Yet the Detroit rapper has spawned a dialogue that dwarfs the album, in size and occasionally in vitriol. And for all the trees that have been sacrified for the sake of the critical battle that has raged as the Grammys approach, neither his defenders nor his detractors have produced much that history will remember.

Instead, Eminem has received the most banal, reactionary responses. Hipper-than-thou music critics mostly like him, but they miss the point. And the feel-good (or at least feel-self-righteous) posturing from gay advocacy groups like GLAAD and Lynne Cheney is even worse. What both groups are unwilling to say is that "The Marshall Mathers LP" is a searing, complex, whirling, grotesque work, and the most deserving Grammy nominee in years.

The chances of Eminem actually getting the record of the year award are roughly nil. (It's doubtful he would have been nominated were it not for new rules that allow a sort of super-committee to override the members' embarrassing nomination omissions.) The work is far too extreme for the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. To vote on the Grammys you have to be a professional record-maker in some capacity -- and a member of NARAS. Despite some outreach campaigns in recent years and occasional, almost accidental recognition of an important artist or two, the group is still overly influenced by the old-school worlds of classical and bland pop.

The music critics are almost uniformly right: This is a great work, and Marshall Mathers/Eminem/Slim Shady is a huge talent. Dr. Dre's production is typically adamantine -- beats and vocals hit hard. Eminem's irresistible hooks and chants stick in your head. And the rapper's sheer verbal power marks every song with off-kilter rhymes, in-jokes, contradictions and insults.

Unfortunately, they've been right for all the wrong reasons. Most of the early reviews called the record a "guilty pleasure," or pointed out particularly sharp references or jokes. One Eminem slam, directed at Christina Aguilera and Carson Daly of MTV's "Total Request Live," was reported nearly everywhere.

The rest of the time, the critics have tried to explain away the most obvious parts of the record: its misogyny and its homophobia. Take this, from Dimitry Leger in last week's Village Voice annual Pazz & Jop Critic's Poll, which called "The Marshall Mathers LP" the fourth-best record of the year:

"Eminem didn't hate more fags or promise to kill more bitches on his latest album than the average credible gangsta rapper does per verse. Critics who fail to hold black rappers to the same moral standard will henceforth appear to be on some very uncool and outdated shit."

The most irritating rock-crit tendency -- the desire to appear risky even though you're 27 and have an M.A. from Brown -- was replayed in almost every review. Worse, the tone of these reviews was almost always halting, begrudging, guilty or pained.

And sometimes, the criticisms were painful themselves. At what might have been the lowest point of the yearlong Eminem controversy, Michael Greene, president of NARAS, wrote a dense, blockheaded defense of the album's status as "the voice of rebellion."

This is odd. "The Marshall Mathers LP" is not a pleasant listen. The music is little more than a mnemonic device, its halting, spare beat the perfect complement to the rapper's irritating persona. He's the high school classmate from hell. To use that oft-repeated verse, Eminem resorted to attacking lite pop music with "shit, Christina better switch me chairs/So I can sit next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst/and listen to 'em argue over which one she gave head to first." Any hip-hop fan would recognize that the line is not particularly offensive, particularly trenchant or particularly funny.

When the album is not being tragic and scary, as in "Kim," the song where Eminem imagines killing his ex-wife (again) and "Stan," where he talks to an obsessive fanboy, it's just being dumb. Eminem admits as much, in "The Real Slim Shady," the album's most popular song:

I'm like a headtrip to listen to
Cause I'm only giving you
Things you joke about with your friends inside your living room
The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y'all
And I don't gotta be false or sugarcoated at all

Well, maybe you don't. But maybe you did. Or you know, or live with, or were raised with or went to school with someone whose idea of humor is:

At 13 I was putting shells in the gauge on the shelf
I used to get punked and bullied on my block
Till I cut a kitten's head off
And stuck it in this kid's mailbox ("I'm Back")

Maybe there is a little Slim Shady in all of us. I know there is in me, and I suspect there is in you.

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