With astonishing lyricism, the controversial rapper battles against his vile alter-ego’s views on Gen Z, transgenderism, and the disabled
"Article published in The Telegraph. Author: Neil McCormick."
Is this the end for Eminem? The Death of Slim Shady is the firebrand superstar’s 12th album, arriving with a title that seems unequivocal about its intent to lay his demonic spirit to rest. A jaw droppingly audacious 19 tracks of rapid fire rap play out as a wild psychodrama in which the 51-year-old Marshall Mathers argues fiercely and comedically with himself over whether his scabrously juvenile delinquent alter-ego Slim Shady still has a function in the modern world.
As a faux news announcer puts it on Breaking News: “Detroit rapper Eminem is trying to cancel himself… for songs that include insensitive comments about little people, people with mental disabilities, transgender rights and the First Amendment.”
The cover depicts his blonde Shady persona being zipped up in a body bag. “You’re gettin’ more perverse every time you record a verse,” Eminem spits accusingly on Lucifer. “Why can’t you make fun of people behind their backs like a normal person?”
It’s a funny line, that neatly sums up the hypocrisy of much of the criticism aimed at Eminem. It has been 25 years since Mathers announced himself as a toweringly brilliant and rudely controversial talent in 1999 with his second album, The Slim Shady LP. That is a quarter of a century in which he has remained at the top of his game and his field by employing provocatively divisive wordplay that somehow manages to be extremely brilliant and shockingly puerile, like a poetic genius with the mind of a 13-year-old delinquent.
He is hard to love but impossible not to admire, and his latest outrageously brilliant magnum opus shows the middle-aged Mathers is still firing on all cylinders, employing a deceptively self-critical concept to unleash tirade after tirade of smartly framed invective at cancel culture, political correctness, gender identity issues and all the most censorious limitations of modern youth’s prickly sensitivity. “There’s no doubt you’re about to get grossed out,” Eminem announces, directly addressing “Gen Z” on Antichrist. “How did we get stuck in this woke BS / I’m trying to make it regress.” It is a dirty job, he disingenuously suggests, but someone has got to do it: “Who else is as pitiless, actually witty and crass / Hideous, ghastly and insidious as me?” Who indeed?
Let me just put this out there: Eminem is amazing, astonishing, absolutely staggering – he’s a veritable living thesaurus worth of synonyms for outstanding and he could probably break them all up into individual syllables and pack them into a double time rap where everything rhymes three ways with everything else. As someone who loves wordplay, I find the experience of listening to Eminem spraying lyrics at full pelt so overwhelming it utterly disarms my liberal sensibilities.
On Habits, he proudly declares himself “mom-shaming, dad-shaming, fat-shaming, mansplaining”, as he crows about “parental discretion, mental aggression, my heads a Smith & Wesson / You’re messin’ with a lethal weapon.” There is a gratuitously horrible track entitled Brand New Dance in which he makes fun of disabled people on a dance floor, whilst on Road Rage he mocks obesity (rhyming “dieting” with “pie-eating”) and make fun of transgender rights (“I gotta memorise pronouns of a CIS man? / How come can’t we just show solidarity with a wrist band?”).
Taking offense is futile because all of this is posited in the form of arguments with himself, in which Eminem brutally acknowledges his own faults, hypocrisies, insecurities and doubts. It’s a device that offers an underlying reassurance of empathy for all aspects the human condition, with the rapper admitting to being more confused than “a black transgender Klan member.”
Musically, there is nothing exceptional going on, with Eminem and various production associates including Dr Dre concocting bouncy but straightforward beats with singalong choruses essentially as springboards for his incessantly brilliant rapping. Over 19 tracks, the drama runs out some steam, wrapping up narratively with sentimental yet oddly moving piano balladry that finds Eminem apologising to his children and contemplating his own death on Temporary and Somebody Save Me.
But Slim Shady is certainly not going down without a fight. “Before I get banned, kicked off Twitter / And TikTok, cause they’re so damned ticked off, bitter / They want me to bounce like a fabric softener” he rails on Lucifer. “When you reach these heights, freedom of speech dies / With every line that I recite, the PC police try to throw me in jail with no bail.”
In my view, Eminem has been the most technically gifted wordsmith in the most lyric oriented musical form in pop history, a blackly comic satirist still operating at the height of his powers. The Death of Slim Shady is funny, shocking, contradictory, utterly outrageous, offensive, sentimental, clever, dumb and occasionally even (whisper it) wise. Eminem clearly relishes his continuing role as the unhinged jester in America’s psyche, speaking unpalatable truth to the power of public consensus, saying the unsayable because someone has to say it. It may be RIP for Slim Shady, but I doubt we’ve heard the last from Marshall Mathers.
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