Eminem falls back on old habits for “The Death of Slim Shady”: Album review

Courtesy of Shady/Aftermath/Interscope

“You created me to say everything you didn’t have the balls to say,” raps Eminem, or more specifically his alter ego Slim Shady, on “Guilty Conscience 2,” a cut from the rapper’s 12th album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce). Over a brooding, stormy instrumental, Em revisits the original song’s conceit – playing the villain to Dr. Dre’s sanity – to reflect on the damage Slim did to his career and artistry.

But in the end, Em has had enough and pulls the trigger on the character who expressed the darkest corners of his self. Or does he? “Paul,” he tells his longtime manager Paul Rosenberg desperately on the phone. “I had this dream, it was fucking crazy, it was like the old me came back and the new me and my brain took over and made me say all this fucked up shit.”

It’s a hackneyed presumption to cap an otherwise compelling concept. And it shows how often Eminem can get in his own way, even when operating at the highest possible lyrical level. Like many of Eminem’s albums, The Death of Slim Shady is based on tropes and themes he has explored time and time again. There are numerous jabs at Caitlyn Jenner and Christopher Reeve (20 years after his death, mind you); transphobia, fatphobia and homophobia; jabs at the mentally challenged. Pretty much everything you’d expect from Eminem, the eternal provocateur.

Of course, there have been plenty of critics over the years calling for his firing — a news anchor says as much in the album’s “Breaking News” interlude — but that’s par for the course for the 51-year-old, and no matter how many jokes he makes about Lizzo, it won’t dent his reputation. And it makes the album exactly what it shouldn’t be at this point in such an illustrious career: predictable. The Death of Slim Shady was promised to be a concept album, one to experience from start to finish, something new and fresh in the Eminem canon. And in a way, it is, letting Slim out of the cage for one last hurrah in a concerted attempt to shock and impress, which he sometimes succeeds at to great effect, sometimes not.

But he’s been here before, and the concept loses meaning when you realize that Slim isn’t really going anywhere. Because who would Eminem be without Slim Shady? Maudlin and lukewarmly thoughtful, as 2017’s “Revival” revealed. Anyone who does that is lost: anyone who relies too much on the explicit entropy of his Slim Shady persona is immature and primitive; anyone who carefully observes the world around them with a fine pen loses their edge.

So he largely settles for the former on The Death of Slim Shady, an album buoyed by his technical prowess and crushed by his crass subjectivism. Eminem’s enormous competence as a rapper has secured him status as one of the best rappers to ever step behind the mic, so it’s a wonder he doesn’t always find a way to put those skills to good use. For every “Renaissance,” the album’s opening salvo that deftly plays with homophones in a critical lecture, there’s a “Brand New Dance,” a three-and-a-half-minute joke in which he encourages listeners to “dance until they’re in a wheelchair” so they can dance like Reeve. (The joke, in case you missed it, is that Reeve was paralyzed.)

You can either laugh at the album or be terrified by it. You can admire the lyrical gift of the Dr. Dre-co-produced “Lucifer,” one of the album’s best, or be incensed by the old-fashioned reference to Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s relationship. Or both. It’s hard to know where the fun begins and the comedy ends, because Eminem’s music has often challenged listeners to confront their own moral values. And in that way, “The Death of Slim Shady” succeeds in making you wonder what it really means to be politically correct. If only that territory hadn’t been trodden for decades.

Where Eminem really shines is in the moments of self-reflection where he draws from his own reality. “Temporary,” featuring Skylar Grey, is Eminem at his best, an ode to his daughter Hailey that includes archival audio of her as a baby and is intended as a reminder of his love for her when he’s gone. “Somebody Save Me,” which is based on a sample (or re-recording) of Jelly Roll’s “Save Me,” has a similar effect, coming across as an apology to his children for choosing drugs over them.

These songs convey an emotional intelligence and self-awareness that Eminem has shown time and again throughout his career. And that’s exactly what contributes to Eminem’s lasting legacy. He’s a contradiction that’s tantalizing, perfectly capable of analyzing his own problems but not afraid to package them between scat and rape jokes. In that sense, The Death of Slim Shady is more of the same – not always bad, but not always good either.