9. Kim
For all his wit, verve and charisma throughout The Marshall Mathers LP, it is on a wave of anger and self-loathing that a lot of the central lyrical themes of the record are carried. Kim was a stark and brutal revenge fantasy in which Eminem murders his cheating wife, Kim, and her lover, as his baby daughter waits in her car-seat for Daddy. It is still horrific to listen to 13 years later. The beats on this track are suitably minimalistic and thudding, while Mathers foregoes a flow in favour of screaming his lines, in the manner of an unhinged soap opera. At one point, where he has finally brought his wife to her final destination and begins to murder her, it is almost possible to visualise his eyes bulging and feel his spittle on your face as he screams, "BLEED, BITCH, BLEED!". One suspects he may have really meant it. I would argue that Mathers revealed the true anger and pain he was feeling at the time of writing the record most in this track, certainly it's one of the tracks from his strongest record that lingers longest in the memory. Remarkably, he remarried Kim after this. Briefly...