White rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers) from Detroit joins the legion
of Insane Clown Posse
and Kid Rock: disaffected white kids from the suburbia
that unleashed their angry rants at society through a parody of ghetto music's
street genre.
Infinite (1996) revealed a confident rapper with a prodigious flow,
especially in Infinite, even if the bombastic beats didn't quite merge with the rapping.
The Slim Shady EP (1997), introduced Marshall Mathers' second alter-ego, Slim Shady, an anti-hero with crossover appeal emblematic of Detroit's "white trash" culture of his childhood, the white equivalent of the black-ghetto culture, the foul-mouthed angry under-employed white male and underdog. It was "shock-rap" for a hip-hop audience of "white niggers" that previously didn't exist.
The Slim Shady LP (Universal, 1999), co-produced with rap star Dr Dre of
NWA, highlights Mathers' carefree and
sarcastic attitude (the hit single My Name Is..., the follow-up
Just Don't Give A Fuck),
besides his tormented youth (Brain Damage, Rock Bottom),
his freudian sense of guilt (Guilty Conscience
and the questionable antisocial preaching of
his perverted fantasies, which frequently involve his own daughter
(97' Bonnie & Clyde, in which his baby's mother gets killed and the baby
helps him throw the body in the ocean, Bad Meets Evil).
Mathers' songs are crafted with a parsimonious choice of instruments and
a modicum of syncopated rhythms.
Notwithstanding Mathers' macho humour (particularly bitter when addressing
pop icons like Spice Girls or Pamela Anderson),
a sense of desolation and even loneliness permeates the music,
which ultimately reflects the doom and weltanschaung of the urban misfits.
And the closing Still Don't Give A recapitulates this tragic leitmotiv
in a quasi-classical epic.
The album topped the charts for weeks in 2000.
The Marshall Mathers LP (Columbia, 2000) refined that approach. Eminem's
salacious fantasies of Britney Spears and other assorted
"bitches", "sluts" and "faggots"
are crowd-pleasers (if the crowd is morbid
enough, as crowds tend to be), but the art is elsewhere: Stan (whose
rude male rap alternates with an angelic female lullaby over sounds of a storm
and a Neil Young-ian rhythm) and Kim (whose thundering, symphonic
score punctuates the screams of two arguing lovers and contrasts with a
romantic melody a` la Francoise Hardy)
are psychodramas (not only songs) that
force hyper-realism into rap music the same way the
Doors forced drugs into pop music.
It is not a coincidence that Mathers' tragic peak comes
with the post-Morrison Freudian nightmare of Kill You, a rap (paced
by brutal pauses) that sweeps away any remaining taboos about sex and violence,
a conversation piece in which vulgar language becomes "the" poetic language.
To emphasize the melodrama, The Way I Am employs even death bells and a
Beethoven-ish piano figure, and its rap is as visceral and desperate as
Eminem music can be.
When it works, Eminem's pantomime is a force of nature.
On the other hand, The Real Slim Shady is a farcical rigmarole with
a vaudeville-esque rhythm, I'm Back is virtually a cabaret number
turned rap, Drug Ballad employs a stomping beat, a strummed piano
and girl-group backing vocals,
Criminal sounds like a mockery of Eminem's own hit My Name Is,
and Marshall Mathers is a parody that borrows from Broadway
musicals and western soundtracks:
Mathers has no respect for his own art.
Mathers is a calculating pop phenomenon (songs alternate with brief spoken
interludes of people commenting on Eminem's attitude, of he having oral sex
with two guys, etc, the ultimate form of self-glorification) that viscerally
exposes calculating pop phenomena.
The album sold 15 million copies in two years.
The single Without Me is the only "consummable" song on Eminem's fourth
album,
Show (Columbia, 2002),
which, for the most part, spends more time promoting Eminem
than in creating art. Compared with the previous output, this is Eminem's
"serious", "mature" and "adult" album.
Like David Bowie and other pop stars before him, he is beginning to worship
his own life/art relationship in a subtle bid to self-craft a personality cult.
Alas, it is also the one in
which the listener is subjected to an endless, unbearable rosary of his heroic
attitudes in a hostile and hypocritical world
(Without Me, Squaredance, Soldier,
Cleaning Out My Closet, Say Goodbye Hollywood,
When The Music Stops).
Angst is ok (White America), but repeated self-immolation is ok
only if followed by facts, whereas this album seems much more
interested in immortality than in immolation.
Nods to Aerosmith (Sing for the Moment) and
Pink Floyd ('Till I Collapse) and Dr Dre's contributions
(Business, the best hip-hop number, and the duet
Say What You Say) are not enough to change the impression of
a monolithic uniformity:
musically, the album is impeccably produced, but repetitive to boredom.
If Eminem ever had a sense of humour, it's gone
(except for the closing My Dad's Gone Crazy), and it has not
been replaced by an adequate sociopolitical reportage, since Eminem mainly
"reports" about himself.
Eminem's artistic collapse continued on Encore (Shady, 2004), on which
the provocative angst of the early albums was replaced by a sort of parody of
such angst (Rain Man).
A few rhymes (Crazy in Love), rhythms (Evil Deeds) and melodies (Yellow Brick Road) are genuinely inspired, but, let's face it,
his Freudian self-analysis stinks,
his Slim Shady alter-ego is yesterday's news and his self-reflections about his own celebrity are becoming quite annoying.
His attempt at politics in Mosh is childish at best.
He seems to thrive on controversy, not art.
But then, maybe, that's precisely what his career is all about: turning
controversy into an art.
Presents (2007) is a mixtape, another sign of artistic decline.
Relapse (Interscope, 2009), his first album in five years,
avails itself of Dr Dre's beats in a cynical but enigmatic manner.
It is hard to believe that this is the same artist who made
The Slim Shady LP. A couple of raps are convincing
(We Made You, Dejavu) but mostly this is serviceable... dejavu.
Despite being propelled by the singles
Not Afraid
and (especially) Love the Way You Lie,
its successor Recovery (2010) was not any better.
Having finally realized that his lyrics were mediocre and trivial, the world
expected to find some music on his albums, and the problem was that Eminem
was not a skilled composer either. Worse: his choice of producers yielded
some of the most trivial beats in the business. Eminem kept indulging in his
old fare (that few still cared for) and only accidentally stumbled onto
interesting/disturbing material such as
Won't Back Down and Going Through Changes.
All subsequent Eminem albums were so full of filler that the "skip" button was a necessary accessory to the listening experience.
The 16-song The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013) has perhaps four decent songs.
Rick Rubin, the inventor of rap-rock, produced Rhyme or Reason, So Far, Berzerk and
Love Game (featuring Kendrick Lamar),
DJ Khalil produced Survival,
Emile produced Legacy and Headlights,
Aaron "Aalias" Kleinstub produced The Monster (featuring Rihanna).
Eminem sounds like an alcoholic who gets angry at everything on
Revival (2017), but nothing sounds sincere, and the production is
so basic that this can hardly be called "music".
Beyonce sings in the lead single Walk on Water, produced by Rick Rubin and Holly "Skylar Grey" Hafermann.
River (featuring Ed Sheeran) is a collaboration with Emile Haynie (Lana Del Rey's and Bruno Mars' producer).
Remind Me samples Joan Jett's I Love Rock 'n' Roll and In Your Head samples the Cranberries' Zombie.
Kamikaze (2018) contains
Greatest (the best hook) and the single
Lucky You, produced by Matthew "Boi-1da" Samuels.
Music to Be Murdered By (2020) contains one lyrical gem,
Darkness (produced by his old buddies
Ryan "Royce Da 5'9"" Montgomery and Luis Resto), and decent average stuff like Godzilla, Lock it Up (with Anderson Paak)
and No Regrets,
but also a lot of awful moments like Stepdad, despite the production of The Alchemist.
The Death of Slim Shady (2024) marked the end of the Slim Shady saga.
Houdini was the opening single.
