1. Eminem - Stan (2000)

It was a regular day in a brand new millennium, and I was driving my car on some daily routine, when a new song came out of the radio. It started with a female singer who affected a melancholic atmosphere, but just as I turned into the highway, she was revealed as a sample, and the record changed into rap. I immediately recognized Eminem, and it didn't take me long to realize what it is I'm hearing. I already heard that Eminem has a track on his new album that is about an obsessive fan who takes his adulation to him too far, and I heard it is something special, but I didn't know the exact details. I kept on listening, and the drama kept pouring out of the radio and creeping slowly up my spine, penetrating like million ants under my skin, suffocating my breath. I was on the highway, but I had to take the right lane and keep to a 70KMH speed until the record ended - I was almost paralyzed. And to this day, when I hear this record, I get the shivers.

Eminem is chiefly responsible for one of the major revolutions in pop history. Up to him, hip-hop was black music, which dealt with things from an African-American perspective. Once Eminem showed up, hip-hop usurped rock and became the center of the pop world, the premier language of youngsters all over the globe. This also compelled hip-hop to develop a more elaborate language, and Eminem led the change, turning every record into a drama where several voices talk with one another. He had the amazing theatrical and poetic ability to make it convincing, and still make it all sound like a regular pop record. He divided himself into three main entities: Marshall Mathers, the identity with which he was born in a Detroit slum, suffered a hard childhood and continues to live a problematic existence; Eminem, his pop persona, who strives to represent hip-hop with pride; and Slim Shady, a devilish prankster who is also the representation of his dark side. Employing these three characters, Eminem dealt with all the contradictions in his position: a white man who has to contend in a black world, and on the other hand represents the white world in which the blacks have to contend; a musician who has a lot of love and respect for his genre, but on the other hand takes part in its incorporation by the mainstream; and a street rapper who must maintain his tough image, and on the other hand a person with a conscience who realizes the immorality and futility prevalent in street culture. In that way, and with his extraordinary poetic ability, Eminem managed to penetrate the masking and phoniness of political-correctness, and expose the hypocrisy in the values of "enlightened" society; to take the violent, homophobic and chauvinistic language of the streets and turn it back on itself; to discuss the problems arising from hip-hop's new position; and all that time to deal frankly with what was going on in his own life and spirit. For a while, he was the most moral and humanistic voice in America.

Many people did not appreciate the mirror he put in front of their faces, and wrote studious and moronic articles about his corrupting effect on the youth. But there was nothing in these articles which Eminem did not discuss himself, and in a much more intelligent and compelling manner. And this record is the perfect showcase, exposing Marshall Mathers' fear that a day will come when the words splattered by Slim Shady will come back to haunt him and his conscience. This is a fear which every artist that explores the darker sides of the human soul has to deal with, but no one, in any art form, has ever expressed it so powerfully.