Some Poppy Sensation: The Return of Slim Shady

True Hip Hop Stories #2

On the 12th of July 2024, the rapper Eminem, best known for his appearance in the 2000 horror comedy Da Hip Hop Witch, released his twelfth studio album The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce). A concept record, The Death of Slim Shady, explores what it would be like if the late-90’s antihero was back in 2024 grappling with gender pronouns, cancel culture, fat shaming and troubling neo-fascists. Despite a lukewarm critical reception, it proved to be yet another commercial juggernaut for Eminem. It achieved the best first week sales for a rap album of 2024 so far, and knocked a woman called Taylor from her twelve week Frankenstein's Reign at the top of the charts. This from a fifty year old rapper whose best record was released before 9/11.

I personally dug it, I do think it’s his best since 2009’s Relapse, even if it lacks the highs of a ‘Headlights’ from The Marshall Mathers LP 2. The problem is, of course I love it, I’m a Stan, and I’m not the only one. But as I get older and I find myself still enjoying listening to a man talk about punting midgets across the room, I do wonder how we actually got here. Barely any of this should work, even on his best records. Yet it did, too well. The longer I think about Eminem the more I realise that Slim Shady was the best thing that ever happened to Marshall Mathers, and the worst thing that ever happened to Eminem.

Chicka Chicka Chicka

The story has been told a thousand times by now, but it’s just so insane, such a one-off, such an absurd run of fortune that it bears repeating. In 1997, Eminem competed in the Rap Olympics, a rap battle contest to find the biggest meanie in town. He placed second to the greatest rapper of all time, Otherwize, but impressed a young man who asked for a copy of Eminem’s recently released independent recording, The Slim Shady EP. A despondent Eminem tossed the kid the tape, barely paying him any mind. This kid was Dean Geistlinger, an intern for Interscope Records. In 1998, a down-on-his-luck Dr. Dre meets with Interscope Records boss and cartoon sleazy music exec Jimmy Iovine for a listening session of some random mixtapes in the hopes that Dre can find a new artist to produce. Eventually, Iovine plays The Slim Shady EP, and Dre is captivated. Given that the first song is the mesmerizing ‘Low, Down, Dirty,’ I'm not surprised Dre enjoyed the music. What I still, to this day, can't figure out is how Dre had the foresight to not only know that this could work; but that it could work on a massive, borderline Michael Jackson-esque, commercial level. It's worth noting that when Dre demanded Iovine find him, the good doctor didn't know he was white. This would be the first, and last, time Dre ever found an artist via a mixtape.

The second half of how the Eminem/Dre team came into existence is perhaps even more absurd. Dre invites Eminem into the studio to record on a beat he’d created out of an old Labi Siffre instrumental. The story goes that Dre plays the track, seconds pass, and Eminem immediately raps: “Hi! My name is!” Dre hits stop on the recording and declares that they’ve just made a hit. This supposedly happened within minutes of Dre and Eminem first sitting down in the studio together. Now, there are two possibilities here. One, that Eminem freestyled the hook that made him the biggest rapper of all time; or two, that he had this hook sitting there, just waiting for the right instrumental to use it on. Either answer is ridiculous, and so was the outcome.

Despite only peaking at #38, ‘My Name Is’ launched Eminem into the mainstream, selling five million copies of his major label debut, The Slim Shady LP. ‘My Name Is’ remains an odd song, however. Eminem employs an arrhythmic flow and simply issues a series of increasingly bizarre statements detailing the antics of Slim Shady. The line between Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady blurs then sharpens over and over throughout each verse, at times from line to line. The lyrical content isn’t that offensive, especially now, but there’s a craftsmanship to each line and each rhyme that would only intensify as his career progressed, and would eventually become a hallmark of his music, for good or ill. Each bar seems actively written to be shouted by a fifteen-year-old for no reason in a Friday afternoon math class. Dre’s beat was his silliest to date. By the time his UFO synth materializes out of nowhere in the third verse, it becomes completely cartoonish. Combining all this with a fluorescent music video, we have, if it was presented by any other artist, a novelty song. A ‘Macarena,’ a ‘Gangnam Style,’ a ‘Monster Mash.’ It is solely the involvement of two talented artists, near the height of their powers, that elevates it beyond ‘Barbie Girl’ in terms of musical value.

I’m Insane With Anger!

You may find this difficult to believe, but some people did not care for Slim Shady. Songs like ‘My Name Is,’ ‘Guilty Conscience,’ and ‘97 Bonnie and Clyde’ caused significant controversy during the height of the Christian Parents Against Everything era, and the 2000s phase of wokeness, or whatever we’re calling political correctness this week. He was protested against, had his songs pulled from the radio, was finger-waggled at by politicians. This, of course, proved fruitless, and Eminem became inescapable. Boys were bleaching their hair blonde and wearing big white t-shirts, girls were sticking splash pages from magazines on the underside of their desks and insisting ‘he wasn’t really like that.’ Deep cuts like ‘Rock Bottom’ and ‘If I Had’ saw Marshall Mathers, not Slim Shady, connect with millions, a connection that cannot be served no matter how many bad songs he would later release.

But it wasn’t Marshall that sold the album; it was Shady. The distinction between Marshall, the man, Eminem, the rapper, and Slim Shady, the maniac, was established early by the artist himself as a means to vent his anger and frustrations and maintain a distance between the art and the artist. With an edgy alter-ego and tangible cultural impact, Eminem had advanced beyond novelty songsmith to something of a genuine fad. I say fad because Slim Shady emerged during a broader cultural movement towards edgier, darker, transgressive media. South Park, WWE’s Attitude Era, Nu Metal, Gross-Out Comedies, all appeared during the back half of the 90s and the front end of the 2000s. It’s difficult to think of a world without Eminem now, but imagine if Eminem never recorded another hit again; if his sophomore album flopped, how would you view ‘My Name Is’ in 2024?

Going from the underground to the mainstream has been a trial by fire for many musicians. Less than a decade earlier, Kurt Cobain experienced a similar explosion into the mainstream that he failed to deal with effectively. There’s this notion that Kurt didn’t want to be famous, as if someone had a gun held to his head and forced him to sign to David Geffen Records, forced him to write million-dollar hooks, forced him to okay the chrome production on Nevermind. No, the only person that ever held a gun to Kurt’s head was Kurt. He wanted to be a successful musician, he just didn’t understand what that would entail. Eminem encountered the same problem. As a dirt-poor kitchen hand prior to fame, Eminem suddenly found himself beset by fans everywhere he went, unable to take his daughter out, unable to grab a bite to eat. And this made him mad, at his fans, at his status, at the world. The result was his diamond-selling follow-up, The Marshall Mathers LP.

I'm not going into detail about The Marshall Mathers LP, but it’s so good that covering it in a paragraph or two will be a criminal disservice. To this day, it remains one of my favorite records from any genre; it features some of the most stunning rapping ever recorded and served as the technical specs for rappers such as Kendrick Lamar. The anger is palpable. From the explosive rampage of ‘Kim’ to the venomous seethe of ‘Marshall Mathers.’ What were once playful edgy jokes evolved into graphically violent edgy jokes directed at everyone from his wife to his label. Beyond the rage and edge, it’s those moments Eminem lets his guard down, and lets Marshall speak, that continue to strengthen that immutable psychic bond he made with his listeners on his first record. Eminem intended the deep cut ‘I’m Back,’ a languid piece of transgressive rap, as the lead single. Interscope Records, however, disagreed that a song where a man vows to impregnate Jennifer Lopez, even if she was his own mother, was a good choice as a lead single. Eminem returned with the rage-filled ‘Way I Am,’ taking aim at his fans and the label, among others, only for that to also be rejected as a lead single. With time running out, he recorded ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ the best Slim Shady, and the song that introduced me to hip hop. The rare sequel that outdoes the original, ‘The Real Slim Shady’ was a gigantic step up from ‘My Name Is,’ reintroducing Slim Shady’s cartoon mischief with better flows, better bars, and a better Dre beat. The track peaked at #4 and set the release formula for his next three albums.

The Marshall Mathers LP moved 1.78 million copies in its first week, 800,000 in its second, making releasing a Gold record look like child’s play for the rest of the month. Between the start of 1999 and the end of the year 2000, Eminem had gone from just another underground MC, a lyrical spiritual individual in your swimming pool, to not just a successful rapper, but the biggest rapper in the history of the genre. The Elvis comparisons are apt but trite, and the man himself recognized this almost immediately. If Eminem was a fad a year ago, he wasn’t anymore; he was here to stay, this was permanent fame. While there have been many, many musicians who have been elevated into the stratosphere and stayed there, what sets the next twenty-five years of Eminem’s career apart is that, whether it was a good album or a bad album, it was a hit album.

Too Big To Fail 

For the next three or four years, Eminem would reign not only as the biggest rapper in the world; but the biggest musical act, period. The Eminem Show, his third classic, was as big if not bigger than The Marshall Mathers LP, and he would win an Oscar for his ubiquitous ‘Lose Yourself’ from his semi-autobiographical film 8 Mile. Eminem would then unleash a charming outlaw called 50 Cent on the world, whose iconic debut Get Rich or Die Tryin’ would eventually move nine million units. Eminem seemed unstoppable, and then he released Encore, the first real dud of his career. A huge portion of the album was switched out with a suite of very bad songs to combat an online leak of the entire album. Beyond the ropey hooks, stiff instrumentals, and inane verses, Eminem wasn’t sounding good. Sometime while becoming a rock star, he’d picked up a drug addiction, resulting in a slurred, mumbling rap style and a flow that had the momentum of a stone rolling down a hill, relentless, but aimless. It was at this point, around 2004, that people first started to say Eminem had fallen off, that he ain’t what he used to be, accusations he hasn’t shaken to this day. Nonetheless, Encore sold five million copies, but Eminem would disappear into a drug-induced isolation for the rest of the decade.

After an overdose nearly killed him, Eminem got clean and staged a two-part comeback. One actual comeback, one second comeback because the first comeback didn’t work. This would become a trend. Relapse and Recovery are perhaps the most divisive albums in Eminem’s discography. The extreme horrorcore and array of strange accents of Relapse resulted in a poor reception at first, but the thunderous Dre beats, and insane technical lyricism would— a decade later—lead to Relapse becoming a genuine cult classic. Recovery, which could also be called The Sorry for Relapse LP, featured very loud hits like ‘Not Afraid’ and ‘Love the Way You Lie.’ The critical reception of Recovery wasn’t much better than Relapse at the time; but the extreme commercial success drowned it out for a while, and the album remains a favorite among fans. Not me, though, I’m a Relapse guy.

Recovery will probably be certified Diamond in the next year or two, making it Eminem’s third studio album to sell over ten million copies. A few years later, the spotty Marshall Mathers LP 2 would ship another five million units. Regardless of how many copies these albums sold, the crowd claiming he was washed up got louder and louder, which wasn’t helped by the God-awful Revival, a record so bad that it would mark the end of engaging with a new Eminem release for many. Kamikaze, which could also be called The Sorry for Revival LP, was better but only in the sense that bread is better than wet cement as a breakfast food. Kamikaze is an important album for Eminem, not because of the music, but because it confirmed that much like with The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem is still extremely conscious of the response to himself and his music, and that he’s still caught in the middle of a feedback loop between releasing new music and responding to the reaction to the music.

One line from Kamikaze has stuck, ‘I sound like a broken record every time I break a record.’ By this point, the disconnect between Eminem’s extreme popularity, his extreme detractors, and his (oftentimes) extremely mediocre music seems barely possible. Twenty years into his career, Eminem is still one of the biggest rappers in the world, this despite not releasing anything noteworthy other than for its mixed-to-poor reception and absurd sales. Revival went platinum, Kamikaze went platinum. Other rappers have released mediocre or crappy music this far into their career; Snoop Dogg has been doing it for years. Yet none of them are faced with the kind of widespread mockery or critical derision Eminem faces. Hell, most outlets didn’t even bother to review Snoop’s From tha Streets 2 tha Suites, and were you even aware of Nelly’s Heartland? The fad that became the mainstream had weathered twenty years of changing hip hop tastes. Lil Wayne’s short reign of hedonism before prison; Kanye West’s emergence as hip hop’s David Bowie; Atlanta’s production line of auto-crooned trap; Kendrick Lamar’s crown-snatching emergence as the West Coast’s apex hood poet; Drake apparently made some music. Eminem was old school, but welded at the top of the charts regardless of what he put out, seeing his reputation and legacy take a hit with each subsequent release. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and now it was apparent that the crown was about to snap his neck.

The Return of Slim Shady?

There was a long silence from Eminem after the release of his eleventh album Music to Be Murdered By, a borderline compilation album tied together with some Alfred Hitchcock skits. It’s okay. The Royce assisted ‘You Gon Learn’ was fire when it dropped, and is still fire today. And listening to Eminem body the entire surviving Slaughterhouse members on ‘I Will’ remains a joy to hear. Still, Eminem delivered the worst hook ever and felt the need to collaborate with Ed Sheeran again. 

Then word got around that he had a new album in the works. The general consensus was ‘Please be good, please be good, please be good.’ Unlike his previous releases that were surprise drops, this new album came with an elaborate promotional campaign and shiny new single ‘Houdini.’ A blatant piece of fan-service, ‘Houdini’ opens with an homage to ‘Without Me’ and sees Eminem back in Slim Shady mode taking aim at… you get the idea. ‘Houdini,’ unsurprisingly, was a hit, reaching #3 on the charts and logging hundreds of millions of streams in no time flat. These streams led to Eminem rising to the number five most-listened Spotify artists, leapfrogging Kendrick and Drake, and once again making him the most popular rapper in the world.

The album that followed, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace), confirms this inclination towards fan-service. With early era Eminem flows and voices, excellent beats from Dr Dre and Eminem himself, edgy lyrics, a b-side from Encore, and even a Bizarre feature. The instrumental palette knocks and the concept is solid. Slim Shady has returned in all his edgy glory and proceeds to let the modern world know what he thinks about it. Trans people, little people, fat people, conservative talking heads, Gen Z all come under fire. Yet as the album progresses, the references, especially to Caitlyn Jenner and Gen Z, start to become a little tiresome, like Shady, or Eminem, is just trying too hard. Around this point is ‘Guilty Conscience 2,’ a sequel to the excellent track off Eminem’s debut. Eminem confronts Slim Shady and calls him out on the ridiculous album he’s making him record, eventually shooting himself Fight Club-style to put Slim down for good.

The idea, as I understand it, is sort of a reflexive response to the perception of Eminem’s music nowadays. People wanted the old Slim Shady back, but what would the reality of that be? He’d be complaining about Cancel Culture, Gen Z, making jokes about trans people, as if we don’t have enough of that already. Slim Shady filled a void in 1999. In 2024, he’d just be active on Twitter. And Eminem managed to pull this concept off with a sequence of hard verses, with solid hooks and decent beats. The rest of the album focuses on a relieved Marshall Mathers, and what he’s really about as a fifty-year-old man: His family, his art form, how far he’s come.

The album went to #1 with over a quarter-million sold first week. The critics were indifferent at best, I would argue far too harsh, some outlets giving it a lower rating than Revival, which is just objectively incorrect. The fan response on the other hand has been one relief to joy. For me, therein lies the problem. This is an album for the fans by design, and for Eminem in practice. He’s flowing and writing better than he has in a decade, yet it’s with one eye to the glare of the entire musical establishment, the mainstream charts, radios and streaming services. The album clearly wants to exist in the context of early Eminem, peak Eminem. Yet unfortunately can’t escape the reality of being new Eminem, modern Eminem. Those later Snoop Dogg albums exist for the same reason, Snoop likes making music sometimes, and while the albums don’t chart and make no impact, some people are still listening.

The rapper Nas provides a good counterweight to Eminem’s recent career. A legend by any measure, Nas’s critical and commercial prime was in the mid 90’s, and now as an older man he’s also in the position of being a hip-hop elder statesman. Unlike Eminem, Nas doesn’t really sell records any more. Over the past few years he has collaborated with producer Hit Boy on the King’s Disease and Magic albums, each a three part series of low pressure yet high performance collaborations that reinforced Nas’s tremendous legacy after a flabby mid-career and a failed attempt at a third act Kanye West collaboration. On these albums Nas seems free to flow. Unburdened by trying to make a hit, free from any sort of commercial or critical expectations, Nas just raps about what is on his mind, on beats he’s comfortable on, takes the odd risk, and goes home. The result was his best work in years.

Eminem essentially tried to do the same thing with The Death of Slim Shady, rapped on beats he knew he could kill, about people he wanted to kill, but The Death of Slim Shady was a major mainstream release, whereas King’s Disease 3 was an album for the heads only. Returning to those beats, that content that made him famous in the first place isn’t the liberation it is for Nas, its the acceptance of the burden. It isn’t a grand return for Slim Shady because regardless if the music was edgy or not Slim Shady never left. His energy has kept Eminem at the top of the charts for a quarter of a century, his aura from 1999 still shines so bright that regardless of what Eminem releases now he’ll still be in the GOAT conversation, still be cited by endless rappers as a major inspiration. It isn’t the summary execution of the character either, as his presence on the record only served to breathe new life into Eminem’s old material, which only further highlighted that he ain’t what he used to be. New fans are created, new records are broken, a new album is anticipated, and the cycle begins again.

In a promotional video for ‘Houdini’ Eminem said that for his next trick he would make his ‘career disappear.’ It was intended as a cancel culture allusion but perhaps it was a Freudian slip. Perhaps deep down Eminem knows that the monster he created, the fad that got out of hand has become more of a hindrance than an asset. Maybe he longs to be able to create in a vacuum like he did in ‘99, without Slim Shady around his neck like a noose made of gold. The longevity is incredible, admirable, but what has achieved that longevity is an abstraction, one created by Eminem but handed to millions of people around the world. No matter what he does from here on out, they’ll still demand, will the real Slim Shady please stand up?