Marshall Mathers as Eminem and Slim Shady, 2024

For the past 25 years, Eminem has held his ground in the epic battle for lyricist champion of the world, staying on top against rival legends and ready to knock out any up-and-coming heavyweights who try to steal his title. [1] His career has unfolded in a cascade of superlatives: he consistently breaks streaming and Billboard chart records, cops the industry’s most prestigious awards, and stands today as the biggest selling rap artist of all time.Yet even while held in highest esteem, Eminem as an artist is underestimated, the value of his music lost in the mix when thrown to the wolves of a social media culture ravenous for sensation and clicks. The stans’ ears are Teflon to the ­naysayers: trained in the mechanics of rap and focused on the craft, they know Eminem’s worth. It’s the ­others – those who scratch the surface of the record as they downplay it – who need to catch up.

Eminem’s recently released 12th studio album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), offers an extraordinary opportunity to do so. By describing it on Instagram as a “conceptual” album, Eminem invited listeners to chase the wordplay beyond words as they seek deeper understanding of what it means to rap back at cancel culture. The album’s plot – which involves Eminem ­resurrecting and then mercy killing his evil alter ego Slim Shady – riffs on that theme rather than telling a story that exemplifies it, as a concept album might. Marshall Mathers, the person behind the artistic persona of Eminem, constantly switches up who will get the mic – whether he’ll give it to himself, Eminem, or his alter ego, Shady. This creates a polyphony of narrative voices and keeps ­listeners guessing. Rapping with Shady in his rearview mirror, Mathers plays back his back catalogue in his mind’s ear, connecting with Shady’s stories, rhymes, beats, bars, and themes as he drives forward with the latest installment of the Marvel-like music series he has created based on him – in hot pursuit of the truth about how rap frees speech in a world hell-bent on freeing listeners from offense.

This is a timely moment for Eminem to be addressing cancel culture, given widespread censorship and the global threats to freedom of expression. When an AI-generated Slim Shady walks through the portal on “Houdini” or faces off with Mathers in the Complex Cover series, he gives viewers the chance to reflect on why rap lyrics hit differently in the aughts than now, and whether the meaning of offense is contingent, morphing as it moves from the streets into art and through time. [2] The US Federal Communications Commission’s accusation of obscenity against “The Real Slim Shady” in 2000, based on community standards that no community actually upheld, gives pause for thought about those who put rap on trial for ever-new reasons today – even as kids bop to Cardi B’s “WAP” and Eminem’s classic song now surpasses one million streams a day. [3] And what of Lynne Cheney’s attempt back then to listen to Hip Hop straight and put it in a straitjacket? When during a Senate ­hearing in 2000 she called out Eminem as a “violent misogynist” for the song “Kill You,” she mistook art for reality by conflating his characters with his character and storylines with lies about what she imagined white trash to be. Eminem defied her gag order on songs like “Without Me” and “White America” (2002). Shady’s return now is a wake-up call not to forget this history as we enter an era of ever more lethal misreadings.

Eminem’s fans train in speaking truth to power by flexing their verbal imaginations as they dig deep into the hidden meanings of his multilayered wordplay. Following the trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs that he creates as he flips words and scripts on The Death of Slim Shady, his fans tackle cancellation in all its forms, from being banned or silenced for allegedly offending, to being slayed by an opponent in a rap battle, ostracized, or lost to addiction or fame, socially dead, dehumanized, and much more. Conditioning their cognitive muscles on double and triple entendres stretched to fit both beat and form, they acquire the skills to outwit and outspeak their opponents in battle, and to stand up to anybody who instrumentalizes language to nefarious ends.

Let’s take a look at how this all works in “Guilty Conscience 2” – the album’s turning point – in which Mathers and Slim Shady lock horns in a comic verbal duel to the death. Few rappers possess the skill to battle earlier ­versions of themselves – a feat some incredulous fans assume Mathers pulled off with the help of AI, though he didn’t. This track is a palimpsest of at least two early songs – each based on the technique of dialogue that Mathers has used throughout his career to unlock his deepest ­reflections. [4] The original “Guilty Conscience” from The Slim Shady LP (1999) presented a series of skits in which Dr. Dre played the good conscience to Shady’s bad, ultimately succumbing to Shady’s evil ways over a classic Dre vamp. On “My Darling” from the ­deluxe edition of Relapse (2009), Eminem echoes the unbothered delivery on his megahit “Superman” (2002) as he brags over a slithering beat about his ability to beat his demons. His ennui dissipates when he is confronted by the dark shadow of his own voice as Shady/­Mephistopheles, who tries to lure him back into the vortex of his addiction, even enlisting Dr. Dre to cement the Faustian pact that allows them all to profit from keeping Eminem high and Shady busting rhymes. Eminem smashes the mirror reflecting back Shady as his darker side (3:48), ­grabbing for his chainsaw to kill him at the song’s climax (but in a funny kind of way).

In “Guilty Conscience 2,” by contrast, Mathers himself is back and chill, bantering with Shady about offending and taking offense over a swaggering groove cocreated by Fredwreck and Dem Jointz – the next-level musical wizards from the ICU who join Mathers and Dre in producing this song. Locking into the pocket with the precision of John Coltrane’s quartet or Miles Davis’s quintet at their prime, they achieve the type of synergy only a seasoned crew can offer – the musical depth of relation and loving connection that shatters cancellation and that is also expressed in Mathers and Dre working their West Coast magic on “Lucifer.” The squad drops a diamond of stand-up comedy in sound by ­complementing Mathers’s and Shady’s impeccable timing and deadpan punchlines with the sustained suspense of a day-of-judgement-choir-driven vamp that builds to a climax through rhythmic breaks, nuanced instrumental layering, and slapstick sound effects. All of this is effortless – the underscoring genius precisely because it doesn’t draw attention to itself and blends so well with the lyrics.

Fredwreck and Dem Jointz in the studio, 2022

Mathers kills the beat, inviting us to ­luxuriate in the sheer pleasure of his craft. Take the ­moment he raps three homophones – core nerd/­cornered/coroner – before asking Shady “What shot is this?” Shady’s response of “third” is a laugh-out-loud punch line (0:30), given that Mathers made history for convincing people they “only get one shot” (“Lose Yourself,” 2002). [5] Or what about when Shady riffs distastefully on being “up to here” with little people while deaf people have “it up to hear with me too” (1:56–2:08). These moments raise the question of whether clever rhyme dilutes offense, or allows us to reflect ironically on it. As one of the most critically self-reflective rappers in the business, Mathers is a genius at getting into the minds of those who harm others and spilling their contents out into perfectly calculated rhymes for the world to contemplate. [6] By allowing both himself and Shady to offend, take offense, and go on the ­offensive in the ­rapid-fire blame game of this song, he offers listeners the chance to reflect on their own practices and limits.

The pièce de résistance is the palindromic structure of “Guilty Conscience 2” – the smashed mirror from “My Darling” made structural flesh as Mathers retreats and Shady takes over around the song’s midpoint (3:00). [7] Shady’s voice bulks up like a sonic Incredible Hulk as he merges with Mathers by mimicking his flow and more recent rapid-style delivery. In the end, Mathers outmaneuvers him, lyrically slaying him with ­apologies to those he’s buried in the past – an ounce of respect to offset the destruction (4:22). The line “Shady made me, but tonight Shady’s rock-a-bye baby” from “When I’m Gone” (2005) wafts through Mathers’s dreamlike consciousness as he takes Shady out (4:46), foreshadowing the theme developed in the last part of the album. But even though Mathers awakens from this nightmare, it’s Shady who gets the last laugh – both literally and metaphorically – on the song.

The fight over who has canceled whom remains too close to call, leaving listeners wondering who ultimately survived to take control of the album. Hearing the tracks in order, one might conclude that Mathers prevailed, evolving as an artist by integrating his alter ego into himself. More preoccupied with his own mortality after Shady’s death, he cultivates his legacy, using features to express loyalty to his people – for example, by spotlighting rising Shady Records star Ez Mil, who hits the ground running on “Head Honcho.” But this is only part of the story. Fueled by the game of signifying, some fans have gone down the rabbit hole of listening to the sequence of songs on the album backward, discovering what would have happened if Mathers had lost this battle and died of an overdose in 2007, ­leaving Shady to taunt future generations from the crypt – his youthful, raw verbal punches frozen for eternity on vinyl. Reverse listening can feel like “rewinding the tape” – one of Mathers’s favored metaphors for turning back time to alter course on bad decisions and habits, or for waking up from a bad dream. By suggesting that time can move backward and forward and that this album’s concept is thus a two-way street, he invites listeners to think of cancellation dialectically in relation to acceptance, holding both possibilities in tension with each other for the entire length of the journey.

The Death of Slim Shady wouldn’t be an ­­Eminem album without an emotional punch – the gut-wrenching ballads that get to the heart of the matter and bring the message home. Eminem often shifts emotional registers, styles, and genres in these anthems, which feature hit choruses crafted from reframed sampled verses sung by queens of the Eminem hook like Skylar Gray. On “Temporary,” Mathers returns at his most vulnerable as he raps a letter for his ­daughter Hailie Jade to read after his death – or, in terms of the storyline, his symbolic demise on the album. Torn apart by the thought of Hailie losing him – or perhaps of letting her go as she ­marries and leaves the nest – he chokes up (2:24 and 3:38), his staccato vows to protect her, ­echoing the anguished bars of guilty conscience over ­failing to prevent his best friend Proof’s death to gun violence on the 2017 song “Arose” (at 1:43). Mathers strips the concept of cancellation down to its raw core here, channeling the pain of his own childhood abandonment and abuse into a fierce will to love and protect his ­daughter.

That love is palpable as well in the cognitive dissonance created when he admonishes himself for failing to quit drugs even while his rapping presence attests to his recovery in “Somebody Save Me” (2:06). Viscerally shaken, listeners ­realize that Mathers is here now because he chose self-love over self-hate then, pivoting back to life on the force of a multisyllabic rhyme – “alternate reality” to “I’ll turn it and be able to” – in the run-up to the final chorus of that song (2:52). What a soul-shaking capture of the temporality of recovery as a convergence of past, present, and future embodied in the commitment reaffirmed daily to love oneself and stay clean. [8] The album hits rock bottom on the necropolitics of ­American empire – also explicitly addressed in JID’s lit verses on “Fuel” – which reduces impoverished and ­racialized communities (like Mathers’s was) to bare life, and doubles down on destroying those who spit back rhymes of refusal or survive in spite of ­attempts at their violent erasure.

For all these reasons, I will have The Death of Slim Shady on first rotation as I attempt to forge a path forward from the bitter dissension and mutual cancellation on campus last year by teaching Hip-Hop beefs at UCLA this spring. Sharpening our wits and tongues on Eminem’s bars, ­learning to practice self-love, care of community, and empathy by listening to him rhyme the pain we cannot speak, grooving to the best beats in the business, and entering the ring of his rap battles to hone our skills at free speech and spar with offense, those of us who love him and care about the culture will fight to create a better world.

Eminem, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), Shady Records, Aftermath, Interscope, 2024.

Tamara Levitz is a professor of Comparative Literature and Musicology and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA. For the past decade, she has researched structures of white supremacy and racial exclusion in the formation of music disciplines and comparative literature in the United States. She is currently completing a book on Deracializing Academic Freedom.

Image credit: © Cian Moore; Courtesy of Fred Nassar