Alright. First things first, I didn’t like this album. This is important because when I initially thought of writing reviews on music I listened to, I made an unofficial decision to not cover any music that I didn’t enjoy. With how much time and energy that writing these takes, and how many other things I could always be writing instead, I thought “why use that time to focus on what I don’t like?"
To paraphrase the words of Adrienne Maree Brown in her book Emergent Strategy “what we pay attention to grow, so I wanted to stop growing the crisis, the critique.” (Pg. 46) But hey, I can’t deny there is some hater energy in me that is oh so sweet to get out when it is sharpened by my thoughts and passion.
I say "hate" facetiously too because while I think this album is crud, that isn’t what ultimately made me decide to write about it. It is also more underwhelming and underrealized than truly bad considering the money, time, and attention that making something like this took.
All things are relative, though, and I think that this is one of the best musical years we've had in a long while and I can't find any reason that I would listen to this album over the many other great albums that preceded and followed it.
Originally I wasn’t even going to comment on this album. I first listened to it the night it dropped, and immediately after I was compelled to say something about it, but after going to the internet and seeing it getting rightfully shitted on, I decided that my voice wasn’t necessary to add just another voice to the cacophony of negativity…however…that changed recently for two major reasons.
The first is that while I see that most people also feel that the album didn’t realize its potential, the discourse mostly rests on the poor decisions Eminem made in crafting this album, and the tone-deaf and half-realized identity of this album, but none really mourn the death of Slim Shady and the album we could have had.
The second thing that spawned this review is me going back recently and listening to the Slim Shady LP, and it reminds me of all the things that I love and hate about Slim Shady, and why he didn’t really make an appearance on this album for me. To me, the conversations that Eminem holds with his old alter ego are shallow and don’t actually acknowledge the depth that the character held, or offer much to the wave of artists that he inspires not only stylistically, but in content as well.
Rather than this being a moment to shit on Eminem, I would rather take this time to mourn and eulogize Slim Shady, and hopefully describe what I think this album could’ve been in a way that might recover some of what was lost. If you’ve never listened to the Slim Shady LP, it’s the album we first get introduced to the character of Slim Shady and one of my favorite Eminem projects.
Full of Dr. Dre beats and Eminem’s charismatic, zany, funny, and often downright gross and off-putting rhymes, it’s an album that feels like catching Adult Swim late at night as a kid. It’s brash and immature, but it’s also amusing and honestly, charming.
Slim Shady is the embodiment of adolescent angst and the mask that we can often create as kids to protect ourselves from the world. Even many of the stories that Slim Shady tells sound like the crazy disturbing stories that “troubled” teens be telling you, so full of horrifying detail and ridiculous half-truths that you can’t tell what’s real or fake, you can just tell that this kid has gone through some SHIT. It WORKS because he is a kid. Or…kid-ish. He was 27 when the Slim Shady LP came out, but that’s a far cry from the 51 years that he is now, and it’s clear that his connection to his youth was much stronger at that time.
Beyond that, Eminem’s immature and offensive language at that time was much more a reflection of the environment. Of being a poor white kid in Detroit and coming out of battle rap that is built upon dissing and disrespect. Of being a genuine dysfunctional alcoholic pillhead who had a deep maternal trauma that was reflected in his romantic relationships. Slim Shady was fucked up, but he was genuine and relatable. It’s why though Eminem is a rap superstar today, he has always been a favorite of the edgy outcasts and nerdy hoodie backpack kids, something that I genuinely think Eminem dislikes.
Ironically, one of Eminem’s most iconic records is his song “Stan” off of “The Marshall Mathers LP”, where he takes the perspective of an obsessed fan writing letters to him. While this song does a good job of detailing the parasocial dependency of fanatics, I also think that Eminem failed to realize how much his music connected to “Stans” and the fact that his song was indicative of something much deeper than one or two obsessed fans.
All the weirdos that Eminem attracts are due to the message and persona that embodies much of his earlier work, and as this fanbase grew, Eminem gradually became more and more distanced from them, leaning into his status and ego which was more acclimated towards rap superstardom than the edgy outcast he started as. There is also another large contingent of Eminem fans that are the white "I don't listen to rap but I like Eminem" crowd, which Eminem has always had a weird love-hate relationship with, leading to moments where he is talking about awfully hot coffee pots, but I don't think this album was for them so there's no real need to talk about them. Or maybe it was crafted with them too much in mind because the central point is that many of his fans that connected with the character of Slim Shady were an outcast-y, weird, in-pain crowd that Marshall Mathers, being the introvert that he is, didn't like interacting with, especially as he started to pull himself together a bit more over the years. I think this has, in turn, colored Eminem's outlook on the character of Slim Shady. While he will always recognize and appreciate what the character did for him, I don't think he can truly empathize and connect with that old character.
This has made it so that his older songs' dissing critics came off as humorous and irreverent, and today his status and ego make his focus on critics makes him sound bitter and uninspired. Certain topics are best left to underdogs, especially when they become 70% of an album's identity (multiple albums at that). I could go on further on this point, but for this discussion, it is more important to return to the discussion of maturation because though this plays a role it is only part of the story.
What is important to take away from this is to acknowledge that Eminem has and should have changed a lot over the years. Has learned and grown a lot in that time. Grew more as a father, became rich, and focused more on sobriety and family, and since his I’m-the-best -rapper “Rap God” era, his music has become much more focused on the technical genius of rapping, and less about actually reflecting a thought, story, or opinion. Halfway through listening to this new album, I suddenly had a Leo Dicaprio moment, snapped my fingers, and pointed at my phone as I was struck by an epiphany…
Eminem is rap’s Riddler. I couldn’t think of anyone who could appreciate this album more. It’s all about being edgy and wrong and wrapping it all up in some convoluted word problem or conceit.
But let me address this album directly. I will not be breaking it down song by song because I don’t want to and it's wholly unnecessary. If you have someone in your life who is defending this album to you, they are mostly likely saying something like “naw, you don’t get it. It’s a concept album. You have to play it from the beginning to end in order to understand it.” To this I say that this album does indeed tell a story, it’s just a poorly constructed one. The presumed concept is that Eminem is having a nightmare where he is confronted by his Slim Shady alter ego, attempts to address Sim Shady’s immaturity, offensiveness, destructive and toxic behavior, to which Sim Shady responds by bringing up all the success that that dysfunction brought the both of them. This all culminates in a battle between the two for “control” which Eminem wins and then wakes up from his nightmare to find…nothing changed, really.
See all this character development mostly takes place in one track named “Guilty Conscience 2” which appears as track 13 in a 19-track album wherein all the previous songs were a cavalcade of midget jokes, disability jokes, transgender jokes, rape jokes, and on and on and on.
It’s hard to take this album seriously as an address of the toxicity and immaturity of his past persona when it makes up the bulk of this album, usually flouted alongside an odd mix of pride and ire that he holds for being critiqued for his offensive language, and an insistence that he is persecuted when he continues to be one of the highest selling rappers.
Are you mad at critics saying you should be less offensive, or do you also think you should be less offensive since you’re “killing” that character? Do you agree with critics but are still mad at them? I don’t get it. I think that in his addressing the pitfalls of his old character, he failed to acknowledge the real parts of the character that made him so charismatic and charming.
For every “Brain Damage” or “Cum on Everybody” he had on Slim Shady LP, there was a “Rock Bottom” or “If I Had” that talked about Eminem’s struggles with poverty, depression, isolation, and drug addiction, which provides some body and context for the vivid and disturbing pictures he often painted in his music. The Slim Shady that shows up on this most recent album reflects very little of this nuance, and he comes off much more as a parody of his old self.
My issue with this album has very little to do with anything offensive he said on this album. In fact, having just listened to just 3 songs off a Slim Shady LP, I can say with confidence that Eminem’s most offensive bars in this new album don’t even come close to his old offensive bars, which is ironic since so much of this album’s identity is this war against Politically Correct culture and internet social justice warriors.
This is important because it shows that Eminem’s brash and untamed persona he displays on this album is still highly cognizant of what is marketable and what is not. He takes shots at Caitlyn Jenner a lot on this album and even pokes fun at her sex change, but he doesn’t misgender her once. As someone who listens to a lot of rap, I promise you this was done very purposely. He frequently makes fun of little people and calls them “midgets” but let’s be real, midget falls on the Eskimo end of the spectrum when it comes to offensive language, with many people unaware of the offensive etymology of the words, or caring. Shoot, Drake calls Kendrick a midget in his first diss response “Pushups” and everyone sings that part with their whole chest.
This album feels disingenuous, lambasting your old persona for his behavior while still exhibiting that behavior currently for continued profit, and also somehow upset with the world for critiquing your art. He even compares himself to Dababy when it comes to cancel culture, and it would maybe take a whole other paper to address why that is so tone-deaf.
And that reflects the heart of the issue with this album, and really most of Eminem's recent albums, he’s out of touch. Who woulda thought that reading dictionaries inside all day and having more success and riches than you know what to do with might result in Eminem’s music, which was so full of conflict and stress, to be affected?
Now do I think that Eminem will never have another good album, or that he can’t make good music anymore? Not at all. In fact, I am praying that even with how badly I think he executed this album, he does retire that “persona” of his and we can get some music that isn’t talking about how much critiques hate him, how many minority groups hate him, how he can jump over short people, and trip over Caitlyn Jenner…maybe the Caitlyn Jenner jokes can stay cause she’s a terrible person, but that’s all! Peace!
Citations
Brown, Adrienne Maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press, 2017.
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