When Eminem unveiled his latest album title in April, he left one big, looming question: What did he intend, exactly, with “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)”?
Early Friday morning, the answer finally arrived. Eminem has buried his wicked alter ego before the culture of 2024 does it for him.
The first two-thirds of the Detroit rapper’s new album is a broadside of in-your-face shock rap, with an occasional old-school feel that revives the vocal mannerisms and mean streak of his Slim Shady persona. It’s a voice that unleashes its venom on hearing-impaired people, the trans community, overweight people, disabled people and the pronoun-conscious. The lyrical targets are wide-ranging — from Lizzo to MAGA pundit Candace Owens — while jabs at Caitlyn Jenner and the late Christopher Reeve are a running theme.
And then comes “Guilty Conscience 2,” a verbal showdown between Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady. “You’re still mentally 13 / And still thirsty for some controversy,” the rapper tells his evil twin before the inner monologue delivers its kill shot: “I’m welcoming you to my last hurrah / I bid you goodbye / Murder-suicide.”
Earlier on the album, in a kind of over-the-top, hall-of-mirrors parody, songs such as “Evil,” “Antichrist” and the Dr. Dre-produced “Lucifer” play up Shady’s rotten-to-the-core reputation while anticipating backlash from feminists, Gen Z and other perceived would-be censors.
“Somebody needs to come and hit the reset button back to 2003 / Because how did we get stuck in this woke BS?” Shady raps.
It’s controversy for controversy’s sake, once a staple of Eminem’s creative repertoire but now delivered by a 51-year-old artist who seems to be thinking hard about his legacy and place in hip-hop, as his 2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction speech made clear. It might be easy to accuse him of having his cake and eating it too — spewing lyrical nastiness while blaming it on a character — but the reality is more nuanced.
Eminem alerted fans Thursday that “The Death of Slim Shady” is “a conceptual album” that should be absorbed in order. It certainly unfolds that way for those first 13 tracks, but the remainder of the record is a thematic mixed bag, seemingly disconnected from what preceded it. The closing stretch features a pair of slower-paced songs addressed to family — “Temporary” and the Jelly Roll-sampling “Somebody Save Me” — that feel oddly tacked on.
The album is a Detroit-heavy work, featuring a slew of work with longtime keyboardist-writer Luis Resto, a cameo from old D12 colleague Bizarre (“Antichrist”) and a fake news segment voiced by WDIV-TV’s Devin Scillian and Kimberly Gill.
“Detroit rapper Eminem, in a stunning move, has released an album in which he is actually trying to cancel himself,” Scillian intones, while Gill “reports” from the scene of downtown demonstrations against the rapper.
The album is lined with shades of “The Eminem Show” and “Encore” (quite literally in the case of “Brand New Dance,” largely recorded in 2004), though it wouldn’t be accurate to call it a retro work. The production is tight, the wordplay dependably clever, the vocal flow confident and versatile.
Dre, making his first significant contributions to an Eminem album in several years, is in the co-producer seat twice (“Lucifer,” “Road Rage”), though his voice doesn’t appear. Guests include longtime collaborator Skylar Grey (“Temporary”), Shady Records artist Ez Mil (“Head Honcho”) and Detroit rappers Big Sean and BabyTron (“Tobey”), while “Fuel” is a hard-hitting track with a fiery contribution from Atlanta’s JID.
All told, it appears that Slim Shady — the savage, unhinged alter ego deployed by Eminem as a creative device for more than a quarter-century — has been laid to rest. It was a persona he infamously concocted while sitting on a toilet circa 1997, as the struggling rapper brainstormed a path out of his stagnation on Detroit’s hip-hop scene.
The new album’s buildup had already offered a few clues. The upbeat single “Houdini,” a callback to the 2002 hit “Without Me,” suggested a disappearing act — a message bolstered by an accompanying social media post in which Eminem declared it to be his “last trick.”
And there was the black-and-white ad placed in the May 13 edition of the Detroit Free Press, a faux obituary noting Slim Shady’s “sudden and horrific end.” It was followed weeks later by an online clip portraying the character’s headstone.
The cover features Eminem peering out from a body bag and comes stamped with an old-fashioned nod to the ’90s — a “PARENTAL ADVISORY” label warning listeners of explicit content.
