 album that made him a pop-culture juggernaut. That’s a real accomplishment, and Eminem pulled it off by sequelizing himself. At the age of 41, he reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for the fifth and, as of now, final time. As Eminem’s sense of style atrophied and his aesthetic diverged from everything else that was happening within rap, he kept selling records. Within a few years, he became the biggest-selling rapper in history. But Em arrived at exactly the right moment, with exactly the right presentation and packaging and with the real-deal skills necessary to back up the hype. If you’ve got a strong enough back catalog and the right people looking after your business interests, you’re never going away.Įminem was always an unlikely candidate for pop stardom - a foulmouthed Scribble Jam battler who was all too eager to display his troubling relationships with the people in his life. But once you reach a certain point in the 21st-century rap firmament, you’re indestructible. Rap careers can still burn out quickly enough to spin your head around just ask Roddy Ricch or DaBaby, a couple of guys who will eventually appear in this column. By the ’90s, the biggest names in rap were trying to lock down roles in sitcoms and B-movies. MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice elevated rap to scary new commercial heights, but they were punchlines when their biggest hits fell off the charts. Run-DMC were on top of the world in 1986, and they couldn’t get arrested in 1990. Once upon a time, rap careers were short.

If you’re a middle-aged white rapper who’s built a titanic, historic career by ruminating on your own mental problems, then you might have some use for that comfort. Familiarity breeds resentment, but it also gives comfort. More often than not, it’s the truth, commercially if not artistically. That kind of thinking doesn’t always work, and it leads to cultural dead-ends, to multiplexes full of slight variations on decades-old brand names.

One of the clearest dictates of show-business logic goes like this: If something worked once, it will work again. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.

A dance of fire and ice demo