Eminem review, The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce): Joyless and uninspired downward smash

July 12, 2024

Over the past decade, critics have claimed that Eminem has been overtaken by new young rap talent. But the only rapper Marshall Mathers really had to compete against was his younger self. The alter ego behind his 1999 breakthrough The slim Shady LP and the many hits that followed – most notably the cheeky, bombastic “I’m Back” – Slim Shady was Mathers’ identity, only without the ego. A vicious clown persona that made the Detroit rapper feel free to indulge in every forbidden thought that crossed his mind, every misogynistic fantasy, every homophobic quip and every drug-addled boast. The sort of thing, we’re told, you wouldn’t get away with today. Though he didn’t try for lack of trying.

On a series of sober albums of recent times with titles like recreation (2009) and revival (2017), Mathers evolved a bit and tried to make peace with a childhood of abuse and neglect. To some extent, Shady followed his example – Mathers’ manager Paul Rosenberg said XXL a few years ago that “Shady thinks a little more now as a character.” But the horror-movie plot of his 12th album cleverly sidesteps this ideological progression by having Shady return through a time portal from 1999 as an antihero turned supervillain. In the video for lead single “Houdini,” a panicked Mathers – in superhero gear that resembles Del-Boy in that Only fools and horses episode with the inflatable sex dolls – producer Dr. Dre says: “He’s trying to cancel us!”

It sets the tone for an album that often feels like a bet to see how many Caitrlyn Jenner jabs Mathers can pack into 65 minutes. The “Houdini” clip ends with a cataclysmic event that creates “an unholy hybrid” of the young, sassy Shady and Mathers’ older, fattening self (he’s now 51). But if this album was designed so Mathers could have the best of both worlds—to indulge his earlier, deliberately offensive wordplay under the guise of battling the Shady persona within him—then the reality is the worst of both worlds.

A lot of The death of Slim Shady resembles a telegraph Commentary: the clumsy button-pushing, the blather about “the PC police” and “Gen Z” coming to get him. Anything, it seems, to get a reaction. On “Habits,” Mathers spits that his critics are “mad because they can’t tame me”—but there’s nothing edgy about these creaky routines. Like many who rant about a “woke mind virus,” Mathers is the one who sounds like he has brain worms, who constantly bitches about pronouns and, on “Road Rage,” gives the completely unsolicited information that his “dick just won’t grow around trans people.” OK, buddy.

His lyrical obsessions are bizarre: several pieces make fun of Christopher Reeve, the Superman Actor who was paralyzed in a horse riding accident and died in 2004, two decades ago. In moments like these The death of Slim Shady feels like an LP-length Weird Al parody of Eminem, except not even Weird Al would stoop to a beat as uninspired as that of “Houdini,” which simply loops the riff from the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra” endlessly, sounding like the ringtone of an unanswered cell phone.

“Houdini” certainly marks a low point for the album, although few of the other songs rise above the unremarkable. “Tobey” – another single whose title refers to Maguire, the star of Spider-Man – is the highlight: its production is full of tension, although it’s notable that Mathers doesn’t pick up the mic until over three minutes in, after the superb verses from the youthful Babytron and his regular collaborator Big Sean. Mathers’ rap maintains his trademark sharpness of diction throughout; the fault lies in the content: it slams relentlessly downward, so joyless, so uninspired.

Three-quarters of the way through, the struggle between Mathers’s two selves devolves into murder/suicide before he wakes up and utters the words of any dull-witted screenwriter: “It was all a dream.” The final few tracks take an abrupt shift in tone. “Temporary,” a song recorded for his daughter Hailie, who has long served as Mathers’ muse in his more tender moments, features a hook from regular collaborator Skylar Grey. Its dark, somewhat maudlin thread is picked up on the closer “Somebody Save Me,” in which Mathers imagines a world in which he never overcame his addiction and died before seeing Hailie graduate—or recording her first podcast (every father’s nightmare).

This somber climax picks up a theme previously hinted at in “Habits,” where Mathers compares this return to his Shady persona to a drug relapse. The connection between his addiction, his fame, and his Shady self is mentioned again in the “All You Got” skit: “You were nothing until you found me,” Shady tells Mathers. “You can’t outdo me/You can’t outsmart me.” The Freudian theme is fascinating; a better album would have fleshed it out and dug deeper. But that would have come at the expense of some Caitlin Jenner jokes, and he couldn’t afford that, could he?