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Over the past decade, critics have suggested Eminem was overtaken by new young rap talents. But the only MC Marshall Mathers has ever really competed against is his younger self. slim Shady The alter ego behind his 1999 smash album and the many hits that followed—including the thunderous, brash “I’m Back”—was Mathers’ identity, minus the ego. A malevolent clown persona through which the Detroit rapper felt free to indulge every forbidden thought that crossed his mind, every misogynistic fantasy, homophobic slur, and drug-addled braggadocio. The sort of thing, we’re told, that you couldn’t do today. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Through a sober last days album series with titles such as Recovery (2009) and The comeback (2017), Mathers has evolved, somewhat, as he tries to make peace with a childhood of abuse and neglect. To some extent, Shady has followed suit — Mathers’ manager Paul Rosenberg said XXL A few years ago, Shady thought a little more as a character. But the horror-movie plot of his 12th album carefully avoids any ideological advances by seeing Shady return via a time portal from 1999, an anti-hero turned super-villain. In the video for lead single “Houdini,” a panicked Mathers—in superhero gear, looking like Del Boy in this Only fools and horses episode with inflatable sex dolls – tells producer Dr. Dre: “He’s trying to get us canceled!”
The video sets the tone for an album that often feels like a bet to see how many Caitlyn Jenner punches Mathers can cram into 65 minutes. Houdini’s video ends with a cataclysmic event that results in “an unholy hybrid” of the young, sassy Shady and Mathers’s older, pot-bellied persona (he’s now 51). But if this album was designed to let Mathers have his cake and eat it too—to indulge in his early, deliberately offensive puns under the guise of battling his inner Shady—the reality is the worst of both worlds.
A lot of The Death of Slim Shady looks like a Telegraph Op-Ed: The clumsy punching of people’s buttons, the chatter about “the political correctness police” and “Gen Z” coming for him. All, it seems, to get a reaction. On “Habits,” Mathers spits that his critics are “crazy because they can’t tame him”—but there’s nothing scathing about these grating routines. Like many who harp on about a “woke mind virus,” Mathers is the one who sounds like he has brain worms, bleating incessantly about pronouns and, on “Road Rage,” offering the entirely unsolicited information that his “dick just won’t get bigger” around trans people. Okay, buddy.
His lyrical obsessions are bizarre: several pieces mock Christopher Reeve, the Superman Actor paralyzed following a horse riding accident, died in 2004, twenty years ago. In moments like this, The Death of Slim Shady It sounds like an LP-length Eminem parody by Weird Al, except even Weird Al wouldn’t stoop to a pace as uninspired as that of “Houdini,” which simply loops the riff from the Steve Miller Band’s “Abracadabra” endlessly, sounding like an unanswered cell phone ringing.
“Houdini” certainly marks the album’s low point, though few other tracks are noteworthy. “Tobey” – another single, the title of which refers to Maguire, star of Spider Man – is the album’s strong point: its production is taut, although it’s noticeable that Mathers doesn’t take the mic until three minutes in, after standout verses from young BabyTron and his usual adversary Big Sean. Mathers’ rapping maintains his characteristically crisp diction throughout the album; it’s the content that’s at fault: it’s relentlessly downward-pounding, joyless, uninspired.
Three-quarters of the way through the album, the fight between Mathers’ two characters ends in murder/suicide, before he wakes up and utters those words beloved by every stupid screenwriter: “It was all a dream.” The final tracks mark an abrupt change in tone. “Temporary,” a song recorded for his daughter Hailiewhich has long served as a muse for Mathers’ most tender moments, features a chorus from frequent album collaborator Skylar Grey. Its dark, somewhat cloying thread is picked up on the closing track “Somebody Save Me,” in which Mathers imagines a world in which he never overcame his addiction and died before seeing Hailie graduate — or record his first podcast (every dad’s nightmare).
This dark climax picks up on a theme earlier in “Habits.” Here, Mathers compares this return to his Shady persona to a drug relapse. The connection between his addiction, his fame, and his Shady persona is again hinted at in the “All You Got” sketch: “You were nothing until you found me,” Shady tells Mathers. “You can’t outrun me/You can’t outrun me.” The Freudian theme is intriguing; a better album would have fleshed it out, dug deeper. But it would have come at the expense of a few Caitlyn Jenner jokes, and he couldn’t afford that, could he?