Eminem: The Death of Slim Shady Review

Slim Shady is back. And dead.

Whether you think he’s fallen off, jumped the shark, is better than ever or haven’t even kept up with the relatively prolific output over recent years, Eminem remains one of the most interesting figures in hip hop alongside the likes of Ye.

After his legendary rise to rap and pop dominance with an opening salvo of three classic albums, Eminem’s career and output became more uneven but no less fascinating as he reckoned with fame and legacy. After the mixed response to the accented flows and horror themes on his 2009 comeback album Relapse, he cannily brute forced his way back into the charts and to critical acclaim with the bombastic stadium rap of 2010’s Recovery.

That formula of pop starlet choruses and self serious lyrics faltered on 2017’s Revival however. Just like after Relapse, he returned a year later with a vengeance and a rejigged approach, except this time Eminem focused on tapping into the rugged beats and furiously technical, scabrous verses of his 2011 Bad Meets Evil album with Royce Da 5’9” and cuts like Rap God from The Marshall Mathers LP 2.

Since then, he has obsessed over rapping more proficiently and basically faster than anybody else, with double time flows that often astonish – even if they rarely connect the way some of the canonical verses from his early work do.

After two albums worth of material in 2020 and a steady supply of guest appearances, Mathers returns with an album referencing his cunningly constructed alter ego in a more direct callback to his early work than he has made since The Marshall Mathers LP 2.

Slim Shady was a brilliant creation – a cartoonishly evil persona designed to let Eminem say the funniest and most offensive things he could think of, getting outsized reactions from listeners, media, parents and politicians. All with some level of creative immunity.

One school of thought goes that much of the lyrical content on The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show and Encore would simply get Eminem cancelled now, alter ego or not. Putting the theory to the test, The Death of Slim Shady sees the character time travel from 1999 hellbent on doing exactly that, on a concept album that pits the rappers’ personas against one another.

The output is an album releasing in 2024 full of jabs and jokes at the expense of trans people, disabled people, small people and perennial target Christopher Reeves, dead these twenty years. Rapping as Eminem, Mathers himself takes issue with Shady’s targets – and rapping as Shady, points out that it was this exact content that made Eminem the most successful rapper in history.

Eminem has been digesting his place in the rap pantheon on record for a long time now – here, he’s in a tug of war with what put him there in the first place.

It’s a solid notion and serviceable as a narrative, climaxing with a showdown where Eminem finally shoots Shady and kills him. It’s hard to feel like Eminem is taking this too seriously, hearing him say he’s getting revenge in the name of people like Benzino and Ja Rule, as he had very real and very personal vendettas against both men that had nothing to do with the antics of Slim Shady.

The real benefit to the material is that it gives Eminem a story and topic to focus on throughout the album, outside of what have become well worn pet topics since Kamikaze. On Music To Be Murdered By’s Stepdad he proved that his mastery of storytelling is as good as ever when he wants it to be, with verses that for my money could have come from sessions in 2002.

This latest release attempts to weave a tale across an album rather than a song, with mixed success. The brilliance of a Lose Yourself or a Stan is in drawing you into a vividly painted story in a few short minutes, but an hour is a long time to follow along. The key problem is that Slim Shady doesn’t feel fleshed out as a threat or even really as a character, especially compared to the presence the persona had on Relapse. That album was a bleak look at that alter ego taken to the logical extreme. Slim Shady was a legitimately disquieting presence, all pills and chainsaws.

Here he’s a time travelling troublemaker, but the stakes – both within the story and in how he represents real life jeopardy – are nowhere near as severe. How can they be? On Relapse, Slim Shady personified an addiction and a dark place in Marshall Mathers’ mind that had nearly killed him.

The Death of Slim Shady is often at its most entertaining when it loudly recalls past works. The first single, Houdini, returned to the blend of head nodding production and ribald lyrics that made Without Me a huge hit a lifetime ago with great success. Like 2020’s Godzilla it has a cartoonish tone and bounce that Eminem less frequently reaches for now. Which is a shame since, apart from his shocking lyrics and lyrical ability, it was the fact his music was so damn fun to listen to that helped make him a star. Dusted off from the Encore sessions meanwhile, Brand New Dance even makes a case for the mix of childish lyrics and gummy, earworm beats that yielded a mixed critical response to that album back then. Guilty Conscience 2, the aforementioned climax to the story, makes the concept of the rapper basically arguing with himself for five minutes much better than it has any right to be. A few more numbers in the vein of Houdini would have gone a long way to leavening the sometimes dour mood, however.

The appearances by Big Sean and Babytron on Tobey are great, giving Eminem the chance to add another muscular Detroit posse track to his ouevre. Ez Mil joins in for his second collaboration with the Detroit rapper on Head Honcho, and I never thought I’d hear a guest verse in Tagalog on an Eminem album – which is a cool thing in itself. Skylar Grey is here as usual, while villainous D12 bandmate Bizarre gets to contribute to the controversy-baiting content – with evident glee. Fuel’s opening onslaught by JID is by far the best guest spot here though. Eminem audibly steps his game up to follow the underrated Atlantan, and between them these are probably the two best verses on the whole album.

The other issue that faces Mr. Mathers is that music is consumed and reacted to very differently now. A quarter of a century ago, his impish rhymes and roasting of celebrities could gradually ripple across radio and classrooms, inexorably soaking into the public consciousness. By the time I was buying Eminem and D12 CDs as a teenager, the man was a byword for boundary-pushing, parent-infuriating music.

Now, an album release is a drop on Spotify followed by a weekend of quick takes and reactions on social media, instantly echoed by millions of viewers who may well identify more with their favourite content creator than the artist being discussed. There’s at once an ease of access to art and thousands of potential filters through which to experience it, providing the potential for takes, outrage and echo chambers to simmer up and – often – dissipate just as quickly. Eminem was partly relying on this, hoping to yield stung responses from his perennial enemies in critic circles and elation at Shady’s return from his Stans. A couple of weeks on, that has happened to an extent – but not at enough of a volume to make this a cultural moment the way those first three albums were.

What is more interesting is how this record will endure. Dialing down the hyperdrive multisyllabic sprint-rapping he has been on for a minute and focusing (mostly) on a single topic, Eminem is more narratively engaged than he has been for some time. Some of the beats do run into each other even after many listens, with a gloomy atmosphere that lacks the lurking balefulness of Relapse. Nonetheless it’s a good listen, providing plenty of additions to your playlist, and makes a good template for Eminem to hopefully craft more concept albums in future.

Or perhaps if he’s unhappy with the tenor of the response, he’ll once again return with an avenging album of incandescent fury to take issue with everyone for not getting it. Which I’d also enjoy.