(Shady/Aftermath/Interscope)
The return of the rapper’s nihilistic alter ego makes his 12th album feel like a confused, conflicted attempt to recreate his 00s success – his flow is perfect as ever, but he can no longer provoke true outrage
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?
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