Deep Album Cuts Vol. 255: Eminem
Eminem is nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year, alongside A Tribe Called Quest, Beck, Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Devo, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, New York Dolls, Rage Against The Machine, Lionel Richie, and Dionne Warwick, among others. So here's a look back at his catalog and all the bars you know and love: That's an awfully hot coffee pot! It's fun for me just to grab a boob! You're usin' way too many napkins! Your girl want an M&M so I gave her an M&M! Her honkers were bonkers! All men are friends!
Eminem deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. I'm Shady
2. '97 Bonnie & Clyde
3. Bad Meets Evil (f/ Royce Da 5'9")
4. Kill You
5. Criminal
6. Drug Ballad
7. 'Till I Collapse (f/ Nate Dogg)
8. Business
9. Square Dance
10. My 1st Single
11. Yellow Brick Road
12. Insane
13. So Bad
14. Rhyme Or Reason
15. Heat
16. Normal
17. Unaccommodating (f/ Young M.A)
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from The Slim Shady LP (1999)
Tracks 4, 5 and 6 from The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)
Tracks 7, 8 and 9 from The Eminem Show (2002)
Tracks 10 and 11 from Encore (2004)
Track 12 from Relapse (2009)
Track 13 from Recovery (2010)
Track 14 from The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)
Track 15 from Revival (2017)
Track 16 from Kamikaze (2018)
Track 17 from Music To Be Murdered By (2020)
I must admit, I've never been too big on Eminem. The first time I saw the "My Name Is" video, I was just totally turned off by the beat, the hook, the lame jokes, the cartoony aesthetic. And as his career went on and he made some undeniably great music, there were always some really bad songs and embarrassing shit right alongside it, so I kept him at arm's length. I kind of feel like, just because I'm a white rap fan (a white fan of rap) doesn't mean I have to be a white rap fan (a fan of white rappers). And even when Eminem was at his peak, so were Jay-Z and Outkast and DMX and Big Punisher and Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes and Scarface and The Roots and Ludacris and Jadakiss, it was just an incredibly exciting and competitive era of mainstream hip hop, so I was never really too pressed to spend my CD budget on these Eminem albums that people were listening to everywhere I went.
Now that Eminem has been outright embarrassing for over a decade, I can look back at his early stuff and appreciate what was special about it more than I did at the time. I like Em the best when he was just this kid who loved Redman and Pharcyde and didn't think he deserved to sell any more than they did. But I can also hear the stuff that put me off of him, and it was a little exhausting to listen to a bunch of his stuff and relive that cycle of Eminem rapping slurs and jokes about domestic violence, doubling down, and then writing tediously smug songs about the controversy.
After those first three albums contained some pretty great stuff, Eminem started to fall off pretty hard, and Encore and Relapse contain some of the worst music ever made, but there are still some decent songs I was able to pluck out for the playlist. "My 1st Single" is an album cut that's kind of an extended joke about Eminem's need to make super accessible lead singles. Meanwhile Encore's actual first single was the incredibly bad "Just Lose It," and even with a bunch of poop sound effects "My 1st Single" is a far better song.
"Yellow Brick Road" was written in response to The Source unearthing an early '90s song where Em raps this weird offensive rant about dating a Black girl. And it's interesting to hear Eminem rap this thoughtful, carefully worded notes app apology sort of song about race when he otherwise always refused to back down or concede anything to his critics after rapping something offensive. It kind of proves that he does understand how these power dynamics work but prefers to play dumb most of the time.
I didn't realize until I put this playlist together that "'Till I Collapse" featuring Nate Dogg is hugely popular, 8x platinum with more streams than every other Eminem song except "Lose Yourself." That totally caught me off guard because I don't think I've ever heard that song outside of The Eminem Show. But apparently it's been used in some video games and movies and as athletes' entrance music, which makes sense, it totally has that vibe.
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