In the United States, The Eminem Show was the highest-selling album of the year, with sales of almost ten million copies. In 2002, Eminem's fourth album, The Eminem Show, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and reached the top spot on various charts internationally, as it went on to sell over nineteen million copies worldwide. With more than ten million copies sold, the album was the third best-selling record of the year in the United States. In the subsequent year, Eminem released his third studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP, which sold 1.76 million copies in its first week of distribution, breaking records for the fastest-selling hip hop album of all-time and the fastest-selling solo album in the United States.
In the same year, the rapper, along with manager Paul Rosenberg, founded the record label Shady Records. After signing a contract with Interscope Records and Aftermath Entertainment, the rapper released The Slim Shady LP in 1999, which reached the number two spot on the Billboard 200, and received four platinum certifications from the RIAA. It sold about a thousand copies and failed to rank on the national charts. Įminem's debut album, Infinite, was released by Web Entertainment in 1996. In his home country, he has earned 50 platinum album certifications and 10 number one albums. His worldwide albums and singles sales stand at over 220 million, making him one of the best-selling music artists worldwide. Eminem is the best-selling hip hop artist of all-time and the best-selling artist of the 2000s with US album sales at over 32.2 million during the decade. His music has been released on record labels Web Entertainment and Interscope Records, along with subsidiaries Aftermath Entertainment and his own Shady Records. Years later, as the shock has faded, it's those lyrical skills and the subtle mastery of the music that still resonate, and they're what make The Slim Shady LP one of the great debuts in both hip-hop and modern pop music.American rapper Eminem has released eleven studio albums, one compilation album, and one EP. At a time when many rappers were stuck in the stultifying swamp of gangsta clichés, Eminem broke through the hardcore murk by abandoning the genre's familiar themes and flaunting a style with more verbal muscle and imagination than any of his contemporaries. As well they should be - there are few rappers as wildly gifted verbally as Eminem. Dre but also helmed in large doses by Marky and Jeff Bass, along with Marshall himself - mirrors his rhymes, with their spare, intricately layered arrangements enhancing his narratives, which are always at the forefront. Eminem's supreme gifts are an expansive vocabulary and vivid imagination, which he unleashes with wicked humor and unsparing anger in equal measure. There have been more violent songs in rap, but few more disturbing, and it's not because of what it describes, it's how he describes it - how the perfectly modulated phrasing enhances the horror and black humor of his words. Of course, nowhere is this more true than on "97 Bonnie and Clyde," a notorious track where he imagines killing his wife and then disposing of the body with his baby daughter in tow. This was unsettling in 1999, when nobody knew his back-story, and years later, when his personal turmoil is public knowledge, it still can be unsettling, because his words and delivery are that powerful. The Slim Shady LP bristles with this tension, since it's never always clear when Marshall Mathers is joking and when he's dead serious.
Then, it wasn't clear to every listener that Eminem was, as they say, an unreliable narrator, somebody who slung satire, lies, uncomfortable truths, and lacerating insights with vigor and venom, blurring the line between reality and parody, all seemingly without effort. Given his subsequent superstardom, culminating in no less than an Academy Award, it may be easy to overlook exactly how demonized Eminem was once his mainstream debut album, The Slim Shady LP, grabbed the attention of pop music upon its release in 1999.
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