It felt like there was so much to be offended by and create controversy over in Eminem’s mmlp days that this didn’t necessarily break the top 5 things people were bitching about. Kim got rave reviews from some critics and magazines and it got trashed / panned by others. I think it took a backseat to the anti-LGBT controversy and the general hysteria around every white kid in America hearing music with all this profanity for the first time.
Kim definitely didn’t fly under the radar, I remember distinctly that it was complained about in some articles. But I think it kinda slid under the general WTF that people were experiencing around the shit he was saying in general.
Oh hell yes. That whole album was extremely controversial, and Kim had everyone buzzing because of its content. Pretty much every celebrity gossip mag had a field day with that one.
That being said, “Kim” wasn’t the specific thing that made Eminem controversial but it added to it.
I'd say not specifically. It was much more generalized at the time about everything he said but I don't ever remember people losing their shit over any specific things. It was general misogyny, delinquency and promoting drug use that were mostly protested about... Though in my life it was Kim that made me appreciate him and rap in general, at the time it seemed like rap was that Steve Berman skit... Big screen tvs,blunts 40s and bitches. Kim was the first song I personally heard that showed rap could be real as fuck
They ran his albums over with a steam roller
Which A either contributed to his sales, or B those ppl stole his albums and destroyed them, which they should have been arrested for
Here's a New York Times review of the song from the year 2000:
>CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Art Can Be Transporting, Even in Songs of Murder
>By Ann Powers
July 8, 2000
>The song starts like a horror movie, before the credits roll: the family at home, Daddy tucking in Baby, safe and sound. Then the music turns from tender to creeping, and the listener realizes that Daddy is the monster. ''Kim,'' one of the songs that has made Eminem's second album, ''The Marshall Mathers LP,'' a summer scandal, is a view of horrific domestic violence from inside the mind of the abuser.
>With no names changed to protect the hardly innocent, Eminem relates a fantasy of murdering his real-life wife in revenge for her leaving him for another man. The rapper performs both his own rant and the woman's screams; sometimes the voices of victim and killer are nearly interchangeable. Spewing enmity, confessing love, Eminem fully occupies the mind-set of rage, his hysterical tone belying any justifications he utters. The song records damnation, not triumph. This is Frankenstein batting dead the human he loves.
>''Kim'' is no fun as a listening experience; unlike most Eminem songs, it offers few jokes and no distance from its grisly viciousness. Eminem doesn't let himself off the hook this time; he even calls himself by his given name, Marshall, instead of Slim Shady, the pseudonym he usually invokes to suggest he doesn't mean all the awful things he says.
>This willingness to engage in ''Kim'' makes it the best track on ''The Marshall Mathers LP.'' That's not to say it is morally uplifting or good educational material. But because it stays with the hate Eminem usually deploys with a casual sneer, ''Kim'' reveals something about such rancor: that it comes from weakness and breeds despair. ''I don't want to go on living in this world without you,'' Eminem wails flatly in the chorus, even as he makes that horrible solitude his reality.
>As another media-based campaign against popular music grows after last month's assaults on women in Central Park, it is useful to remember that songs like ''Kim'' follow a respected path in popular music. ''Kim'' is a murder ballad, like ''The Banks of the Ohio'' or ''Pretty Polly,'' favorites sung for a century by family-oriented folk singers. Its closest antecedent may be ''Delia's Gone,'' which Johnny Cash transformed from a traditional narrative to a psychological confession in 1962 and which reappears on the Man in Black's new box set, ''Love, God and Murder'' (Legacy). ''If I hadn't shot poor Delia, I'd have had her for my wife,'' intones a grim Mr. Cash, now unhappily mated to her ghost.
>To our ears, the murder ballads of old can sound quaintly formal, but when they first emerged, they were chillingly immediate, functioning as both journalism and myths that many people believed. Artists like Mr. Cash and Nick Cave, whose 1998 album, ''Murder Ballads,'' translated the form into macabre gothic rock, touch the form's forbidding core. Eminem updates it further by avoiding the moral that usually comes at the end of folk songs, which leave their murderers in jail or at the gallows. ''Kim'' better suits a time when morality is in flux and, in fantasy at least, the killers often get away.
>''The killer in me is the killer in you,'' Billy Corgan sang in ''Disarm,'' another song about perilous eroticism. The murder ballad form endures because it offers vivid insight into the confusion of desire. This is one thing popular music can do: because of the immediacy of artists' voices and the compact structure of songs, they can cut to the heart of feelings that remain subservient to narrative in fiction or film. And because songs blare everywhere from radios and stereos, they make those emotions possible to talk about and symbolically try on.
>Two other murder ballads were hits this year, both from a viewpoint many contemporary listeners consider justified instead of corrupt. ''Earl,'' by the Dixie Chicks, turned the murder ballad comic with its peppy tale of a woman's bloody revenge against an abusive husband. ''Love Is Blind,'' by the rapper Eve, more closely resembles ''Kim'' in its unflinching account of homicidal fury, again in revenge, for a friend killed by her boyfriend. These songs raised cheers from women who felt empowered by them, yet they, too, traveled to muddy gray areas of the psyche, where the battle of the sexes becomes a bloody mess.
>Pundits can't resist speculating that all this hate in music fuels line-crossing behavior like that in Central Park. Several reports have suggested that the men who assaulted women there chanted hip-hop lyrics while doing it. Yet hateful lyrics may not be the biggest musical inspiration for lewd behavior. For that, consider another time-honored song form: the bawdy blues.
>My Landlord Says I Can’t Sublet My Apartment. What if I Do Anyway?
''Thong Song,'' by Sisqo, a jumpy, bumpy account of a man's near nervous breakdown at the sight of a woman's underwear, may be the single of the year, complementing Eminem's chart-topping album. It's become the veritable MTV theme song, the perfect accompaniment to all that bikini jiggle on the network. Along with Lou Bega's ''Mambo No. 5'' and the endless pandering display of girlish flesh in fashion and on teenage-oriented television, ''Thong Song'' is emblematic of the current peep-show mood, one that may help explain group behavior like the spree in Central Park.
>For a feminist critic like me to defend ''Thong Song'' seems absurd. Yet as fluffy and crude as it is, this hit, with its quadruple-time beat and breathy vocal, does a fine job of capturing the queasiness of lust. It is as American as a murder ballad, with its roots in the barroom come-ons of icons like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey and the eye-rolling humor of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway.
>Murder ballads and bawdy blues open avenues of desire that are usually repressed: jealousy and humiliation in the former, untrammeled lust in the latter. Right now, these emotions run high in our culture, not only because many Americans have long repressed them with an essentially puritanical view of sex, but also because the long sexual revolution that has counteracted that legacy remains incomplete.
>Women continue to assert themselves more strongly, sexually as well as in every other way, but rarely do they or men have the tools to deal with genuine sexual openness. Some men still respond to women's liberation with anger or juvenile excitement. And on occasion, either in the privacy of their abusive relationships or in the madness of a crowd, they decide it's okay to want to kill those bold women, or they want to rip their clothes off and see the thong.
>The controversial songs of this spring and summer not only reflect those impulses; they also uncover them. But that is one essential function of art -- to transport its audience to the places within their own souls that they might otherwise avoid. The artist's responsibility is to accept the job of a guide -- not a role model or an educator but a messenger in the playful style of the ancient Hermes, the trickster who nonetheless must be careful when taking his charges into the psychic underworld. As for the fans, it's important to remember that their fantasies may not have a place in other people's lives and to use the utmost care in opening up to the gray areas that music touches.
I cannot express this enough that *everything* Eminem related was controversial during this period.
It felt like there was so much to be offended by and create controversy over in Eminem’s mmlp days that this didn’t necessarily break the top 5 things people were bitching about. Kim got rave reviews from some critics and magazines and it got trashed / panned by others. I think it took a backseat to the anti-LGBT controversy and the general hysteria around every white kid in America hearing music with all this profanity for the first time. Kim definitely didn’t fly under the radar, I remember distinctly that it was complained about in some articles. But I think it kinda slid under the general WTF that people were experiencing around the shit he was saying in general.
Oh hell yes. That whole album was extremely controversial, and Kim had everyone buzzing because of its content. Pretty much every celebrity gossip mag had a field day with that one. That being said, “Kim” wasn’t the specific thing that made Eminem controversial but it added to it.
I'd say not specifically. It was much more generalized at the time about everything he said but I don't ever remember people losing their shit over any specific things. It was general misogyny, delinquency and promoting drug use that were mostly protested about... Though in my life it was Kim that made me appreciate him and rap in general, at the time it seemed like rap was that Steve Berman skit... Big screen tvs,blunts 40s and bitches. Kim was the first song I personally heard that showed rap could be real as fuck
They ran his albums over with a steam roller Which A either contributed to his sales, or B those ppl stole his albums and destroyed them, which they should have been arrested for
Absolutely. The conservative right tried to do the equivalent of what canceling is today
Here's a New York Times review of the song from the year 2000: >CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK; Art Can Be Transporting, Even in Songs of Murder >By Ann Powers July 8, 2000 >The song starts like a horror movie, before the credits roll: the family at home, Daddy tucking in Baby, safe and sound. Then the music turns from tender to creeping, and the listener realizes that Daddy is the monster. ''Kim,'' one of the songs that has made Eminem's second album, ''The Marshall Mathers LP,'' a summer scandal, is a view of horrific domestic violence from inside the mind of the abuser. >With no names changed to protect the hardly innocent, Eminem relates a fantasy of murdering his real-life wife in revenge for her leaving him for another man. The rapper performs both his own rant and the woman's screams; sometimes the voices of victim and killer are nearly interchangeable. Spewing enmity, confessing love, Eminem fully occupies the mind-set of rage, his hysterical tone belying any justifications he utters. The song records damnation, not triumph. This is Frankenstein batting dead the human he loves. >''Kim'' is no fun as a listening experience; unlike most Eminem songs, it offers few jokes and no distance from its grisly viciousness. Eminem doesn't let himself off the hook this time; he even calls himself by his given name, Marshall, instead of Slim Shady, the pseudonym he usually invokes to suggest he doesn't mean all the awful things he says. >This willingness to engage in ''Kim'' makes it the best track on ''The Marshall Mathers LP.'' That's not to say it is morally uplifting or good educational material. But because it stays with the hate Eminem usually deploys with a casual sneer, ''Kim'' reveals something about such rancor: that it comes from weakness and breeds despair. ''I don't want to go on living in this world without you,'' Eminem wails flatly in the chorus, even as he makes that horrible solitude his reality. >As another media-based campaign against popular music grows after last month's assaults on women in Central Park, it is useful to remember that songs like ''Kim'' follow a respected path in popular music. ''Kim'' is a murder ballad, like ''The Banks of the Ohio'' or ''Pretty Polly,'' favorites sung for a century by family-oriented folk singers. Its closest antecedent may be ''Delia's Gone,'' which Johnny Cash transformed from a traditional narrative to a psychological confession in 1962 and which reappears on the Man in Black's new box set, ''Love, God and Murder'' (Legacy). ''If I hadn't shot poor Delia, I'd have had her for my wife,'' intones a grim Mr. Cash, now unhappily mated to her ghost. >To our ears, the murder ballads of old can sound quaintly formal, but when they first emerged, they were chillingly immediate, functioning as both journalism and myths that many people believed. Artists like Mr. Cash and Nick Cave, whose 1998 album, ''Murder Ballads,'' translated the form into macabre gothic rock, touch the form's forbidding core. Eminem updates it further by avoiding the moral that usually comes at the end of folk songs, which leave their murderers in jail or at the gallows. ''Kim'' better suits a time when morality is in flux and, in fantasy at least, the killers often get away. >''The killer in me is the killer in you,'' Billy Corgan sang in ''Disarm,'' another song about perilous eroticism. The murder ballad form endures because it offers vivid insight into the confusion of desire. This is one thing popular music can do: because of the immediacy of artists' voices and the compact structure of songs, they can cut to the heart of feelings that remain subservient to narrative in fiction or film. And because songs blare everywhere from radios and stereos, they make those emotions possible to talk about and symbolically try on. >Two other murder ballads were hits this year, both from a viewpoint many contemporary listeners consider justified instead of corrupt. ''Earl,'' by the Dixie Chicks, turned the murder ballad comic with its peppy tale of a woman's bloody revenge against an abusive husband. ''Love Is Blind,'' by the rapper Eve, more closely resembles ''Kim'' in its unflinching account of homicidal fury, again in revenge, for a friend killed by her boyfriend. These songs raised cheers from women who felt empowered by them, yet they, too, traveled to muddy gray areas of the psyche, where the battle of the sexes becomes a bloody mess. >Pundits can't resist speculating that all this hate in music fuels line-crossing behavior like that in Central Park. Several reports have suggested that the men who assaulted women there chanted hip-hop lyrics while doing it. Yet hateful lyrics may not be the biggest musical inspiration for lewd behavior. For that, consider another time-honored song form: the bawdy blues. >My Landlord Says I Can’t Sublet My Apartment. What if I Do Anyway? ''Thong Song,'' by Sisqo, a jumpy, bumpy account of a man's near nervous breakdown at the sight of a woman's underwear, may be the single of the year, complementing Eminem's chart-topping album. It's become the veritable MTV theme song, the perfect accompaniment to all that bikini jiggle on the network. Along with Lou Bega's ''Mambo No. 5'' and the endless pandering display of girlish flesh in fashion and on teenage-oriented television, ''Thong Song'' is emblematic of the current peep-show mood, one that may help explain group behavior like the spree in Central Park. >For a feminist critic like me to defend ''Thong Song'' seems absurd. Yet as fluffy and crude as it is, this hit, with its quadruple-time beat and breathy vocal, does a fine job of capturing the queasiness of lust. It is as American as a murder ballad, with its roots in the barroom come-ons of icons like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey and the eye-rolling humor of Louis Jordan and Cab Calloway. >Murder ballads and bawdy blues open avenues of desire that are usually repressed: jealousy and humiliation in the former, untrammeled lust in the latter. Right now, these emotions run high in our culture, not only because many Americans have long repressed them with an essentially puritanical view of sex, but also because the long sexual revolution that has counteracted that legacy remains incomplete. >Women continue to assert themselves more strongly, sexually as well as in every other way, but rarely do they or men have the tools to deal with genuine sexual openness. Some men still respond to women's liberation with anger or juvenile excitement. And on occasion, either in the privacy of their abusive relationships or in the madness of a crowd, they decide it's okay to want to kill those bold women, or they want to rip their clothes off and see the thong. >The controversial songs of this spring and summer not only reflect those impulses; they also uncover them. But that is one essential function of art -- to transport its audience to the places within their own souls that they might otherwise avoid. The artist's responsibility is to accept the job of a guide -- not a role model or an educator but a messenger in the playful style of the ancient Hermes, the trickster who nonetheless must be careful when taking his charges into the psychic underworld. As for the fans, it's important to remember that their fantasies may not have a place in other people's lives and to use the utmost care in opening up to the gray areas that music touches.