The Death of Slim Shady is an album filled with memorable lines. Some are memorable because they display their author’s nonpareil skill as a rapper: they whiz past in a perfectly enunciated, rhythmically precise gust of homophones, references and wordplay. Some because their scabrous, nihilistic wit induces precisely the reaction their author presumably intends: a kind of horrified bark of laughter despite yourself, followed by a surge of guilt so overwhelming that you don’t want to highlight the line in question, lest you be damned by association. And some are memorable because they land with a dull, shrug-inducing thud, the unmistakable sound of an artist trying too hard to shock. The most telling line may come on Lucifer, which, with its Dr Dre-produced, bouzouki-sampling beat, has a strong claim to be the album’s strongest track. “But Marshall,” offers Eminem, addressing himself, as is so often his wont, “it’s like you came from 2000, stepped out a portal.”
It’s a lyric that seems to strike at The Death of Slim Shady’s raison d’etre. Eminem has cut a curious figure over the last decade. He’s still reliably chalking up incredible sales figures – every album he’s released has gone platinum in the US; his 2020 single Godzilla shifted something close to 10m worldwide – while apparently struggling to find a place for himself in a musical landscape that’s altered dramatically since his early 00s heyday. Is he the grumpy keeper of traditional hip-hop values discarded in an era of mumble rappers and Auto-Tune, as suggested by the indignant verbal assaults he launched at a younger generation of artists on 2018’s Kamikaze? Is he a noticeably different character to the twentysomething nihilist who sold 25m copies of The Marshall Mathers LP, deploying his splenetic lyrical approach against the “alt-right”, as a string of freestyles and guest appearances released in 2017 implied? Or is he simply the huffy middle-aged reactionary that his more foresighted detractors might have predicted he would become, decrying millennial snowflakes and wokeism like a Daily Mail columnist?
