It’s happens a lot in our #AlbumCovers series: when looking at the finest album art out there, we inevitably come across landmark records in contemporary music. From The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the album that revolutionised folk music, to Abbey Road, the last record made by the Beatles, and Black Sabbath, the first heavy metal album.

Today is no different. We’re looking at the cover for The Marshall Mathers LP by Eminem, the album that made hip-hop history at the turn of the millennium. Released in 2000, this genre-defining work smashed all sorts of records. It was the fastest-selling rap album with 1.7 million copies bought in the first week. Rolling Stone named it best album of 2000. And with over 25 million sold, The Marshall Mathers LP is one of the most successful albums of all time.

But before we go on, a quick question: when you think of the cover for this record, what comes do mind? The answer you give will depend on your age and where you live. Because The Marshall Mathers LP was released with two covers, each quite different to the other.

Today we tell the tale of these two contrasting covers for the noughties hip-hop classic.

The best-known Marshall Mathers LP cover: Eminem’s childhood home

If your answer to our earlier question was “Eminem sitting outside his house”, you’re in good company. This was the best-known cover for The Marshall Mathers LP, at least in Europe in the early 2000s

Before we dig into the story behind this image, we need a bit of context. Who was Eminem at the turn of millennium?

It’s 2000 and Eminem – the stage name of Marshall Bruce Mathers III – is already among the most famous rappers on the planet and widely seen as “the next big thing”.

His breakthrough came the year before with The Slim Shady LP, an album that shot him to global success. Released in 1999, Eminem’s second record introduced us to Slim Shady, the rapper’s dark and violent alter-ego. So the follow-up, The Marshall Mathers LP, had to show the “real Eminem”. “When I’m at my best is when I’m dumping my true feelings out, not when I’m being funny,” the artist explained in an interview from the era. He went on to claim that the album “showed that you can be true to yourself and not compromise and still be successful”.

That’s why the rapper’s real name, Marshall Mathers,  features in the album’s title, while the cover pictures him sitting in front of the house he grew up in.

The house stands, or rather stood (more on its fate later), on 19946 Dresden Street in north-east Detroit. Nearby is 8 Mile Road, the highway separating the city from the suburbs that lent its name to Eminem’s blockbuster biopic in 2002.

As Eminem explained to an interviewer, one day  he said to himself: “What if I did the cover at my old house sitting on the steps like I used to do?” And that’s how the rapper made his old house famous.

In the same interview, the artist talks about how he felt during the photo shoot behind that old building. “I had mixed feelings because I had a lot of good and bad memories in that house. But to go back to where I grew up and finally say, ‘I’ve made it’, is the greatest feeling in the world to me.”

The other, bleaker cover for The Marshall Mathers LP

The photo of Eminem’s house on The Marshall Mathers LP is a nice thematic fit for many the iconic tracks on the record: they chart his struggle to stay true to himself despite his enormous success, as well his relationship with his family. “Kill You” seethes with hate for his mother and “The Way I Am” hits out at his critics, while “Stan” and “The Real Slim Shady” explore his turbulent relationship with fans and music’s star system.

But pretty much every track on The Marshall Mathers LP also talks about something else (and directly, too): drug abuse. And this is the theme of the other official cover: set against a post-industrial backdrop, it shows Eminem huddled in the foetal position, empty bottles of booze and prescription drugs strewn around him. It’s dark and disturbing, and perhaps less “presentable” to mainstream audiences.

There’s also a link between this cover and the original title for The Marshall Mathers LP: it was supposed to be called Amsterdam, because it was in the Dutch city – with its famously relaxed drugs laws – that Eminem wrote almost all of its tracks.

What happened to the house on The Marshall Mathers LP?

Eminem’s old house isn’t there anymore – it was torn down in November 2013. In its place is bee sanctuary. The only thing that remains from the rapper’s past there is a tree that was once covered with fans’ signatures, but has now been stripped of its bark by souvenir hunters.

But before its demolition, the house once home to a teenage Eminem had an eventful few years. From 2000, it became an iconic landmark thanks to its appearance on the cover of The Marshall Mathers LP. It was also here that Eminem shot some scenes for “The Way I Am” video.

The home was auctioned off in 2013 and in November of the same year Eminem used a picture of the building on the cover for his eighth album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2.

This time, we see 19946 Dresden Street from the front. But the house is uninhabited, the windows boarded up, the garden overgrown with weeds. It seems to represent the very opposite of the American Dream.

As fate would have it, two days after the release of The Marshall Mathers LP 2, a fire broke out at 19946 Dresden Street. Soon afterwards, the city of Detroit demolished the building on public safety grounds. Later, in 2016, Eminem sold 700 bricks from the house to mark the 16th anniversary ofThe Marshall Mathers LP. The bricks were mounted in a plexiglass case, along with a plaque and a new edition of the album. Some of the proceeds went to the Marshall Mathers Foundation, a non-profit that works with at-risk youth in the Detroit suburbs.

That’s how in 2022 the place where Eminem’s childhood home once stood was given a new lease of life by  the beekeepers of Detroit Hives!

From hip-hop masterpiece to a home for bees, many stories lie behind an #albumcover! How did you enjoy the story of the two album covers for Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP? Will it inspire your own art work? Let us know!

Editor’s note
All images used in this article are included for purely informational purposes, in accordance with the right to report and criticise.