It was the summer of 2000.
I had had my driver’s license for less than a year, the first of my friend group to acquire both a license and a vehicle. I spent a lot of time that spring and summer navigating my 1987 Ford Ranger (AKA Trucky Poo) around my small town with a cadre of friends packed in beside me.
Trucky Poo had a stick shift, a hidden rifle rack, and power windows. Cutting edge in 1987 but not in the year 2000 when we all desperately wanted CD players in our car. Trucky Poo had a CB radio, but no CD player, so although most of my music collection at the time was on CD I was stuck rotating through cassette tapes in the car. My friends pooled their cassette resources, and I ended up with a weird selection of tapes, perhaps most notably the Beavis & Butthead Do America soundtrack (which is not as good as it sounds like it would be).
But–as noted above–this story takes place in the summer of 2000 and that was the summer that Eminem dropped his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP.
Unfortunately, my mom subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine at the time and was very aware of Eminem and what his music was all about. She had declared that under no circumstances were any of us allowed to listen to Eminem and we were certainly not allowed to own any of his albums.
I really wanted The Marshall Mathers LP, but I lived in a painfully small town. I couldn’t risk buying it at the local record store because there was a good chance the record store guy would mention my purchase to my mother the next time she was in browsing the vinyl. I could not risk this.
At some point that year I drove myself down to visit my grandparents in their small town three hours away. I took a detour on the way home, through the much larger town down the highway, and managed to find a random record store in a strip mall. Remember, these were the days before smartphones and I couldn’t just search for nearby record stores!
It was here, somewhere off I-82 in Eastern Washington, that I purchased the Marshall Mathers LP on cassette tape.
I loved The Marshall Mather LP, and so did all my friends. From then on Beavis & Butthead Do America was out and Marshall Mathers LP was in. There were only a few tracks that I regularly fast-forwarded through, but otherwise I spent most of the years 2000-2002 awash in the homophobic, misogynistic rants that characterized that album.
I think it’s the combination of rapid-fire, lyrical rapping along with amazing beats and production that appeal to me. And although the messaging is truly awful, in a lot of ways the topics made a lot more sense to my white small-town self than, say, Tupac or Notorious B.I.G. ever did. I had a parent with a substance abuse problem too! I knew people who lived in trailers, I knew teenagers who took Vicodin for fun, I knew people whose mothers were more interested in their white trash boyfriends than in their own children. Eminem rapping about his white boy anger resonated in a way that Dr. Dre rapping about gang violence and being targeted by the police did not.
And let’s also be clear: it was the year 2000. Mainstream culture was threaded through with homophobia and misogyny. There wasn’t anything Eminem was rapping about that I hadn’t already heard at a party or in the high school parking lot or on cable news.
Still, my mom was right to ban Eminem, and I knew it. I worked hard to hide the tape from her. I never left The Marshall Mathers LP in the tape deck, and I never put it back in the case with the other tapes. No, The Marshall Mathers LP lived up in the hidden rifle rack when it wasn’t being played, usually shoved in behind some terrible vanilla berry perfume spray and a packet of Bubble Yum.
I still love The Marshall Mathers LP, but now instead of hiding my music from my mother I’m hiding it from my children. I’ll turn it on when I’m in the car alone and I get an immediate boost of serotonin when the first lines play. Stan brings me right back to the high school parking lot and all the boys showing off their newly installed subwoofers by blasting the song at full volume. I still laugh so hard at the Steve Berman skit. Every time. And I can still rap every single word in Criminal.
Eminem’s new album, The Death of Slim Shady, dropped a couple weeks ago. It happened to be a week when I was doing a lot of driving, and I loaded it up on Apple Music as soon as I had dropped both my kids off at their respective summer camps.
I really like this new album. It feels like a return to The Marshall Mathers LP, and therefore it feels like a return to my teenage years. Here I am, cruising through town with my giggling, shrieking friends on a hot Saturday night in July. Here I am, pulling up to my piano teacher’s house and turning down Drug Ballad lest she discover that I listen to anything other than Bach.
I am not in a position to unravel the cultural significance of Eminem. I’m too mired in nostalgia, and always will be. But I think in some ways Eminem feels safe to me because the destructive bigotry that he’s rapping about isn’t something I’ve ever agreed with. I know that deep down I don’t hate women or gay people. I never have and I never will. Still, I wince even as I’m rapping along to know that these songs gave others license to do and say terrible things to my gay friend back in high school.
Maybe I should stop listening to Eminem, but I probably won’t.
I will keep hiding it. Not from my mom anymore (she reads this blog after all), but from my children. When they’ve slammed the car door shut behind them and are halfway to the school doors, I will welcome my good friend cognitive dissonance into the passenger seat while I queue up The Death of Slim Shady on my iPhone. I don’t have a cassette case to hide anymore, and I can just hit the skip button instead of fumbling the timing on the fast forward.
And I will be thankful that my kids are growing up in a world where Eminem is considered even more perverse and offensive than he was in the year 2000. At least we’ve come that far.