“How many times you tried to kill me?” snarls Eminem in his Slim Shady guise at one point on ...(Coup De Grâce). “I always come back!” It's a theme that best crystallises the biggest issue that continues to plague Marshall Mathers: he simply cannot shake off the weight of his own legacy. To Em's credit, he tries to tackle this problem head-on with his twelfth studio album, and on the surface, The Death Of Slim Shady offers a tantalising premise. A concept record in which our favourite controversy-baiting quinquagenarian attempts to kill off his infamous alter ego once and for all, it could have been a chance for a true reckoning, the moment where the real Eminem stands up and shows us exactly what he's about in 2024.
To be fair to Mathers, he almost gets there: Guilty Conscience 2 is a tense, dramatic face-off between Em and Slim that sees the former berating the latter's need to endlessly punch down: "Ain't you the same one that hated bullies calling you bad names?" Eminem laments. "You're me, and we're a team," Slim shoots back. It'd make for a fascinating piece of introspective rap if it wasn't for the fact that it comes after almost 40 minutes of Eminem endlessly wanging on about "woke" culture, "the PC police" and being "cancelled", all layered under what seems to be a concerted attempt to O F F E N D!!!!! as many people as possible.
