The world has changed dramatically, yet Eminem remains pretty much the same as he ever was. Yawn.īesides, is there anyone left who feels so connected to Mathers’ persona that they’d kill him? Or even get a tattoo for him? To put it a different way, a lot of shit has gone down since Eminem performed that duet with Elton John. He’s the dark side of our subconscious, our collective id run amok. It’s an intriguing twist-Stan acting out his own “‘97 Bonnie & Clyde”-but as the song enters its seventh minute, Em sheds the disguise and starts rapping his press release. SPOILER ALERT: Eminem isn’t rapping as Eminem, but as an Eminem fan out for revenge on his hero. On opener “Bad Guy,” he raps (again) about premeditated murder and wallows in the grisly details: picking out the right knife, finding the back door unlocked, stowing the body in trunk. Think more along the lines of The Phantom Menace. It’s almost unfair to compare the sequel with the original. Nostalgia is the natural state of the old school, so rather than look forward, Eminem is content to gaze backwards, in particular at the album that represents the height of everything: fame, relevance, ability. Either he didn’t want to look too intently inward or he simply couldn’t.
Even 2009’s Relapse, on which he pondered his own drug addiction, Eminem sounded detached-never quite present even as he perpetuated the same beefs and boasts. His last few albums, starting around 2004’s uneven Encore, have all shown a man who had conquered the world but wasn’t sure what to do next. In other words, Mathers is no longer the vanguard he’s the old school.
He’s been overtaken by emcees with more innovative rhymes (Lil Wayne), sharper storytelling (Kendrick Lamar), greater charisma (Danny Brown) and more incisive shock value (Odd Future). Thirteen years later, Eminem remains eminently popular, but it’s clear he no longer holds the same vaunted spot in pop culture or even in rap music. “Stan” was the standout, of course, but songs like “Kill You” and “The Real Slim Shady” showed just how mighty his flow was and just how deep his self-hatred. In contrast to the human cartoon he played on The Slim Shady LP the year before, The Marshall Mathers LP he turned young-white-disenfranchised-dude anger into something like poetry, probing his soul for any shred of humanity and plumbing his tense relationship with his own fans.
In 2000, the kid born Marshall Mathers vented his deepest frustrations with the world and became the world’s greatest rapper. The “2” in the title of Eminem’s latest is almost nonsensically desperate.
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