The Eminem Show by Eminem
The Eminem Show is the fourth studio album by American rapper Eminem, released in 2002. It was the best-selling album of 2002 in the United States, with sales of 7.6 million copies. At the Grammy Awards of 2003 it was nominated for Album of the Year and became Eminem's third LP in four years to win the award for Best Rap Album. The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling approximately 284,000 units in its first week, which due to a premature release by retailers and street-date violations, counted only a day and a half of sales. The album sold 1,322,000 copies the following week, where it registered a full week of sales. The album topped the Billboard 200 for five consecutive weeks. The album also spent five consecutive weeks at the top of the UK Albums Chart. It has gone on to sell over ten million copies. On March 7, 2011, the album was certified ten-times-platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, making it Eminem's second album to receive a Diamond certification in the United States. In 2009, the album was ranked #317 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and was later ranked at #84 on the same magazine's best albums of the 2000s decade. The album received critical praise by most music critics and is often debated as Eminem's most personal and best work. Eminem himself acknowledged during an interview with MTV that was recorded on May 25, 2002, that he felt that The Eminem Show was his "best record so far". The Eminem Show was Eminem's first album to be mainly self-produced.
If <i>The Slim Shady LP</i> was the start of Eminem’s journey, and <i>The Marshall Mathers LP</i> a document of the rapper’s struggle to get to the top, 2002’s <i>The Eminem Show</i> is what it sounds like when the only real fight left is the one with yourself. He’s still angry, especially when you get him started on America, which had just thrown itself into yet another war against an enemy (“terror”) it couldn’t quite define (a topic Em tackles on “White America” and “Square Dance”). But on <i>The Eminem Show</i>, he also shows he’s done some softening up, taking on the subject of parenting (“Hailie’s Song”), and addressing his moral responsibility to his audience (“Sing for the Moment”). He even apologises to the mom he spent two albums pretending to kill, at least kind-of (“Cleanin’ Out My Closet”). “I never would’ve dreamed in a million years I’d see/So many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me,” he raps. Is that a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. But at least he knows he’s not alone, no matter how alone he sometimes feels. The fact that he got the album’s name from Peter Weir’s soul-searching 1998 Jim Carrey drama <i>The Truman Show</i> gives you a sense of where Eminem was at. Life wasn’t a simulation, but reality was definitely getting bent out of shape—even his daughter’s eyes couldn’t ground him anymore (“My Dad’s Gone Crazy”). If the music felt heavier and more dramatic—well, you get it. Or maybe you don’t, until you sell 10 million albums and find yourself making movies loosely based on your own life (<i>8 Mile</i>). No rapper had ever sounded so vicious, honest and breathtakingly arrogant at the same time: “My songs can make you cry/Take you by surprise at the same time/Can make you dry your eyes with the same rhyme/See, what you’re seein’ is a genius at work,” Eminem raps at one point on <i>The Eminem Show</i>. That withering psychoanalytic criticism you just thought of? He said it five minutes ago—but it’s cool, you got a lot going on. Before <i>The Truman Show</i>, people wrote Jim Carrey off as a comedian, too.
