If there's a particular template for Eminem's career at this early point, it's that of the young Elvis (a comparison that Eminem hates). Both men took a musical form invented by African-Americans and gave it a popular white face. But Eminem has advantages Elvis did not. He writes his own idiosyncratic material rather than singing anyone else's songs. His mentor isn't a white Machiavelli like Colonel Parker, but the legendary hip-hop producer Dr. Dre, whose endorsement gave him instant credibility with black and white audiences alike and shielded him from accusations of cultural theft. (''I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley, to do black music so selfishly and use it to get myself wealthy'' goes one of the many Eminem lyrics in which he pre-empts any such criticism.)

That Eminem is also showing Elvis-esque potential to bust out of the youth market is not entirely a surprise. Any listener with open ears and some affinity for the musical vocabulary of hip-hop can easily become hooked on his music. Violence is merely one of the many notes he sounds in a range that stretches from schoolyard slapstick to pathos, and the mayhem is so calculatedly over the top that it seems no more or less offensive than typical multiplex Grand Guignol. In his most ambitious songs, his voice as a writer reaches well beyond idle provocation anyway. He comes at you with a torrent of language that sucks up and spits out the detritus of pop culture (from comic books to Versace) while marrying it to the rage, hurt and, occasionally, love that are at the core of his favorite subject, his own life. Somehow, just when you think he is going to spin out of control, all the rhymes land on their (and the music's) feet, leaving the listener at the end of the precisely observed story he has to tell: the disturbing epistolary chronicle of a deranged fan, the domestic battlefields of both his childhood and his own divorce and, most recently (and sometimes petulantly), the price of fame. In a country in which broken homes, absentee parents and latchkey kids are endemic to every social class, he can touch some of the hottest emotional buttons. He can be puerile too, but what else is new in pop music?.... That's only the first page of six. I'm not sure I have that much time for Eminem, but it's certainly complete and well-written.