 A columnist of "The New York Observer" wrote that Eminem had become a “guilty pleasure” for baby boomers, describing him as “the most compelling figure to have emerged from popular music since the holy trinity of [Bob] Dylan, [John] Lennon, and [Mick] Jagger.”

The "clean version" of "The Eminem Show" censors many more profanities and derogatory words than in clean versions of Eminem's previous albums, in which the words "goddamn", "prick", "bastard", "piss", "bitch", "ass", and "shit" were allowed.This album allowed no profanities, and the profanities were either muted, obscured by sound effects, or back-masked.In addition to this, entire sentences were sometimes removed from the censored version for being very sexually charged.