Backtracking is our recurring look back at the pop music that shaped our lives. Our friends may come and go, but we’ll be spinning our favorite albums forever.
On May 28, 2002, The Eminem Show was unleashed upon the world. And the swift cultural embrace (five straight weeks at #1) and widespread success of the album ended up being one of the last moments of the musical monoculture. Everyone from Entertainment Weekly to the notoriously stingy Pitchfork loved it, and it became that year’s highest selling album (7.6 million units sold).
It was fitting that it entered a popular culture in flux, since it was born of a musician in transition. Eminem started out as a homophobic, misogynistic, bile-spewing provocateur, and is now a fame-averse father and supporter of same-sex marriage who has overcome addiction (and somewhere in between hugged Elton John). The fulcrum of that evolution was The Eminem Show, which found the Slim Shady persona fading into the background as Marshall Mathers explored problems as, dare we say, a mature person would. So how does it hold up a decade later? More »
