“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” Dylan Thomas wrote in 1947, and that sentiment appears to be guiding Marshall Mathers III – or rather his alter ego, Slim Shady, who has been resuscitated, stumbling bleary-eyed through not only a different century but also a different climate.
From Wu Tang Clan to MF Doom, hip hop has a rich history of its players wrestling with personas and superheroes, a way in part of feeling empowered when historically disenfranchised. It is an interesting way to work through demons, power dynamics, the world that was inherited and the world that is yet to come.
Eminem is no exception, and on his 12th studio album he uses Shady as a way to perhaps defeat his ego, his past and his prejudices. While he might want to lay that ghost to rest, it is an uneasy funeral, acknowledging his debt to a persona that broke him through the underground rap scene of Detroit in the 1990s. It is a compelling and uncomfortable paradox that has always been his power and his problem: a man well versed in offensive slurs is also a supporter of women’s rights (most recently after the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade).
The darkly masterful opening track, Renaissance, travels “inside the mind of a hater”, specifically hip-hop fans who “pick apart a Picasso and make excuses to hate”. Habits wants to remind us that anyone “calling Shady misogynistic” should bear in mind that he’s raised “three daughters, two graduated from college with honours”, but it also states that “the world isn’t one big liberal-arts-college campus”.
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Two album highlights reunite him with his old friend Dr Dre, who brings swaggering production to Lucifer and Guilty Conscience 2 (a follow-up to 1999′s outing), where Eminem raps “Used to read comic books to learn more words, ‘cause deep down I’m a dork” as he enters a dialogue between himself and his alter ego. “You’re me and we’re a team.” Complications abound. For every furious slander and insult – for example, goading Gen Z on Antichrist: “Someone needs to come and press the reset button” – there is a strange vulnerability at work, too, as on the delicate Temporary or Somebody Save Me.
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The production is at times dazzling. The banging frequencies of Fuel (with JID) complement the squelching squall of Bad One, where Eminem rues “all these corny white rappers, I ain’t a fan of it, it ain’t my fault, but like sock puppets I had a hand in it”, which prefaces the elegant grime of Tobey, a dizzingly good an all-Detroit affair with Big Sean and BabyTron.
Marshall Mathers III is an equal-opportunities offender as Slim Shady, but his lyrical dexterity remains heavyweight, and he seeks to provoke those who dwell in self-righteousness without self-interrogation. It is not a baseless exercise.
