Now, I’m not the biggest Eminem fan in the world, but I’ll tell you something about this boy from Detroit: He can flat out rhyme. There are no debates in that, there are no rebuttals against the fact that he is one of the greatest rappers to ever grace the microphone. He should very well be in your top 5 of all rappers, simply based off of this one album. When this came out, he was very weird, dark, and controversial with his subject matter that he presented to the general audience. This album is great because it caused a shock wave of rappers coming out with a full-out raw aggression, and it was controversial because of the violent rhymes. As a white rapper, aside from Vanilla Ice, Eminem broke more barriers and proved that he can rap with the best of the black rappers that were out at the time.

Discovered by Dr. Dre, Eminem took on the role of his mentor to pretty much spawn his own men-tees in 50 Cent, D12, Obie Trice, creating Shady records, and creating a movement in hip hop by recently signing powerhouse rap group, Slaughterhouse & another white rapper, Yelawolf. He’s done a lot of the white rappers trying to come up like the aforementioned Yelawolf, Machine Gun Kelly, Bubba Sparxxx (even though he hasn’t been out for a while).

This album is crazy. Enough said. The lyrical genius of Eminem started on his first album, and progressed on towards him being one of the most successful rappers in history, so take in this classic and enjoy it.