He continues the technical and thematic pyro show on less-heralded tracks like, “Who Knew.” For that one, he sifts through various American lies with a satirist’s ruthless insight and an architect’s instincts for infrastructure. At the end of his last verse, he pokes fun at people blaming rap lyrics for school shootings, assembling and disassembling vowels, consonants and, critical rhetoric all the while: “How many r***rds’ll listen to me / And run-up in the school shootin’ when they’re pissed at a teac- / -her? Him? Is it you? Is it them? / Wasn’t me, Slim Shady said to do it again!” The part where he breaks up the word teacher to go into a small barrage of finger-pointing is Tony Stark-level re-engineering — flipping twisting and rerouting parts to build new Iron Man tools instantaneously. A micro masterpiece of ingenuity and focus.

And then there’s “Stan.” Jolting and driving across a haunting Dido sample, Em tells a story of the most warped kind of fandom. Developing an obsession with Em, a young man writes a series of increasingly disturbing letters before committing the type of heinous act Eminem imagines on tracks like “’97 Bonnie & Clyde.” Em then concludes the tale with an M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist of an ending, before those became run-of-the-mill in rap music. The track charted fairly well — it peaked at No. 51 on the Hot 100 in an era that was much more difficult for rap to dominate — but its cultural footprint is the astonishing part. In 2017, “Stan,” which had since come to define fans who are irrationally attached to a particular celebrity, was added to the Oxford Dictionary. While his peers were writing rhymes, Em was basically helping rewrite the dictionary.

While Em’s technical accomplishments are… well, accomplished, his cultural analysis is just as compelling. During an era of mass-produced boy bands and hollow moralizing, Em’s verbal defilements spotlighted the U.S.’s hidden absurdities: how could you be worried about fictional violence in a world where we’ve started wars with countries just to take their oil? How could you be mad about sexual content when your acting president is getting head from his intern? In 2002, Bill O’Reilly’s criticism caused Pepsi to take away Ludacris’ sponsorship. Years later, he ironically was forced to settle several sexual harassment lawsuits. These events unfolded after The Marshall Mathers LP hit shelves. But they’re all fruits of the same philosophical asymmetry Em explored in his magnum opus, and they’re largely as true now as they were then. When The Marshall Mathers LP was released, Bill Clinton was our president. Trump is our current one. Like the greatest poets, Em’s best words are both of their era and eternal — a delicate balance struck at the intersection of wit and understanding.

Remarkably, Eminem’s own commercial success accurately reflected both his impact and skill set. This wasn’t a case of an underground wordsmith who could only sell to purists. In its first week of release, The Marshall Mathers LP sold 1.78 million copies. The villain won: The guy who made a song about killing his wife and taking his daughter along for the ride with the body sold more first-week copies than the group that made “I Want It That Way.”

Outselling the Backstreet Boys, of course, also means he was outselling other Best Rapper contenders — by a lot. Jay-Z’s Vol. 3… Life and Times of S. Carter debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, too. But Eminem’s first-week totals nearly quadrupled his. Virtuosic as OutKast’s Stankonia was, Em’s first-week sales more than tripled theirs, too. It more than doubled DMX’s And Then There Was X. Among the other contenders for Best Rapper in the World, only OutKast and Jay-Z come close to matching Eminem’s level of creativity, yet none of them sold more… and there’s a chance none of them meant more. With the Marshall Mathers LP, Em reached apex rap skill. This was a demented Mos Def doing NSYNC numbers. This was something beyond that; this was a reimagining of cultural law.