Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [13]
You do want a piece of me: Eminem performs at the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts, April 14, 1999.
The forty-first annual Grammy Awards celebrated the music of 1998 and were held in February 1999, weeks before the release of “My Name Is.” The ceremony might well have been a wake: the acts commanding the public eye suggested a mood about to change drastically, a take-over of sensitive diversity so complete that it could only give way to the extremes of teen pop, hardcore rap, and rap-rock. The year of the woman, with females dominating nearly every major award, would be the last for some time. The Grammy for Album of the Year (among others) went to Lauryn Hill for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; Record of the Year and Pop Female Vocal was “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion; Madonna won her first Grammy after sixteen years in the business for Ray of Light, the year’s Best Pop Album; while Sheryl Crow won Rock Album of the Year for The Globe Sessions and Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” took home Best Rock Song and Rock Female Vocal. The Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty took home Best Alternative Music Performance while in the rap categories, Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” and Jay-Z’s Volume 2—Hard Knock Life took home Best Solo and Best Album, respectively. The top grossing films of 1998 were Saving Private Ryan and Armageddon, while the Best Picture Oscar went to Shakespeare in Love. In 1998, the only hint of the coming of Slim Shady consciousness on the big screen was the politically incorrect gross-out opus There’s Something About Mary. Just a year later, tastes sure had changed. Along with the shoe-in box-office monster of the year, Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, Americans flocked to all-things Shady: slapstick, violence, horror, and the pathology of the American family. The top grossing films of 1999 were the creepy ghost story The Sixth Sense, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, The Matrix, and the gritty scarefest The Blair Witch Project. The Oscar for Best Picture that year went to the brilliant, dark, dysfunctional family drama American Beauty. The world was not only ready for Slim Shady, we were looking for him.
In the few previous years, the music world had seen too many heroes die, and with them the idealism inspired by what seemed like transformative revolutions in rock and rap. Kurt Cobain’s death stopped the progress far too early, while hip-hop’s reigning rappers, Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G. and a.k.a. Biggie Smalls), were gunned down in their prime, just as their music could no longer be ignored by the mainstream. Tupac and Biggie Smalls did get covered of course, like so many rappers before them, for the violence that surrounded their lives, deaths, and music. In the face of such real tragedy, record companies’ and consumers’ tastes turned to the positivity of the earthy, female variety as well as the low-calorie sweetener of teen pop. By 2000, the year Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP and *NSYNC released No Strings Attatched—the album that, at 2.5 million, still holds the record for the most albums sold in one week—these two were each other’s foil, the equally popular camps polarizing teen music consciousness: on one side, the coy sexuality and synchronized dance of Britney Spears and company; on the other,