“You created me to say everything you didn’t have the balls to say,” raps Eminem, or, more technically, his alter ego Slim Shady on “Guilty Conscience 2,” a cut off the emcee’s 12th album “The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce).” Over a brooding, stormy instrumental, Em takes the original song’s conceit — playing bad guy to Dr. Dre’s sounder mind — to pore over the damage that Slim has inflicted on his career and artistry.
In the end, though, Em has had enough, and pulls the trigger on the character that manifested the darkest corners of his id. Or did he? “Paul,” he frantically tells his longtime manager Paul Rosenberg over the phone. “I had this dream, it was fucking crazy, it was like the old me came back and the new me and took over my brain and had me saying all this fucked up shit.”
It’s a well-worn conceit to cap off an otherwise compelling concept. And it’s tantamount to how often Eminem can get in his own way, even when he’s operating on the highest possible lyrical plane. Like many of Eminem’s albums, “The Death of Slim Shady” rests on tropes and themes he’s explored time and again. There are numerous whacks at Caitlyn Jenner and Christopher Reeve (20 years after his death, mind you); transphobia, fatphobia and homophobia; digs at the mentally disabled. Pretty much everything you’d expect from Eminem, ever the provocateur.
Of course, he’s had plenty of detractors over the years calling for his cancellation — a newscaster says as much on the album’s “Breaking News” interlude — but this is par for the course for the 51-year-old, and no matter how many Lizzo jokes he cracks, it won’t dent his legacy. And it makes the album exactly what it shouldn’t be at this point in such a storied career: predictable. “The Death of Slim Shady” was promised to be a concept album, one to be experienced from front to back, something new and fresh in the Eminem canon. And in some ways it is, letting Slim out of the cage for one last hurrah in a concerted attempt to shock and awe, which he does sometimes to great effect, other times not.
But he’s been here before, and the concept starts to wear thin when you realize that Slim isn’t really going anywhere. After all, who is Eminem without Slim Shady? Mawkish and tepidly reflective, as it turned out on 2017’s “Revival.” It’s damned if you do: lean too much into the explicit entropy of his Slim Shady persona and it’s callow and low-brow; keenly observe the world around you with a fine-point pen and you’ve lost your edge.
So he largely settles for the former on “The Death of Slim Shady,” an album buoyed by its technical prowess and bogged by its crass subjectivism. Eminem’s hyper-competence as an emcee has staked claim for him as one of the best rappers to ever grace the mic, so it’s a wonder that he can’t always find a way to usefully deploy it. For every “Renaissance,” the album’s opening salvo that expertly toys with homophone in a critical tongue-lashing, there’s a “Brand New Dance,” a three-and-a-half minute wisecrack where he encourages listeners to “dance until you’re wheelchair bound” so they can bust a move like Reeve. (The joke, in case you missed it, is that Reeve was paralyzed.)
You can either laugh along with or cringe at the album. You can marvel at the lyrical aptitude conveyed on the Dr. Dre co-produced “Lucifer,” one of the record’s best, or bristle at its dated reference to Amber Heard and Johnny Depp’s relationship. Or both. It’s hard to tell where the fun begins and the comedy ends here, in a way that Eminem’s music has often challenged listeners to reconcile with their own moral standings. And in that way, “The Death of Slim Shady” succeeds in making you question what being politically correct really means. If only this territory hadn’t been trodden for decades.
Where Eminem does excel is in the album’s moments of self-reflection, mining from his own reality. “Temporary” featuring Skylar Grey is Eminem at his best, an ode to his daughter Hailey that features archival audio of her as a baby and is intended as a remembrance of his love for her when he’s no longer here. “Somebody Save Me,” built on a sample (or re-recording) of Jelly Roll’s “Save Me,” has a similar effect, playing as an apology to his children for choosing drugs over them.
These songs convey an emotional intelligence and self-awareness that Eminem has consistently shown throughout his career. And it’s what contributes to Eminem’s enduring legacy. He’s a contradiction that allures, entirely capable of analyzing his own tribulations but not above sandwiching them between scat and rape jokes. In that sense, “The Death of Slim Shady” is more of the same — not always bad, but not always good, either.