In addition to skewering Mr. Bush in his signature diatribe quizzes, this author recently published The George W. Bush Quiz Book , a compendium of damning facts, unflattering observations and incoherent Bushian locutions. He has also just started a Web site (www.StampOutBush.com) that sells self-inking rubber stamps with what he calls "delightfully scathing anti-Bush messages."

Mystery guest, enter! The author's name is Paul Slansky.

He is me.

But he, while driven by the cold anger of the righteous, is nevertheless sufficiently detached to take my hard-hitting questions and-unlike some other interviewees who respond to questions on big airplanes, on Texas ranches and from behind Presidential seals-respond in English.

Q: What motivates your crusade against George W. Bush?

A: Thank you for asking! So many do. But I know I can confide in you. The answer, as if you didn't know, is outrage, despair and incredulity. Outrage that someone who wasn't actually elected-and who wouldn't be in office if Al Gore's representatives had thought to demand a recount of the Florida over-votes instead of the under-votes-has managed in just four years to lay waste to so much of what it took his predecessors 225 years to build. Despair that my 6-year-old daughter is going to have to bear the burden for Bush's unprecedented incompetence. And incredulity that fully half of the electorate seems disinclined to hold him or that gang of James Bond villains around him accountable for anything.

Q: Congratulations on your icy rationality. Still, none of this is happening in a vacuum. Given his record, why is Bush doing as well as he is?

(The tape could not capture the withering stare this question elicited.)

A: One hates to see one's fellow citizens as lazy, over-entertained gluttons for punishment, but a Bush victory in November will preclude reaching any other conclusion. As Bush just said the other day in New Hampshire, great question! Because the Democrats, with embarrassingly few exceptions, have sat by wordlessly while, in any area you examine-the economy, the environment, foreign affairs, you name it-he has made us more polarized and less secure. Imagine what would happen to a Democratic President with an identical record to Bush's! What would Republicans do to a President who received that Aug. 6, 2001, briefing warning of impending attacks against America and didn't even bother to cut his vacation short? They'd eviscerate him.

Q: Don't you think you're being a little rough?

A: I'm being a sweetheart! Not only have these pathetic wusses failed to register any kind of effective protest, but now the Kerry campaign is minimizing the difference between him and Bush. Knowing what he knows now, Kerry would still have voted for Bush's war in Iraq? Who believes that? Huh? And if you do believe it, why would you support him?

And there's this Swift boat grotesquerie. If Kerry can't defend his Vietnam heroics against a guy who used his rich-kid connections to beat the draft and then couldn't be bothered to show up for National Guard duty, mightn't a swing voter legitimately wonder how he'd defend us against real trouble?

Q: You're getting a little loud. What should Kerry be doing?

A: He should fire Bob Shrum NOW. Then bring in James Carville, the only Democratic operative in 20 years with the smarts and bloodlust to win. Bush is pulling ahead.

Q: You know, you're a little tough to take. Most commentators say their antipathy is political, not personal, but you don't seem to be saying that.

A: You are a genius.

Q: What is it about George W. Bush that so repels you?

A: Try these on for size: ignorance, arrogance and intransigence. The thing I find most preposterous about the public's perception of George W. Bush is this idea that he's a "nice guy." When he was a kid, Bush blew up frogs with firecrackers. In college, he branded fraternity pledges with hot wire hangers. At 40, he cursed out The Wall Street Journal 's Al Hunt in front of the man's wife and 4-year-old son.

Q: But his politics ….

A: Oh, his politics! Certainly his policies-his largesse to the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, his hostility to the environment, his scorn for the Bill of Rights, his indifference about health care, his obstructionism towards medical advances, his recklessness with the lives of American soldiers-don't seem very "nice."

Q: Please sit down ….

A: His cocky strut embodies his sense of superiority and entitlement. His voice drips with condescension and contempt. His facial expressions range all the way from a smirk to a sneer. What am I missing here? Where's all the "niceness?"

Q: I see here that you started a "Stamp Out Bush" Web site.

A: You read my mind. Would you like the address, perchance? It's www.StampOutBush.com.

Q: How clever of you!

A: Anyone can be very clever next to this guy. I love the idea of people stamping anti-Bush messages on checks they write, envelopes they mail, business cards they hand out, magazine covers in doctors' offices, ads in buses and subways-in short, on anything ink can dry on that others will see. I've heard that some people are even using them on money, though of course defacing currency is illegal. I guess it depends on what the definition of "defacing" is.

Q: May I ask which one is your favorite stamp?

A: Hmmm … hmmm …. I'm especially fond of "BUSH AND CHENEY: THE EVIL OF TWO LESSERS," "GEORGE W. BUSH: UNITING THE WORLD AGAINST US," and "FUNNY STORY-ACTUALLY, GOD HATES GEORGE W. BUSH," suggested by friends of mine. And my daughter's humble submission has an elegant simplicity that appeals to me, and evidently to others as well. "GEORGE W. BUSH IS A MEAN MAN" is currently my fourth biggest seller.

Q: Mr. Slansky, I think our time is up.

A: If things go badly in November, it sure is.

Thirty-three years later, as the Stones roll into town for a series of shows at Madison Square Garden (Sept. 26), Giants Stadium (Sept. 28) and Roseland Ballroom (Sept. 30), it's an interesting notion to contemplate.

Think about it. What if the band had never made it home from Altamont? There'd be no Sticky Fingers , no Exile on Main Street , no Some Girls . The world would never have heard "It's Only Rock & Roll," "Memory Motel," "Start Me Up" or "Saint of Me," or seen the videos for "Waiting on a Friend" or "Love Is Strong."

Keith Richards wouldn't have developed the grizzled visage of a Navajo shaman, Charlie Watts wouldn't have begun to bald like a Franciscan friar, and neither of them would have gotten strung out on smack. Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman wouldn't have left the band, and goofy Ron Wood would never have had the opportunity to join.

As for Mick Jagger, well, he would have never grown the jowls of a St. Bernard, or married a Nicaraguan socialite or a horse-faced Texan model. His last relationship would have been with Marianne Faithfull. He never would have sung "Star Star" (a.k.a. "Starfucker") in concert while straddling that ridiculous inflatable phallus, or run around onstage in jogging clothes, or released any of those horrible solo albums. And Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner would never have given five stars to his buddy Mr. Jagger's most recent onanistic effort, Goddess in the Doorway -the album that Mr. Richards has been making a point of calling Dogshit in the Doorway whenever the media is listening.

If the Rolling Stones had ceased to exist in 1969, the last song on their last studio album would have been "You Can't Always Get What You Want." "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses" would have been released posthumously.

Of course, there would be studio outtakes and demos to be released down the line, but the core of the Stones aural legacy would be limited to the 22 records-that's counting greatest-hits compilations as well as both the U.S. and U.K. versions of some releases-that represent the band's output between 1963 and 1969. Those albums were recently remastered and reissued by ABKCO Music-the label owned by the band's former manager, Allen B. Klein-and a month spent listening to these sonically superior CD's reminded me of what an incredible body of work the Stones laid down in their first seven years as a band. As good as the best of the post-60's Stones would be, if this ABKCO catalog was all there ever was, it would still be rock 'n' roll's defining legacy.

The British Invasion was about six months old when the Rolling Stones hit America in June 1964. The Beatles had already placed eight songs in the Top 10, and the Dave Clark Five, the Searchers and a few others had all hit the Top 20.

Yet for all the excitement, it was an extremely safe incursion. The bands all wore jackets and ties on stage, and though everybody's hair was a little long, no one-not even, at this point, John Lennon-was looking for trouble.

The Stones' first American television appearances slyly subverted these tidy notions. They appeared twice on The Hollywood Palace , where stupid jokes were made at their expense by host Dean Martin, and once on WPIX's Clay Cole Show . I saw them all, but it's the Clay Cole appearance that I won't forget. Mr. Jagger performed in jeans and a pullover-it could have been a sweatshirt or a sweater, but whatever it was, it looked even grubbier on my small black-and-white set. His outfit screamed "Fuck you!" to everyone who thought a proper gent got dressed up to perform.

And then there was the music. Unless you came of age in this period, chances are you're unaware of the pre-"Satisfaction" Stones era, during which they covered everything from R&B to soul to hard-core Chicago blues, Marvin Gaye to Solomon Burke to Willie Dixon. No white guys ever played black music better-and no matter what artist's lyrics Mr. Jagger was singing, he always put his own undeniable imprint on them.

At a time when the Beatles were riding the charts with "P.S. I Love You," the Stones' sound was anti-pop: aggressive, intense and nasty-a rawer version of Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, with the relentless beat driven home by raging guitars, wailing harmonica and, most of all, Mr. Jagger's cocky, arrogant, lewd voice.

As I watched Mick Jagger leering into Clay Cole's camera, flapping his huge wet lips and singing "I Just Want to Make Love to You," my mother stood in the bedroom doorway watching me watching the Stones. Eventually, she called out for my father to join her.

I was thrilled. Teenagers-particularly teenage boys-are an angry lot. They're confused and embarrassed by the chemical changes their bodies are going through. They're increasingly aware of how imperfect the world is, and how harshly the world can judge their own imperfections.

In short, they're pissed off . And it's not enough to tell their parents about it. They need to make them feel the way they do, experience their rage and revulsion, and the time-honored way to do this is to embrace that which their parents fear and hate.

There was nothing about the Rolling Stones that said "Love me," and for that-and for the looks of horror that these surly hooligans put on my parents' faces-I instantly and passionately loved them.

Like all the great, prolific groups of the 60's, the Stones put out three or four great singles a year and managed to fill sides of albums with great tracks. But it was the singles that kept them vital. Every three or four months, they put out a little artistic bulletin about where they were at exactly that moment in time, and how everything they were listening to-which was the same stuff we were listening to-was affecting them creatively.

As a result, the singles became events. The first time I heard "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was when the band world-premiered it on Shindig in 1965. As I recall, they played it under the closing credits, which meant the show faded to black before the Stones did, but I still knew that this was the best rock 'n' roll song I'd ever heard. I still think so today, though "Honky Tonk Women," Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" and Eminem's "Stan" are pretty damn close.

It all peaked in 1969. Despite the loss of the brilliant but drug-addicted Brian Jones, who left the band and quickly drowned, the Stones recorded "Honky Tonk Women" and released Let It Bleed . Mick Taylor joined the band, they toured the States, they recorded "Brown Sugar" and "Wild Horses." Then they put a cherry on top with a free concert at the Altamont Speedway.

If your introduction to the Rolling Stones was "Miss You" or "Start Me Up," or even "Tumbling Dice," you'd already missed almost everything by the time you found them. These 60's CD's are the best opportunity you'll have to be there then. Or, if you were there then, to be there again.

The quantity of quality songs is pretty astonishing. Out of 180 tracks, more than half are just plain great. And yes, the label's claims that the remastering has greatly improved the sound quality are justified-the analog warmth of the original albums is back, and supposedly they'll sound even better on an SACD player, which no one I know has yet. Anyway, the CD's that we were urged to buy in the 80's because they sounded so much better than our records have now been upgraded to sound as good as our records.

Unfortunately, what these albums make up for in sound, they lack in packaging. The CD's come in digipaks with no booklets and almost no information-an extremely shoddy effort given the scale and importance of this reissue.

Still, these are must-have albums. Not all of them-several are redundant, and one or two are even rather bad-but the true rock fan is going to spend upwards of $200 on these, and that's with deep discount pricing.

Here's what to buy to get what you need:

· The Rolling Stones (1964), 12 x 5 (1964), The Rolling Stones, Now! (1965), Out Of Our Heads -U.K. version (1965). The eponymous debut is widely believed to be the best first album any band ever put out, but each of these early collections of mostly cover versions have several must-have tracks that are unavailable elsewhere, among them (but by no means limited to) Slim Harpo's "I'm a King Bee," Rufus Thomas' "Walking the Dog," Chuck Berry's "Around and Around," Bo Diddley's "Mona," Don Covay's "Mercy, Mercy" and Larry Williams' "She Said Yeah," a 90-second-long buzz saw of pure punk energy that summed up the Ramones' entire career a decade before it started.

· Aftermath -U.K. version (1966), Between The Buttons -U.K. version (1967). Twenty-six tracks between them, all written by Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards, and even the tracks I'd thought were B's back then seem like A's in the context of what's out now. "Mother's Little Helper," "Stupid Girl," "Lady Jane" and "Under My Thumb" are just the first four tracks on Aftermath , and Buttons is an equally strong, if less familiar, collection, with "Miss Amanda Jones" and the gorgeous waltz "Back Street Girl" among the highlights.

· Flowers (1967). Almost everything on this album is available elsewhere, but damn it, you still need it for "Ride On, Baby" and "Sittin' on a Fence."

· Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967). I had such a strong memory of the trippy-dippy garbage on this Sgt. Pepper –influenced album that I was surprised to find that there are also things on it that rock harder than anything on the current A.O.R. charts. Still, even with "2000 Man" and its prescience about cybersex ("I am having an affair with a random computer"), only the completists need this.

· Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969). On the first you'll find "Sympathy for the Devil," "Street Fighting Man," "Stray Cat Blues" and "Salt of the Earth." On the second, you have "Gimme Shelter," "Let It Bleed," "Midnight Rambler" and "You Can't Always Get What You Want." These two albums represent the Stones at their creative peak.

· Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! (1970). The Stones at their live peak.

· Metamorphosis (1975). An uninspired collection of demos and inferior alternate versions released by ABKCO to cash in on that year's Stones tour. Still, completists will need "I'm Going Down," a raucous outtake from the Let It Bleed sessions.

· The Rolling Stones Singles Collection: The London Years (1989). A three-CD set with every single and B-side released in the U.S. and the U.K., almost all of them in mono. "It's All Over Now," "The Last Time," "Get Off of My Cloud," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Paint It Black," "Jumpin' Jack Flash"-everything you can think of is here, along with plenty of underrated gems like the ominous "Tell Me," the cacophonous "We Love You," the crazed "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby, Standing in the Shadow?" and the sinister "Memo From Turner." As for Hot Rocks (1972) and More Hot Rocks (1973), you only need them if you want stereo versions of the hits. Completists note: More Hot Rocks has several otherwise unavailable early R&B covers.

· You definitely don't need Got Live if You Want It! (1966), a horrible recording from the days when rock concerts lasted about half an hour and you couldn't hear the music over the screaming of the fans. Also superfluous are Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) (1966), Through The Past Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2) (1969), December's Children (and Everybody's) (1965) and the American versions of Out of Our Heads , Aftermath and Between the Buttons .

I remember reacting very badly at the time to that Nik Cohn quote, certain that the Stones' early demise would deprive us of a huge treasure trove of great music to come. And, as I'd expected, they have continued to give me enormous pleasure. O.K., Some Girls was their last great album, but there have been enough good tracks over the last quarter-century to keep me interested.

They exist in the culture now not as a vital creative force but as late-night TV-monologue fodder, aging men-grandfathers and a future knight, for God's sake-whose wizened visages peer at us now not from the cover of Rolling Stone but Fortune : "Inside Rock's Billion-Dollar Band."

But these ABKCO CD's re-create that fleeting period when the Stones mattered. On these albums they will always be bad boys, playing the purest and dirtiest rock 'n' roll ever made. Unlike The Picture of Dorian Gray , the Stones themselves get older, but this music stays forever young.

If you're one of those people who thinks the Strokes or the White Stripes or the Hives or the Vines is the hot new thing, and you are not intimately familiar with these early Stones albums, I envy you. You still have the discovery of the quintessentially timeless hot new thing to look forward to.

A Case for Neko

Listening to Neko Case's fine new album, Blacklisted (Bloodshot), is a lot like watching a David Lynch movie. The images and music that Ms. Case creates are as enigmatic as they are cinematic, and often laced with dread and danger. The album's opening track is "Things That Scare Me," and it's a theme that seems to run through this album. On that first track, a stormy swirl of guitar, banjo and snare drum, she sings that she's "hunted by American dreams," but Ms. Case also seems haunted by death, relationships, girlhood and the scary specter of lost youth.

The album's high point comes early on "Deep Red Bells," which seems to be some sort of a hymn for a murder victim. It's hard to tell-Ms. Case is rarely literal but always vivid. In the first verse, she describes a hand print as looking "a lot like engine oil, and tastes like being poor and small / And Popsicles in summer." It's a haunting image that takes on darker connotations as the song unfolds: "Who's left to suffer long without you? / Does your soul cast about like an old paper bag?" Ms. Case sings as the ghostly wail of a pedal-steel guitar and the dark throb of a baritone guitar compete in the background. "Past empty lots and early graves of those like you who've lost their way / Murdered on the interstate / While the red bells rang like thunder."

These lyrics benefit from Ms. Case's striking clarion voice, which sounds like a deeper, steelier version of Tammy Wynette's, minus the cornpone Southern inflections. It's particularly resonant on the chorus of "Deep Red Bells," where Ms. Case empties her alveoli in a way that's both sexy and scary-just like the song.

Though this is Ms. Case's third album, it's the first in which she wrote or co-wrote all but two of the 14 songs. Here's hoping she writes again. In the meantime, she'll be performing tracks from Blacklisted at the Bowery Ballroom on Sunday, Sept. 29, with her band, Her Boyfriends. It should be one night that The Sopranos won't have a monopoly on the seductive dark side of the human experience.

-Frank DiGiacomo

And sometime in the past couple of years, you had your Eminem moment. Maybe it was on the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards when he sang "Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" while leading a swarm of look-alikes into Radio City Music Hall. Maybe, as in my case, it was his performance of "Stan" with Elton John on the 2001 Grammys. Or maybe, as it occurred with more than a dozen of my friends, someone who'd just found him turned you on to what you'd been missing.

Whatever. Chances are that you're a little uneasy about your Eminem enthusiasm and that you don't share this guilty pleasure indiscriminately, lest someone who still dismisses him as an obscene lout will think you insane.

You're not. For the rock 'n' roll generation, Eminem, né Marshall Mathers III, is the most compelling figure to have emerged from popular music since the holy trinity of Dylan, Lennon and Jagger. There should be no stigma attached to being an Adult Who Loves Eminem. Besides, as my sitcom-writing friend Danny Zuker said, "We're actually the perfect fans for him, because we're the least likely to shoot up a school after listening to him."

As the man himself points out in his infectious new hit, "Without Me," the airwaves felt empty without him. But the wait is over and the results are as thrilling as they are unsettling. The Eminem Show (Interscope) is Eminem's third great album in 40 months-an astonishing output comparable to the peak creative bursts of the Beatles, the Stones and Dylan-and the only one you'll need to get through the summer.

Statistically speaking, this album should have been a disappointment. Right now, Eminem's the biggest star in music, his first movie, the Curtis Hanson–directed 8 Mile , about an Eminem-like white rapper, is slated to be released in November, and he's got more money than all of his ancestors put together had in their whole lives. History tells us that all of these should be working like opiates on Eminem, dulling his rage and his wit and his connection to the griminess of real life.

But the great thing-for us, not for him-is that, despite all of his good fortune, Eminem is still pissed off. His greatest joy-besides his daughter Hailie Jade-is his ability, as he says on the new album, to get "under your skin like a splinter."

Eminem, with his ego so big it needs two alters, has three singers in his band. In "Without Me," nasal-voiced Slim Shady boasts about his return to save music from terminal blandness. "Now let's go, give me the signal / I'll be there with a whole list full of new insults," he raps. And the song, with its retro-disco beat, slinky sax and hilariously self-aware lyrics, actually does come to the rescue, creating something you're actually excited to hear on the radio.

Then there's "White America," the pounding punk/metal anthem that blasts open the album. Eminem takes the lead on this one, a thundering rant defending freedom of speech, and what more fun way to do that than to shout about burning the flag and pissing on the White House lawn, and, oh, "Fuck you, Ms. Cheney"?

It's not Eminem's fault that the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate culture he grew up with was such a moral sewer of cynicism, sensationalism and exploitation that he now has to ratchet up the outrageousness to Grand Guignol levels to get us to pay attention.

Referring to the F.C.C.'s recently aborted effort to fine a radio station for playing his music, Eminem gloats, "And now they're sayin' I'm in trouble with the government, I'm lovin' it, I shoveled shit all my life / and now I'm dumping it!" Great rock stars have been pushing the envelope for 50 years now, but I can't recall anyone with Eminem's popularity getting more of a kick out of giving the world the finger.

"I love pissin' you off," he says on "Soldier," "it gets me off, like my lawyers, when the fuckin' judge lets me off." And it amazes him how effortless it is. "Don't you people see I'm just saying shit to fucking get a rise out of you?" he said a while back. "You're letting me win!"

But "White America" is more than just a verbal Molotov cocktail. The song is also an astute self-assessment of who Eminem is in the culture, how he got there, who his fans are, and why he's a threat: "See the problem is I speak to suburban kids who otherwise woulda never knew these words exist / whose moms probably woulda never gave two squirts of piss, till I created so much motherfuckin' turbulence / straight out the tube, right into your living rooms I came, and kids flipped when they knew I was produced by Dre / That's all it took, and they were instantly hooked right in, and they connected with me too because I looked like them."

Critics who complain about Eminem's relentless self-obsession are missing the point. Translating what it's like to be him into the metaphors he can communicate to the world is exactly where the art comes in. The more personal he makes his work, the more universal it becomes. Because he's so damned interesting to himself, he becomes interesting to us.

"Most people, you ask them what's going on in their life and they say, 'Oh, nothing much,'" said writer Steve Radlauer. "And they mean it. Eminem can't believe how much is going on in his life, he's reveling in the details, like a great political writer analyzing a great election, or Calvin Trillin writing about parking a car in Manhattan. It's a great sociological work-in-progress."

There is, in this new album, a subtle effort to reposition himself as more of a soldier in the culture wars, and less of a misogynistic, homophobic wack job. It's not entirely successful. The graphic song about venereal disease, "Drips"-as if the world needed one of those-is so naked in its need to shock that it manages to offend only with its witlessness. And his seeming hatred for the entire female gender, save for his daughter, is hard to take.

Still, he's trying. Eminem's first album featured the song "97' Bonnie & Clyde," about taking his daughter along on an errand to dump her mother's body in a lake. The second album had the prequel, "Kim," as harrowing a blast of murderous rage-"Now bleed! Bitch, bleed!"-as pop music has produced. Its intensity made the Stones' "Midnight Rambler" sound like a poseur's nursery rhyme. Even Eminem, who sports a tattoo on his stomach that's addressed to his ex-wife-"KIM R.I.P. (ROT IN PIECES)"-has said he doesn't listen to it anymore.

On the new album, there's no song about killing Kim, though there are a few references to coming close. Ah, progress.

There's such a variety of musical genres and such a barrage of verbiage on The Eminem Show that it will take weeks to absorb it all. My current choice for funniest line is this depiction in "Superman" of a post-coital moment with a groupie: "First thing you say, 'I'm not fazed, I hang around big stars all day / I don't see what the big deal is anyway, you're just plain old Marshall to me' / Oooh yah girl run that game, 'Hailie Jade, I love that name / Love that tattoo, what's that say? "Rot In Pieces," uh, that's great.'"

"There's so much 'meta' in Eminem," said writer Fred Schruers. "He's always examining the reception he's getting." "As he sings on "Without Me," "Feel the tension soon as someone mentions me."

The best song on the album is "Cleaning Out My Closet." Marshall Mathers sings this one, and the track's deceptively pretty melody and chorus-"I'm sorry, Mama, I never meant to hurt you"-provides the counterpoint to the artist's ultimate fuck-you to the inadequate mother whose refusal to "admit you was wrong" keeps his rage white-hot.

"And Hailie's getting so big now, you should see her, she's beautiful / But you'll never see her, she won't even be at your funeral," Mr. Mathers sings. "How dare you try to take what you didn't help me to get / You selfish bitch, I hope you fuckin' burn in hell for this shit. / Remember when Ronnie died and you said you wished it was me? / Well, guess what, I am dead. Dead to you as can be."

Whew!

On an up note, the same song recounts the June 2000 incident in which Eminem was arrested for pistol-whipping a guy he caught kissing his wife outside a Detroit nightclub. Occurring as it did mere days after his last CD, The Marshall Mathers LP set first-week sales records on its way to going octuple platinum, the episode appeared to be one of those self-destructive acts that an angry man might commit in the wake of phenomenal success, but on "Cleaning Out My Closet," Marshall, who was sentenced to two years of probation as a result of the encounter, reveals a nascent ability to protect himself from himself: "What I did was stupid, no doubt it was dumb / but the smartest shit I did was take the bullets out of that gun. / Cuz I'da killed 'em, shit I would have shot Kim an' him both / This's my life, I'd like to welcome y'all to The Eminem Show."

As he sings on "Superman," Eminem isn't interested in being a man of steel. Our best artists are never perfect people, and so we must deal with the duality-or in Eminem's case, the plurality of personae. Yes, he's a misogynist, and he has valid things to say. You know, like O.J. is guilty and there are corrupt cops.

The culture police would have us believe that Eminem is telling kids, "Take drugs, drive drunk, kill, rape, maim," but actual listening reveals a far more moral, almost poignant, message: Parents, do your goddamn job.

As he says in "Who Knew": "Don't blame me when li'l Eric jumps off of the terrace / You shoulda been watchin' him-apparently you ain't parents."

Granted, he's not doing anything to make our jobs easier, but he'd say that he raised himself, he helped raise his half-brother Nathan, he's raising Hailie Jade. Our kids are not his concern.

So, how did we aging boomers find him? While my wife Liz and I pride ourselves on having kept up with music into middle age, the birth of our daughter Grace in 1998 reduced our listening hours drastically. We wallowed in parenthood, blissfully oblivious to Eminem's march on pop culture. After three years of Teletubbies and Barney and Blue's Clues , we were craving something with a bit more edge.

And then, there it was, on the Grammys, of all places, Eminem performing "Stan": "Dear Slim, I wrote you but you still ain't callin' / I left my cell, my pager, and my home phone at the bottom / I sent two letters back in autumn / You must not have got 'em."

The combination of the song itself-has there ever been, in any medium, a truer portrait of a deranged fan?-and the intensity of Eminem's delivery was revelatory. I fell in love-note to Mr. Mathers: not that way, dawg-like I had only once before, on the Saturday afternoon in 1964 when I first saw the Rolling Stones, on WPIX's Clay Cole Show .

I bought both of his CD's the next day and drove around all afternoon immersed in the giddy experience of being completely entertained. The Marshall Mathers LP dazzled with its brilliant five-song exegesis on celebrity-"Kill You," "Stan," "Who Knew," "The Way I Am" and "The Real Slim Shady"-that may be the greatest kickoff of any album ever. But its predecessor, The Slim Shady LP , was equally impressive in the way it showed how the numbing pain of poverty-"That's rock bottom / When you feel like you've had it up to here / 'Cause you mad enough to scream but you sad enough to tear," Eminem sings on "Rock Bottom"- leads inevitably to a certain nihilism in "If I Had": "If I had one wish / I would ask for a big enough ass for the whole world to kiss."

By nightfall I was on the phone proselytizing about this great new thing I'd discovered two years late. My friend Mr. Zuker, a father of three, was relieved. "I'm so glad to hear this," he said, "because I've been driving around listening to Eminem for months now, and I thought I was having my midlife crisis."

Within days I'd tracked down a half dozen bootlegs compiling all of the guest raps, soundtrack contributions and independent label releases that made up the rest of his output. On an obscure track called "Any Man," I found this rhyme: "I strike a still pose and hit you with some ill flows / That don't even make sense, like dykes using dildos."

The song ended: "Somethin', somethin', somethin', somethin' I get weeded / My daughter scribbled over that rhyme, I couldn't read it."

Given the precious little that most people bring to their celebrity status, Eminem's talents are enormous. Start with the writing: the attention to detail, the musician's ear for the rhythms of exactly how people talk, the way it can take you by surprise and make you laugh out loud, often at something horrific, as when the self-loathing star mocks the notion of being anyone's role model: "I got genital warts and it burns when I pee / Don't you wanna grow up to be just like me?," he sings on "Role Model" "I'll tie a rope around my penis and jump from a tree / You probably wanna grow up to be just like me!!!"

Beyond the words are the beats. Being so closely identified with Dr. Dre, the Phil Spector of Hip-Hop, Eminem's own natural musicality has been hugely underrated. On The Eminem Show , Dre produced three tracks. Eminem produced or co-produced 12, and the album sounds great.

And beyond his talent are his balls. His stuff was political, if not politically correct, from the start, because his main subject was poverty and what's more political than that? But the mini-Armageddons that officially ushered in the new millennium have blown us back to the late 60's: The country is "at war," whatever that means, and a kid-as well as that kid's parents-would have to be stupid to assume that the administration couldn't resume the draft, like, yesterday if they wanted to. Someone has to remind everyone that we still have freedom of speech here, that it's the bedrock of everything else the country claims to be and stand for, and that questioning the government-or using profanity-is not unpatriotic.

And here that someone is, spitting contempt for those elders so undeserving of respect, declaring himself, as he does in "Square Dance," not just willing but eager to "ambush this Bush administration, mush the Senate's face in, push this generation / of kids to stand and fight for the right to say something you might not like."

Who was this Marshall Mathers III? How was it that this guy who had probably listened to very little, if any, Dylan seemed to be channeling the same absurdist/protest muses?

An hour on the Web filled in the blanks: Born to 17-year-old mom in 1972. Instantly abandoned by Dad, Marshall Mathers II. Spent childhood ping-ponging between Kansas City and Detroit with mom and her mood swings. Always the new kid in school, always getting beaten up. After a particularly rough encounter, wound up comatose.

Best friend was mom's teenage brother, Uncle Ronnie, whose not inconsiderable contribution to the world, before committing suicide, was turning Marshall on to rap.

Had extremely volatile relationship with girlfriend Kim-whom he eventually married and soon divorced-the mother of his beloved 6-year-old Hailie Jade. Was going nowhere in rap when, while taking a shit, thought up "Slim Shady," the droog-like doppelgänger who could do all the venting and spewing he clearly needed to do. Got signed by Dre, video aired round the clock on MTV. Sold 4 million copies of first album. Got sued for $10 million by mom upset about being portrayed as a pillhead whose chief pastimes were Bingo and lawsuits. She settled for $25,000. Replaced the ridiculous and essentially harmless Marilyn Manson as music's Public Enemy No. 1, uniting left GLAAD) and right (Lynne Cheney) in a crusade to shut him the fuck up.

I started pushing Eminem on friends. "Unbelievable!" e-mailed the poet Marilyn Johnson, married 16 years with three kids. "He is making art."

"I thought he was a punk asshole and I never thought in a bazillion years I'd listen to his music," said Los Angeles Times copy editor Matt Coltrin, "but now I can't stop." Even writer Jerry Lazar, whose favorite Beatle had always been Paul, was impressed, once he "stopped listening with parent ears" and could hear things besides "bitch" and "fuck."

Resistance was futile. "I can't afford to think he's brilliant," said the mother of two teenage girls. A week later her husband called to say, "Thanks so much for the Eminem. We listened to it all the way up to San Francisco."

New York Times critic Janet Maslin, who likes Eminem more than either of her teenage sons do, met him on the Detroit set of 8 Mile last winter and described him as "serious, articulate and not at all overbearing" during their interview. "He was interested to talk about acting, because it was new for him. He didn't mind that he had a lot to learn, but he was going to learn it his own way."

Ms. Maslin said that her fandom "does not come without guilt. A lot of what he says makes me uncomfortable, but the bottom line is if it's good, you have to acknowledge that, and it is. It's very cathartic to listen to him, it's like Quentin Tarantino's best stuff, there's an energy to it."

My wife, whose first angry young man of music was Elvis Costello, thinks we midddle-aged fans are responding to his ability to speak the anger that we can't express so freely because we have to do things like drive car pool, so we drop off the kids, roll down the windows, and blast Eminem on the way home.

Or maybe it's that music makes its imprint on you at whatever age you first hear it and, throughout your life, evokes that age when you hear it again. If you were branded by the Stones' "Satisfaction" when you were 15, you're going to feel 15 again when you hear "White America," and how many drugs can do that?

If you've read this far, I have to believe you're already a fan, but if not-if you've let Lynne Cheney and GLAAD define Eminem for you-you have to make up your own mind. Go buy the CD. In fact, get all three, it'll save you a trip back to the store tomorrow.