#dare i say its the most underrated song on his discography
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littlebagoflemons · 2 months ago
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me currently
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fuck it. have the five page essay-ish thing i wrote on hoax.
it's so underrated and contains so many references to taylor's one great true love... that she lost.
(but there's also a bit about what the album cover means since i just think it adds to the evidence of something)
Let me take you on a journey, more specifically, the journey taylor’s music brought me to.
But fine for irl context, and disclaimer as well, I’m a new swiftie.
Yes, folklore was the one that really really pulled me in.
I’ve always loved her music, those that I knew of anyways, and she’s always held a special place in my heart and some part of me always knew that I was always going to explore her discography someday… and those days and months of exploring aforementioned music finally arrived.
So, for context, I’ll say that I mostly loved her bops. I always knew and loved her as that teenage girl feeling of wanderlust, and just wonder, and sweetness, and love…
That was what taylor was to me, the feeling of love.
It’s only when I very quite recently really really grew up and at the same time, taylor’s most popular music at the time, folklore, also happened to be really grown up, is when I realized and found out that taylor always had this depth to her.
So, for me, debut to speak now and half of red will always have that child-like wanderstruck look of awe and love vibe and feeling to me, cause nostalgia, it’s what I spent my life thinking of it and her as.
Also it’s been some time since I fully listened to those albums, so the journey/throughline narrative that I see from taylor’s discography is
Debut – young kid figuring it all out, emotional but sweet
Fearless – growth, ambition, dreams, complexity of wanting someone you know you’re not supposed to
Speak now – cinematic movie like quality of storytelling, these are fantasies, epics, novels all on their own, legend
Red – reckless abandon, intense extreme adult love, and also growth
1989 – true love, actual adulthood, scandal, gossip, hiding, protecting what’s important, dwindling mercurial highs
Rep - …
One thing that I started to notice only on 1989 and then it looked to be the case for the ff albums too, is that the latter half of one album oft bleeds onto the next one
So like the sound of I know places and even kinda wonderland to some extent, is very similar to reputation’s sound.
Then idk, new year’s day being a really sweet love song transitioning into lover
And then it’s nice to have a friend’s simple acoustic nostalgia & daylight’s nature imagery transitioning into folklore
And theeenn I’m betting the lakes as a positive song is a foreshadowing for the more softer positive outlook evermore is going to have, compared to folklore at least
But I honestly believe that if you look at the albums themselves, debut to speak now and red all seem to be about fleeting romances that pass and go
But 1989, that’s when things start to get real, and I believe, that’s when taylor really starts to get her muse…
Cause if you look at from 1989 to folklore evermore heck even to the rerelease of fearless and red…
These songs seem to be stemming from one relationship
A relationship that’s secret, that’s fragile and delicate, and complicated and complex
And correct me if I’m wrong, but…
Is king of my heart the first time taylor ever used the term, the one???
The one real thing you’ve ever known?? All too well
One touch you are in love??? One step one night
Point is, I think starting from 1989, most of the songs taylor wrote and sung about could all be attributed to just one person.
A tumultuous complex but nevertheless real and true love.
And I bring up the one connection because the one clearly parallels king of my heart
And all at once, YOU ARE THE ONE I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR
why would taylor write about losing someone that she thought she was the one if the person you think it’s about is still supposedly with her when she wrote it?
And finally, in taylor’s announcement of folklore, she wrote about an exiled man walking the bluffs of a land that isn’t his own, wondering how it all went so terribly, terribly wrong.
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And in its music video, you get the same imagery?
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You know where, … you… also… get… the same… exact… imagery…?
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The folklore album cover.
Where it’s taylor, walking, in the middle, so small in the grand vast bluffs of a land that wasn’t her own.
In every single music video for every folklore song, the only ONE, THE ONLY ONE, where you get the same imagery, the same color palette as the album cover, is exile.
Which is about someone, a man walking the bluffs of a land that isn’t his own.
So if taylor is the man, then she’s
I can see you standing, honey
With his arms around your body
Guess who she has a close relationship with, who betrayed her, who got married to someone else?
*regina george anger screaming*
Me is a breakup song.
Taylor rereleasing red second has so much more weight to it now.
“In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness.”
moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion – me, I PROMISE THAT YOU’LL NEVER FIND ANOTHER LIKE ME.
WATCH MISS AMERICANA AND I DARE YOU TO NOT SEE ME AS A SPITEFUL/VINDICTIVE/REBELLIOUS BREAK UP SONG
grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness – FOLKLORE.
Then I guess, fine… we’ll get to why hoax is so fucking meaningful yet you don’t understand why it is.
Yes, my only one.
Smoking gun.
I saw someone call this a reference to the fire and ash in mtr, but I also think of this as someone being your one weakness…
Think about it like this, in reputation
And what if the one person who kept you alive through all that
Betrayed you too.
Taylor talks so deeply and passionately over how much this person matters, they were her smoking gun.
Because they were what kept her going through the death of her reputation.
When no one trusted her that one person did.
They were her smoking gun.
My eclipsed sun.
Lover ended with daylight.
Taylor called reputation as night time.
And now what once was daylight has now been eclipsed over, by betrayal grief sadness desolation.
(darling this was just as hard as when they pulled me apart, folklore is as dark as rep)
Winless fight – ma & thp, fight that someday we’re gonna win.
They or she didn’t.
Frozen ground brings me back to holy ground and to doht, my love had been frozen
The imagery of hoax’s lv, is of a cliffside overlooking an ocean
Which brings me back to gorgeous, of OCEAN blue eyes looking in mine, I feel like I might sink and drown and die
Screaming, similar to mtr’s I still talk to you when I’m screaming at the sky
(sidenote might not related to taylor references, but that line gives me hopelessness give me a reason to live vibes, and what with gorgeous’ line of sink and drown and die and this is me trying’s Pulled the car off the road to the lookout Could've followed my fears all the way down…
Anw… the sidenote is cause that feeling of hopelessness just really resonates with me personally, kind of the type screaming at the universe, at whatever’s out there why… sigh…)
Faithless love – false god
Hoax – illicit afairs
Blue… rep (delicate)
Best laid plan – dbatc, paper cut stings from our paper thin plans
Sleight of hand???
Five whole minutes pack us up leave me with it???
Could barren land also be bluffs of a land that isn’t his own?? Idk… *shruggie*
Ash from your fire mtr
New york, DBATC, 1989, false god, cornelia street
Hero died, remember when I said I’d die for you? False god
What’s the movie for, exile, I think I’ve seen this film before
You knew it still hurts underneath my scars from when they pulled me apart
Like I said, reputation… who was her saving grace/smoking gun from all that
THEY WERE THE ONE, THE ONLY ONE, TAYLOR HAD WHEN SHE WAS PULLED APART
SO THEY KNEW, THEY KNEW HOW MUCH IT HURT HER
BUT THEY BETRAYED HER ANYWAYS.
Password let you in the door, I knew you’d come back to me, front porch light cardigan
What you did was just as dark, just as hard
Why wouldn’t it be?
They were the one she had throughout all that turmoil… yet they betrayed her too…
Kingdom come undone – komh, we rule the kingdome inside my room
Beaten my heart – KOMH, dbatc
The feeling of thinking you found the one, the one you’re going to spend the rest of your life with… the one you would throw away all of this for…
Don’t want no other shade of blue but you, no other sadness in the world would do
You don’t want anyone else but them if they were the one you were going to throw it all away for…
You don’t wanna say goodbye…
You just wanna keep feeling the pain, the love, the conflict that you had with them…
You don’t wanna say goodbye
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zanrai-kid · 6 years ago
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I have no legitimate sleep schedule, so take my list of my Top 20 favorite Gorillaz tracks
20: Momentz - In the same league as Feel Good Inc., don't at me.
19: Stylo - Mos Def and Bobby Womack absolutely devastating on the bridges. Hearing Jeremih perform this live was gorgeous.
18: Humility - Gorillaz made a summer jam, and it sure sounds like it. Damon's getting old, man. Just wants to retire, wants to have a few beers by the beach. 
17: Sleeping Powder - iwasgone I M B A C K ASDKJHAJSDHGSKDJHFGKJHASGLDKJAGSD
16: Feel Good Inc. - A legendary song in my formative years, and a soundtrack to the Bush administration as important as “American Idiot”. Only so low on the list because of oversaturation.
15: Rhinestone Eyes - This song is the embellished production of Plastic Beach in a moment. I once made a mashup with this song and "Kangaroo Court" by Capital Cities.
14: Re-Hash - First song on the first album, and it slaps.
13: Ascension - Vince Staples is such a brilliant voice in the latter half of the decade, and I'm pleased to see Damon Albarn recognize this.
12: DARE - Hot damn, this song is a jam.
11: M1 A1 - Hearing this song kick off a Gorillaz concert feels like getting shot by a cannon. It's the "most like the sound the pilliows exuded on the FLCL soundtrack" song in the Gorillaz discography, and for that, I like it.
10: Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey's Head - When Gorillaz want to tell a horror story, they double down and get Dennis Hopper to tell a story of apocalypse. Demon Days is such an immortal album, and this song will live on as a ubiquitous reminder of one's mortality at the hands of greed. Good one for the pessimistic crowds of both 2005 and 2019.
9: Rock the House - BETTER THAN CLINT EASTWOOD. FIGHT ME. When Gorillaz sample audio, they make sure to make the most of it. The ten second sample of John Dankworth's "Modesty Blaise" carries Del the Funky Homosapien's bragging boogie rap through to another level with the tight bass riffs the self-titled album is known for. Echo effects, horn stabs, a fucking recorder. This tracks fucks me up.
8: Souk Eye - I think a track off of The Now Now is one of the best works in the Gorillaz discography. Primarily because following Humanz and The Now Now, Albarn and Hewlett are in a strange time of their lives. Both are now 50 years old, and Gorillaz has lasted 20 years. The concept has run its course for now. To hear this song close this chapter of the Gorillaz story feels fitting. A love song to the many miles taken, only to realize one must leave their current circumstances in order to survive.
7: Last Living Souls - It's a cliche to say a song builds, but when the track starts with little more than a drum machine, and leads to an acoustic breakdown and string section breakdown back-to-back, you can agree this song builds. A lush atmosphere of tiny bleeps and bloops coming together to become greater than the sum of all parts. The song sounds so down and muted on the album, but hearing it live, it feels like a war cry. Both interpretations fit the themes of Demon Days, and it's a good one to start off the album following the Dawn of the Dead sampled "Intro".
6: El Mañana - Hearing this song follow "Busted and Blue" accompanied by visuals of Noodle during the Humanz Tour is the closest I've come to a religious experience at a concert. The sudden immediacy of the situation following "Feel Good Inc" is made aware from sirens and Damon delivering a ragged vocal delivery. The track ebbs and flows in and out of deep bass and washed out highs. It feels like a sigh. It feels like crying. And if you're a Gorillaz lore sucker like I am, this track accompanies the death of Noodle, the single most important event in the canon. Also, the acoustic version reminds one how good Damon is at evoking very quiet emotion.
5: Tomorrow Comes Today - When those drums come in, man, you get teleported to the turn of the millennium. Dirty trip-hop was coming out of the UK en masse, Fatboy Slim released one of my favorites albums of all time "Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars", and Daft Punk's "Discovery" was still a year off. In between some of the most important music of my life being dropped, Gorillaz dropped their first single "Tomorrow Comes Today" at the end of the year and solidified their place for years to come. Slinking and sly, velvety and smoky. This is Gorillaz sending up a culture of basement shows and turntablism. If Think Tank is the first "Gorillaz album", this is when the transition was made manifest.
4: On Melancholy Hill - Ugh, this song. This song is pretty. Full stop. It's one of Gorillaz' very few love songs, and it still manages to capture the plasticine sadness of Plastic Beach. Plastic Beach was my first real and honest introduction to Gorillaz in college, as I only remember hearing about Demon Days from advertising in 2005, when I was 12. This track was just a treat to hear in spring/summer, and a reason I made so many (see: too many) of my finals about Gorillaz. Around the time Humanz was teased, I went back and realized this song had held up so well. It's just a universal sentiment about how the world we know is falling apart, but let's have this moment together. The acoustic version is an honest to God lullaby. Something I can play my future children. Not bad for only 16 lines of lyric.
3: Empire Ants - If "On Melancholy Hill" is about finding the beauty in ruin, "Empire Ants" holds a magnifying glass up to ruin, wondering how it came to be. Listening to the album, "Superfast Jellyfish" came just before. A satirical take on consumeristic meals leading into a song about how we are personified as ants, marching in tandem to complete our tasks and build ever outward, never truly satisfied until death. It is a reminder to look upon the greater picture that is our world and see the moments of tranquility for what they are. Sadly, these moments do not last, and Little Dragon's part reminds us we are part of a machine, ever moving, ever crumbling. It is beauty interrupted by obligation, and for a kid who was in college when this album dropped, and who is now 26 and facing a lifetime of having to make my own decisions, it's an anthem.
2: Hong Kong - I remember loading the entirety of Plastic Beach onto my iPod Nano, and having an iTunes gift card left to spend from Christmas/birthday/etc. Having seen the Demon Days Live concert, I knew this track had to be on my beautiful iPod Nano. That, and for some reason, "Dirty Harry (Schtung Chinese New Year Remix). I remember long car rides staring out the window, listening to this track as the scenery blew by. I remember reading up on this track's history, how it was released in-between Demon Days and Plastic Beach and it shows, how it's a tale of neo-industrial China and Hong Kong's place in both Chinese and British history. This is both a love letter and warning to the nation of the apocryphal train ride that inspired Demon Days. In a world where China seems to be ever rising, "Hong Kong" is a song that asks questions of how this will affect the world as a whole, using Hong Kong as a metaphor. That's nothing to say of the wondrous instrumentation, the piano part in particular on my wishlist of "Songs I Should Learn on Piano Before I Die". Many call it Gorillaz' most underrated track, and I agree full stop.
1: DoYaThing - I'M THE SHIT. I SAID I'M THE SHIT. Above all else, Gorillaz is a collaborative effort of hundreds of musicians from all walks of life. When you throw James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, a band that rose in the same timeframe as Gorillaz, and Andre 3000, my personal pick for the G.O.A.T., magic happens. Uncut, unedited, 13 minute magic happens. Is it a bit of a meme? Sure. It is a shitpost disguised as a legitimate song? Why not. But sometimes, the goofy aspect of Gorillaz can craft audio gold. And aren't we all about memes on this blog? Albarn's at his most snotty white boy. Murphy's production and vocals are a reminder he was every music nerd's wet dream in the 2000s. Andre 3000 is just laying into every line with a confidence not heard since Stankonia. Everything about this song is designed and manufactured to sound like it it running off the rails in a fit of confidence. It is both wildly powerful and mournfully unaware. In short, to quote the great music critic Todd in the Shadows on the subject of LCD Soundsystem’s song “Losing My Edge”, "(It is) a critical darling... This was tailor made for critics. It is perfect music nerd bait, total pandering." DoYaThing, my favorite Gorillaz song of all time.
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earwaxinggibbous · 6 years ago
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Eminem - Worst to Best
So I was watching theneedledrop and thinking I could do this too. That’s all the prefacing you’re gonna get.
I know it’s hard to believe I can judge Eminem from an objective standpoint considering I’m such a big fan that I ranked Kamikaze as my favorite hit song of 2018 (my actual favorite song was probably When You Die by MGMT or Stop Smoking by Car Seat Headrest for the record) but I am able, physically, to have negative opinions even about the rap god himself.
My only rule is that this only includes his full-length studio albums. Infinite won’t be here due to my lack of knowledge regarding it, but everything else is fair game. This will be heavily opinion-based.
Let’s go and start from the worst!
9. Revival (2017)
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Initially I was gonna put Encore below this one. After all, in my opinion, there’s nothing egregiously awful about Revival in my mind. It just sort of existed to me, like that dead roach that stayed in my high school’s gym for over a month before disappearing without a word about it. 
It wasn’t until I gave a few of the tracks a re-listen that I realized Revival has nothing going for it. This is Em’s sellout album, the one where he collabs with Beyonce, Ed Sheeran and goddamn X Ambassadors in the vague hopes that it’d get him a hit. Songs that don’t bother having clever writing because all they need to do is slap a semi-important pop singer on the hook.
It’s easily Em’s most ballsless album. In a universe where Kill You and Same Song & Dance exist, there is no need for Framed, Em’s almost saddening attempt to return to his Slim Shady roots even though, let’s be honest, the years of Shady are long behind us.
I’m not saying I need Em yelling slurs and talking about murder every five seconds, I just want him to be, for lack of a better word, the most authentic version of himself he can be. And this really isn’t it to me. No amount of politics or wordplay can hide that this is a sham of what an Eminem album should sound like. I don’t need diss tracks, or songs about serial killing, I just want him to say what he wants and not hold back.
Everything about the album is weak and tired. Every song melds into one another, without thought or purpose, only broken up by the celebrity hooks that define them. It’s the blackest mark on Em’s discography, and easily his worst album to date. Not even worth sneezing at.
8. Encore (2004)
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I guess we shouldn’t let Em do whatever he wants...
Encore has the opposite problem that Revival does, and it’s a problem I empathize with. Encore is essentially word vomit in album form. It’s the musical equivalent of Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, loud and incoherent and kind of gross. It’s what happens when ambition goes unchecked, and Em just leans a little too far into what the media says about him.
This was also deep in the throes of Em’s drug abuse problem, and it shows. This album feels like a bad drug trip, sludgy and gross and heavy, in a way that makes it hard to move your arms and legs. With these absolutely god-awful sung choruses on songs like My First Single, Eminem dares you to make less sense than him as he rambles like a crazy person through song after song, only taking breaks from his half-attempts at comedy on tracks like Mosh, Like Toy Soldiers and Mockingbird, which try to be serious. But it’s hard to be serious when you’re essentially getting choked in a soup of valium and regret.
I don’t hate Encore like I do Revival, because in some ways I can understand where it comes from. It’s trying to do the same sort of thing its predecessors did, with silly songs and serious ones. But the funny songs are so weird and frankly gross that it quashes any attempt of seriousness. It’s like Eminem thought the only way to make his songs better were to take what his detractors hated about him and turn it up to 11. Songs like My First Single are complete nonsense complete with gut-churning sound effects and a shitty beat, whereas Just Lose It, a song I’m ashamed to admit I enjoy, fills itself with baseless offensiveness and weird reference humor to function. And that was the big hit single off of this album.
Really I think Just Lose It was the best way to sell this album. What says Encore more than a song insisting that Eminem diddles little boys? FACK would’ve been in place on this album, which is not a compliment.
7. Recovery (2010)
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Recovery shares a lot of problems with Revival, a lot of radio-bait songs featuring pop artists that have no business being within ten feet of Eminem. But I’ll admit its singles were far superior to that of Revival. No Love was far superior to anything Revival spat out.
I just kinda don’t care about this album. Other than how Love The Way You Lie was permanently ingrained in the cultural consciousness around 2010, I have very few thoughts about it. I remember hearing most of the singles when I was in elementary school, and they were all just kinda fine. Space Bound was okay (other than that coked up line about love being ‘evil’ spelt backwards) and Not Afraid was sincerely underwhelming considering what it was going for.
It’d been diminishing returns for Em for years, so I’m not shocked he needed some time to get back on his feet. But there’s just not much to say about Recovery. I feel like Em was a lot prouder of it than anyone else.
6. Kamikaze (2018)
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At some level, I feel like Kamikaze set itself up to fail. And it did pretty well in spite of that.
The album’s main selling point was that it was dissing everyone. Shady’s gonna name names, I remember hearing, as this album dropped right the fuck out of nowhere in the late summer of 2018. Diss track drama has never really been for me, since oftentimes it pits artists I like against one another over petty bullshit. And hearing that Em slammed people simply for disliking Revival only made me more nervous about what Kamikaze’s outcome would look like.
I’m glad to say it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting.
I’m sort of on the fence about this album. While I think it is punchy, and pretty fun lyrics-wise, it definitely doesn’t hold a candle to any of his older stuff. It doesn’t even really hold up against MMLP2. It’s less that I enjoy this album, and more that I enjoy the possibility of Eminem managing to pick himself up after Revival and move into the new age while still being himself.
Easily the worst moment on this album is Eminem calling Tyler the Creator the f-slur and even implying he’s pretending to be gay, which he has since apologized for. However, the scariest thing to me that the line represents is the possibility that Eminem’s personality is too anachronistic. That in an era of young-adult trap rappers with very experimental homemade beats, there’s no longer room for a famous, albeit angry man in his 40′s being backed by a studio. It’s the years of Soundcloud, where anyone can be a rapper, and someone as old and frankly polarizing as Eminem may never truly have the limelight again.
Em’s style has simply fallen behind the times and he will never be content with updating himself, because that isn’t who he is. And while I love that about him, I think it might speak disaster for his career.
I like the songs though.
5. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)
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Now we’re getting into the good shit. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 starts off with a bang, the first song being Bad Guy, a direct sequel to Stan and an incredibly powerful sequel at that. Eminem asks questions about his fame, his identity, and most notably, he fucking gets murdered at the beginning of this album.
MMLP2 strips off all but one skit. No Paul Rosenberg cameo on this one. This was him getting serious after the relative failure of Encore and Relapse. This was, frankly, what Recovery should’ve sound like. With Berzerk being a fun sort of party hit, Rap God is what really got him back on the map. The song asserts his lyrical dominance. It is a brag track, and it earns that right.
Despite it being of incredibly high quality, this is nowhere near Em’s best work, which speaks highly for his track record. The fact that something this well-made is comparatively mediocre when put next to the top four is incredible to me. This album is more of a revival than Revival was. It’s Eminem reaching out of the dirt after being buried and yelling “Hey, I’m not dead yet!” It’s the hearbeat running through a comatose body as they return to consciousness.
But when it comes down to it, I love what this album represents to me more than its content. Aside from Berzerk, Bad Guy and Rap God, none of the songs really stand out either way. It’s all good, of course, but none of it can match up to his older work. Regardless, this album means a lot to me on a spiritual level. Whenever I listen to this I feel like a proud parent, and Em is my son who just completely crushed his elementary school talent show.
It’s a good feeling.
4. Relapse (2009)
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At this point it was sort of like picking my favorite child. My number one is obvious, but deciding how to order these three was trouble.
People will probably argue with me saying that Relapse is one of Em’s best, but fuck that. This album is severely underrated among the fanbase, and is an incredibly powerful listen. This album is an auditory representation of rock bottom, in the best way possible.
This is one of the only albums to really define a split between Marshall and Slim Shady, with Slim being a deep-voiced demon and Marshall being a fucked-up middle-aged man who just came staggering out of a rehab center. The way the characters play off of one another is beautiful, Slim trying to manipulate Marshall into his ways and wiles. This also easily has the most horrorcore-type sound and content out of any Eminem album, with Slim occasionally playing the role of a serial killer, such as on 3 am or one of the standout tracks, Same Song & Dance. Insane tells a story possibly regarding Slim’s father, or maybe representative of something else entirely.
One of my few issues with this album, aside from We Made You of all things being one of the singles, is that one of the best tracks is only on the deluxe edition. My Darling ties off the Slim and Marshall story in a nice little bow, plus Careful What You Wish For sweeping up all the themes and putting them in one place.
This album is beautiful, it’s cinematic in a way. It’s deep and powerful and incredibly, incredibly scary, with Em at his lowest point in his life and career. Sadly, it was not well-received critically, which I think is a shame. Clearly they weren’t seeing what I see.
3. The Eminem Show (2002)
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Screw Revival, this is easily Em’s most politically powerful album yet. I listened to this whole thing on a boombox I got at Best Buy for 20 dollars and I felt like I had fucking transcended.
This album pulls out all the stops, immediately starting out on White America, a song so goddamn strong that every time little me heard it on the radio I immediately got down and lost my shit. I didn’t even understand what it was about, all I knew was that it was big and important. And it is.
While his first two big albums tried to be weird and threatening, The Eminem Show just wanted to be big, and talk about big things. Eminem fearlessly tears into heavily-charged concepts in White America, Say Goodbye Hollywood and Square Dance. Then on the flipside he aims the gun at himself on tracks like My Dad’s Gone Crazy, Cleanin’ Out My Closet and even Hailie’s Song. It’s a gut-punch of an album, this is where Eminem is truly fearless.
I’ll also say I feel this album is a little bit more accessible, weirdly enough, than Em’s earlier stuff. It’s much less crude and aggressive, but still carries his trademark style. It’s got the skits, he yells a lot still, but the topics are easier to swallow than his earlier albums. I’d say it’s a good entry-level Eminem album if you’re threatened by rape jokes and Em yelling the f-slur constantly. And unlike what Teens of Denial was for Car Seat Headrest, I feel like The Eminem Show manages to be that entry-level album without completely castrating Eminem’s lyrical content.
But even longtime fans can gain enjoyment from this album and how loud and proud it is, how fearless Eminem really is on this album. This one, more than anything, is the unfiltered Marshall Mathers experience. No filters, no jokes, just him and his daughter and Dr. Dre.
But easily the best part of this album is the DVD extras thing where you get a free episode of the Slim Shady Show. Fuck yeah.
2. The Slim Shady LP (1999)
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The Slim Shady LP was Eminem’s first really successful work. It was also the first thing he ever put on a CD. Yeah, Infinite was on cassette only. And this album is fucking great. It’s a perfect debut for Eminem. It’s got his first big hit, My Name Is, and a myriad of other great tracks. It’s just good late 90′s rap, with fun beats and interesting lyrics. As much as I love SSLP, I don’t really like talking about it because... yeah, it’s good, I’m just never sure what else to say.
And that might make it sound like I like it less than The Eminem Show, but no, that’s not it. As much as I think political Em is great, I’ll forever prefer nasty rat boy Em any day. This is the Em that inspires me the most, the grody, crude one that reminds me of myself. Best tracks include 97 Bonnie and Clyde, Bad Meets Evil and of course My Name Is. This is also the only album where Ken Kaniff is played by Aristotle. There’s your fun fact for the day.
1. The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
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FUCK everyone else, I respect YOU!
The Marshall Mathers LP is a defining rap album. It’s lyrical perfection, the hooks are god-tier, and it is without contest the best Eminem album of all time. I doubt he’ll ever top this, and if he does it’ll probably break space-time. 
MMLP ticks all the boxes an Eminem album usually should. It’s quirky, it’s comedic, it’s dark, it’s angry, it’s violent, it’s everything I could want and more. But beyond that, it’s the thing that really proved what Eminem can do. He can tell stories, he can do lyrics, he can flow, he has good beats, he can murder his ex-girlfriend, he can get his own songs censored on the uncensored version of his album, he can do it all.
The songs on this just put me in a good mood. Even though they’re horrible, and I don’t mean they’re bad songs. The content is absolutely fucked, this album is not for the faint of heart. But it makes me feel represented, not for being gay, trans, mentally ill or short, but for being a fucked-up weirdo who lived a fucked-up life and just wants to scream and lose his shit. More than anything, this feels like an album that’s there for me, for better or for worse.
The standouts on this album in my opinion are the two “named” tracks, Kim and Stan. These tracks are incredibly disturbing, but they both mean a lot to me and are incredibly written and acted. The Real Slim Shady is still an amazing single with an awesome, hopping beat. I’m Back is incredibly solid, Criminal is cleverly contradictory, every track on this album is great without any misses. If there were enough words in the English language to describe how much I love this album, I’d probably use all of them.
This album couldn’t exist today. If this came out today, it’d probably be thrown to the wayside for a myriad of reasons. It’s too late 90′s, it’s too dark, it’s “problematic”, we have like 500 white rappers now, but for the record: Anyone who writes this kind of music today owes it to Eminem, ESPECIALLY all of the white rappers who insist they’re better than him. (Looking at you, MGK.) Even if he’s not doing that great now, even if you don’t like him, it’d be foolish to not acknowledge what MMLP did for rap. And not only was it influential, but it still holds up to this very day.
So there you have it. All of Eminem’s full albums (besides Infinite oopsies) listed from worst to best. Have any differing opinions? Leave a reply. Just be polite, you filthy animal.
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