Eminem's first album must surely be one of the most underpublicised debuts of all time, at least judging by the number of occasions I've seen it claimed that he kicked off with Slim Shady, prior to which there was just some white supremacist stuff which Ray Benzino felt duty bound to tell everyone about. Even accounts which acknowledge the existence of Infinite seem to downplay it as a stumbling ecologically themed demo dating from before our man learned how to say rude words, or even to rhyme them.
It's all bollocks. Infinite sounds very much a product of the era of Mobb Deep and Illmatic with its heavy brooding bass underscoring distant horn riffs - as distinct from the plinky-plonky Munsters themes of the more commercially viable years, despite being the work of the same people. Lyrically, it's a very different affair to Slim Shady, but then the whole point of Slim Shady was it being a character, a persona, even a parody to some extent - which is why not every last Eminem lyric since has been about taking drugs and shagging a farmyard animal. Infinite lacks the headline grabbing novelty and the delight taken in winding you up for the sake of it, but on the other hand, it's really not a massive thematic leap from the sort of more earnest, autobiographical stuff he's been focussing on since he grew out of the Esham influenced material - or at least the material which sounds as though it was influenced by Esham to me.
I love the hits as much as anyone, but this is still his greatest work in my view. The lyrical gymnastics were as spectacular as anything recorded since, and the mood - even more driven and hungry than on the Interscope albums - is crushingly powerful, soulful, funky as fuck, and all the more convincing for the absence of comedy turns to camera.
I really wonder how it all would have panned out for our man had this been the hit it absolutely deserved to be.
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