The Marshall Mathers LP.

Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP (Aftermath/ Interscope)

The great thing about rage is that no pube escapes it. Some deal with it better than others, but every one of us and every one of our sons and daughters inevitably feels disconnected from the world around us/them -- no matter how hard anyone tries to make it, er, not so. Eminem reminds me of the guy who sits down beside you at the diner, looks at you kinda funny, and starts in on a slightly skewed, paranoid monologue about how Timothy McVeigh was misunderstood and all the "real people" live in the Idaho panhandle. At that point you know your evening is dead, and you've made a new best friend despite your best efforts to excuse your self several times -- or even crawl out the bathroom window. Eminem is Marshall Mathers, a truly gifted and truly disturbed young man, who has taken a broken childhood and squeezed every ounce of bitterness and hate out of it. His alter ego, Slim Shady, is the second coming of Elm Street's Freddy Kreuger, a demented, chainsaw toting bundle of anger and revenge against the merest of slights, a fearsome incarnation of thin-skinned urban violence where murder is the ultimate, and regrettably sometimes perceived as the only, solution to life's peccadilloes.

Mathers's first album, The Slim Shady LP, rocketed to the top of the charts in 1999, Mathers tagged with the latest "great white hope" label, as if the next appropriation of black music could be legitimized by Mathers's adoption by rap impresario, Dr. Dre. Slim Shady raised the perennial issues about whether the celebration of misogynistic violence in art fomented real life consequences -- with inconclusive results. Then again, such debates' results are ...