By Brett Anderson | By his own account, Marshall Mathers (aka Slim Shady, aka Eminem), doesn’t even exist. His so-called life is a story that has a beginning ("I was born during an earthquake") but no end, just a big middle section about a white kid raised in a black neighborhood by a mom who he claims did more drugs than him. In real life Eminem is a phenomenon. He’s been embraced by gangsta rap kingmaker Dr. Dre, denounced by Billboard and featured on the cover of Rolling Stone. Still, he raps, "I’m not a real person/I’m a ghost wrapped in a beat."

It’s all fairly dark stuff coming from a rapper whose breakout release, "The Slim Shady LP," is, if you had to pick one word to describe it, funny. In the end, that discord is what makes Eminem’s music breathe. Forget for a moment his rhyme skills and see him as a blond Richard Pryor. His music takes balls -- the genital kind ("I can’t figure out which Spice Girl I wanna impregnate"), the bouncing kind (a lot of his beats sound like they’re attached to rubber bands) and the kind that let you do or say things other people won’t (dreaming about slitting his dad’s throat). On "Guilty Conscience," one of the record’s three Dre collaborations, Eminem even has the guts to tell his mentor to get real, asking his audience, "You gonna take advice from somebody who slapped [TV host] Dee Barnes?"

But, as you may have heard, "The Slim Shady LP" is not entirely a joke fest. Eminem’s most notable skills -- his feel for narrative, his verbal dexterity, his stress-relieving nasal whine -- tend to obscure his confusion about the difference between cutting close to the bone and murder. On the one hand, the rapper’s willingness to lay his own emotions bare is striking; both "If I Had" and "Rock Bottom" are chilling, first-person tales of inner-city strife on par with Ice Cube’s "Dead Homiez." On the other hand, the tone of "It’s My Fault," an account of a woman who eats a lot of mushrooms and ends up dead, is disturbingly jovial.

The gender of the victims in Eminem’s songs is predictable, but calling him a misogynist isn’t enough; "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" is a sick story featuring Eminem, his daughter and his daughter’s mother’s dead body, but it comes from the pen of a guy who’s clearly learned through life (and, let’s be honest, music) that violence is how people respond to feeling scared and angry. Hip-hop, for better and for worse, is about violence as well as race, and with "The Slim Shady LP," Eminem proves that there’s plenty a white kid can say about both.

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The Gourds "Ghosts of Hallelujah"
Allegro Music

By Meredith Ochs | If you read Postcard, the alternative-country Internet discussion group, on the right day, you might walk away with the impression that the Gourds are the second coming of Christ, or at least the late Uncle Tupelo. Participants in online chat groups often describe their favorite bands with the zealous admiration of a fanzine writer. But the fact that the Gourds' two newest members left far more established alt-country groups to join the ragtag Austin quintet (former Tupelo/Wilco multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston had been playing with Freakwater; drummer Keith Langford was in the Damnations TX) indicates that these guys are really onto something.

The Gourds' latest, "Ghosts of Hallelujah," certainly lives up to the band's buzz. It's even better than the two previous unbounded excursions into slackerbilly that landed them a brief stint with Sire. Rather than smooth out their rough edges on "Ghosts," the Gourds raise ragged-but-right to a high art with added instrumentation and melodies that stick to your ribs like okra. The group benefits immensely from the addition of one-man string band Johnston, whose laid-back fiddle, Dobro, banjo and mandolin playing winds around the rootsy guitar crunch and one-octave accordion of Claude Bernard. Obliquely borrowing bits of country, honky-tonk, Delta blues, Cajun and Tex-Mex, the Gourds revisit the creative search and spirit of early roots rockers like the Band much more so than Wilco, which is frequently tagged as the Levon Helm and company of the '90s. Where Wilco openly nod to specific classic albums, the Gourds' songs can be traced further back to loose front-porch jams. As a result, "Ghosts" draws you in with the directness of rural music, but moves at the speed of rock.

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