Review from CDNow
"I don't give a fuck / God sent me to piss the world off." With that uncompromising sense of mission, Eminem delivered the funniest, craziest, and, in its own way, one of the deepest hip-hop albums of 1999. The fun and illness are obvious -- The Slim Shady LP should come with a copy of the First Amendment, so teeming are its songs with references to drugs, violence, and sex.
But Eminem is up to much more than sensationalism. For one thing, this album offers a compelling portrait of the current racial politics of hip-hop. On the brilliant "Guilty Conscience," for example, the lunatic white-boy Slim Shady and producer Dr. Dre ("Mr. N.W.A, Mr. AK, coming straight outta Compton") engage in a hilarious moral debate, with Shady pushing for murder and revenge, while Dre counsels restraint. That violence comes to be the only solution -- and Dre is led back down the slippery slope by Shady -- speaks volumes about rap's movement from the inner city to the suburbs. Eminem isn't just another middle-class wannabe titillated by tales from the dark side, though. His white trash roots -- viscerally documented in "If I Had" and "Rock Bottom" -- lend his songs a grim, affecting sincerity, even at their most extreme.

None of this would matter if Eminem didn't have flow. But he does -- and plenty of it. His nasal tone blends just the right amounts of brattiness and adolescent wit, and, whether his cadences slow down or speed up, he never loses his rhythm. Time will tell how long Eminem will last -- even many gifted hip-hop careers have been notoriously short-lived. But this mad rapper is far more talented than his many detractors believe -- and than he often lets on. You can be sure that The Slim Shady LP will hardly be the last we hear from him.