Why Did The Marshall Mathers LP Blow Up So Fast? The Slim Shady LP Was Not a Flop

MMLP did 1.76 million in a week. The usual story is that it came out of nowhere after a so so debut. The debut was a hit. That is exactly why the sequel exploded.

Ask casual fans about Eminem's rise and you will often hear a version of this: The Slim Shady LP did okay, then The Marshall Mathers LP came out of nowhere and broke records. The second half is true. The first half does not hold up.

The Slim Shady LP numbers

The Slim Shady LP came out on February 23, 1999 through Aftermath and Interscope. It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 with 283,000 copies in its first week, held off the top spot only by TLC's FanMail.

Six weeks later, on April 5, 1999, it was certified platinum. By the end of 1999 it was triple platinum. It went on to spend 100 weeks on the Billboard 200 and reached quadruple platinum in November 2000. In February 2000 it won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and My Name Is won Best Rap Solo Performance.

For a debut from a white rapper out of Detroit that most of the country had never heard of a year earlier, that is not mid. That is a breakout.

This is the single that did it:

The Marshall Mathers LP numbers

Then came May 23, 2000. The Marshall Mathers LP sold 1.76 million copies in its first week in the US. That more than doubled the previous hip hop record, Snoop Dogg's 806,000 for Doggystyle in 1993, and it was the second biggest week of the SoundScan era at the time, behind only NSYNC's No Strings Attached.

It did not slow down. Week two moved more than 800,000. It sold 3.65 million in its first four weeks, sat at No. 1 for eight straight weeks, and finished 2000 with 7.9 million sold. It was later certified Diamond.

So the gap is real. The question is why.

Why the jump happened

1. SSLP built the audience MMLP cashed in. Three million copies in year one is a fanbase waiting for album two, not a ceiling. Sales from a debut like that tell a label the next record can open huge, and they did: label executives were openly speculating before release that Eminem could be the first artist to sell a million copies in a single week.

2. He never left the conversation. Between the two albums Eminem was everywhere. He toured the Warped Tour in 1999, performed on MTV's Total Request Live, and showed up all over Dr. Dre's 2001. Forgot About Dre, released as a single in January 2000, hit No. 25 on the Hot 100 and kept his voice on radio and MTV right up to the MMLP rollout. Fifteen months is a short gap, and he filled all of it.

3. The lead single was bigger. My Name Is peaked at No. 36 on the Hot 100. The Real Slim Shady hit No. 4, his biggest hit at that point, and went No. 1 in the UK. It almost did not exist: the album was finished, Jimmy Iovine felt it had no song to introduce it the way My Name Is had, and Eminem wrote The Real Slim Shady hours before the deadline.

4. Controversy made him unavoidable. SSLP drew criticism and a lawsuit from his mother. MMLP drew GLAAD protests, criticism from Lynne Cheney at a Senate hearing, and talk in Canada of refusing him entry. Every round of outrage put his name in front of people who would never have gone looking for it.

5. The album was stronger. Stan, The Way I Am, Kim, Kill You. MMLP had a deeper set of songs people still argue about 26 years later. Stan alone went No. 1 in the UK and Australia. Hype gets you a first week. The songs got it to Diamond.

The bottom line

The Slim Shady LP was not a modest start that MMLP somehow overcame. It was a multi platinum, Grammy winning debut that turned Eminem from an underground rapper into a celebrity. The Marshall Mathers LP is what happens when that celebrity drops a better album at the exact moment the whole country is watching.

Sources: Wikipedia entries for The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, The Real Slim Shady, Stan, Forgot About Dre and Eminem, citing Billboard, Nielsen SoundScan and RIAA data. Certification levels for both albums have been updated several times since release; figures above reflect the certifications reported at the time.