Eminem - The Rap Singer

My heir? I don't know (…) I like Eminem. He writes well.

(Bob Dylan)

“There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around his generation. (…) He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.”

“My brain is dead, i don’t need a second opinion”

Marshall Bruce Mathers III aka Marshall Mathers aka M&M aka Bad Meets Evil aka Eminem aka The Slim Shady. And we could go on for half a page before thinning out the trail of names, nicknames and pseudonyms spawned by the brilliant, perverse mind of this son of the demise of 1960s American dreams (he was born, and certain dates are never random, in 1972, the year of Watergate, the beginning of the end of innocence). An artist who is, at once, lavishly crowned (more than 200 million records sold, 15 Grammy Awards, 17 Billboard Music Awards, an Oscar for Best Original Song, 10 Billboard number-one albums, the best-selling hip-hop artist of all time) and underrated, a controversial and predictable figure, a man shameless and unabashed, yet elusive (his maximum media exposure of personal matters paradoxically corresponds to an irreducible form of reticence: the most disarming sincerity that becomes a lie through a sort of uncertainty principle whereby the closer you look at a figure's life, the less you manage to grasp his identity and meaning).

The first great rap singer, the biggest pop star in the history of this music, a figure who embodies the sum total of 90s hip-hop while also marking the definitive shift of the classic style into cartoonish hyperrealism (the "South Park" style of Parker & Stone: in one song he even calls himself "like some 26 years old skinny Eric Cartman"), multimedia and pseudo-cinematic. The performer who absorbed from the underground the most neurotic, syncopated rhyming and turned it into an inimitable narrative, declamatory, epistolary style. Who turned music into the soundtrack of an endless autobiographical reality show, and turned dissing, amplified to a philosophical, universal, planetary scale, into a communicative strategy to shatter the taboos of the culture industry and American society, to reveal its dark side and stigmatize its hypocritical moral double standards.

For some: just a Beastie Boy or a Vanilla Ice taken to the nth degree. For others (and we count ourselves among them): one of the highest cultural and musical icons of the new millennium, an artist who, in the history of hip-hop, has been, simultaneously and necessarily on a smaller scale, Dylan (for the linguistic and literary revolution of his lyrics, which sublimates the racial element and turns slang and foul language into visionary lyricism), Bowie (for the theatrical aesthetic of his staging, for having plunged music into a kind of multimedia cabaret, and for the ongoing spectacular dissociation of his artistic personality into a series of alter egos) and Presley (for breaking the interracial barrier, the sociological controversies, and the mass idolatry he managed to generate).

The Way I Am – A white trash odissey: da St. Joseph a Detroit 313 e ritorno

Too much ink has already been spilled speculating about his private life and offering summary reconstructions (somewhere between Dickens and J.T. Leroy) of his unhappy childhood; nevertheless, given the umbilical bond that his biography, however reliable, maintains with the development of his art, both aesthetically and conceptually, it's worth briefly summarizing the key milestones.

Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, on October 17, 1972. His father abandoned the family shortly after his birth, and young Marshall grew up with the now-mythologized figure of his mother (later painted, variously, as an addict, a nymphomaniac, a psychopath, an emasculator), moving constantly between his hometown, Kansas City and the suburbs of Detroit, staying, depending on circumstances, in makeshift lodgings, public housing or trailers. Life wasn't easy: in high school he experienced firsthand what it meant to belong to a discriminated "white minority," he was repeatedly a victim of physical and psychological abuse by older classmates, who once beat him nearly to death (as he would later recount in "Brain Damage"), but it was here that he discovered his two great loves: rap music and his future wife Kim (who would also become a protagonist in his family musical/freak show). Held back twice in his senior year, he eventually dropped out without ever graduating.

Luckily, music gave him some satisfaction: in a short time, despite initial skepticism, he achieved considerable popularity as a freestyler on the battle and club circuit of the Motor City: he was the "great white hope," the man to beat for all the city's Black crews.

In 1992 he signed with FBT, the label run by brothers Jeff and Marky Bass (already collaborators of George Clinton in the P-Funk All Stars and key figures, as musicians and producers, in shaping the Eminem sound), but the sudden suicide of his uncle Ronnie (the only family member he had a decent human relationship with) pulled him away from the hip-hop world for a while. He got by working for minimum wage as a cook and dishwasher in local restaurants. He also tried reinventing himself as a group member, first with the New Jacks, then with Soul Intent, with whom he recorded his first single in 1995; finally, backed by most of those who would go on to form D12 (Kon Artis, Proof and the since-disowned Eye-Kyu), he recorded "Infinite," a demo later inflated until it became his first unofficial album, released on the Bass brothers' label, Web.

Infinite (1996) is the rather anonymous work of a budding freestyler trying to showcase his two main gifts. Between generic self-indulgence and a certain Tupac-style street lyricism, the flow, while technically accomplished, is fairly flattened out into an imitation of East Coast models like Nas and Az, and completely lacks the furious shifts in register and the schizoid, virtuosic inflections that would become his trademark. Conceptually: few autobiographical references (in "It's Ok" there's a mention of the birth of his daughter Hallie, the third central and recurring female figure throughout his major work), no monstrous or grotesque fantasies (only in "Maxine" is there an almost Bukowski-esque portrait of a prostitute, complete with the requisite venereal diseases), zero politically incorrect provocations, and no invectives against the entertainment industry or the country's moral and cultural institutions (in "Infinite" there's even a hint of a certain naive spirituality). Musically: a placid funky style, spare, laid-back arrangements, minimal beats, with only the languid, jazzy atmospheres of "313" and "Maxine" standing out.

The album drew modest, mixed reactions (most accused him of copying the style of fashionable Black rappers), and Eminem himself would later speak of it with a certain reluctance, almost embarrassed: "Obviously, I was young and I felt the influence of other artists, (…), on 'Infinite' I was trying to figure out what my style was, how to use my voice and how to present myself. It was a trial that helped me grow. I think of 'Infinite' as kind of a stretched-out demo."

In the meantime, if his career wasn't taking off, things on the personal front were falling apart: Kim left him for good (though in reality it would only be the first of a long series of break-ups and reconciliations), taking Hallie, the daughter the two had together, with her and preventing him from seeing her; Marshall was forced to move back in with his mother, an experience which, combined with heavy abuse of alcohol and every kind of drug, stoked feelings of hatred and self-destruction in him that would culminate in the making of a second demo titled "The Slim Shady Ep". Here, in the company of his second alter ego — the psychopathic, "guilty conscience", "normal as Norman (Bates)", demonic serial killer Shady — the style that would carry him to success began to take shape, at least from a lyrical and aesthetic standpoint.

The Slim Shady Lp: the white knight's revolution

In 1997 he took part in the Rap Olympics Mc Battle in Los Angeles, placing second in the freestyle category, and partly thanks to the promotion around the event, Shady's demo landed on Dr Dre's desk, who listened to it and was immediately won over. The former N.W.A. member, the West Coast's king-maker, godfather of gangsta rap and inventor of g-funk, coming off three lean years following the glory days of Death Row, saw in the huge potential of the young "white knight" a chance to relaunch himself as a producer, and teamed his Aftermath label with the Bass brothers' Web, while Interscope would handle distribution.

When it finally saw the light of day in February 1999, triumphantly heralded by the singles "My Name Is" and "Just Don't Give A Fuck", The Slim Shady Lp was the perfect convergence. The point of no return. A critical mass about to explode. The ordinary day of madness in turn-of-the-millennium America. The record that would renew classic hip-hop on a linguistic, iconographic and musical level. Slim Shady is a Ziggy Stardust of "white trash". The blasphemous, schizophrenic mouthpiece for the rage of the urban underclass. But the constant switching of alter egos, and the three-way standoff between person, persona and antagonist, keep the author from ever taking himself too seriously, letting him slip out of the identification game only to fall back into it at will, turning the record into a hyperrealistic, grand guignol "cabaret of cruelty".

As Luciferian and shape-shifting as Peter Sellers in "Dr. Strangelove", as demented and iconoclastic as that same English actor in "Hollywood Party". Determined to use the world as a scapegoat for all his traumatic repressed baggage and his sense of frustration, Eminem absorbs models borrowed from trash TV (live on-air brawls à la "Jerry Springer"), from the empty, desperate frat-boy humor of college movies, from "adult" cartoons in the wake of "The Simpsons", from the slasher iconography of teen horror films (clearly referenced on the cover), and, thanks to his vivid imagination, his rich vocabulary and an uncommon gift for association, reworks them into a highly personal freak-show blending thaumaturgic self-confession, latent schizophrenia and a sadistic comic-book aesthetic that hits the bullseye of the mass (pre-reality) voyeurism of his era (just think of the endless, morbid multimedia fallout from three defining stories of the decade: the "Sexgate" scandal, the Bobbitt case, and the O.J. Simpson trial).

A spectacular dissociation of artistic personality that shows up not just in the lyrics but also in the vocal delivery: a convulsive alternation of syncopated rhymin', screaming, singing and acting-out, with shifts in tone and caricature-like inflections reminiscent of cartoon dubbing, in a constant "carnivalized" flip-flop between the comic and the tragic, the grotesque and the sublime, allegory and bad taste. Backed musically by Dr Dre and the Bass brothers, Eminem crafts a synthetic blend that is at once futuristic and well-established (a summa of the '90s), refined and stripped-down, fusing the rough, cutting rhythms of East-Coast street hip-hop with the glossy, seductive harmonies and the rhapsodic, booming sounds of West-Coast gangsta rap, and spiking the whole thing with the rocky attitude typical of the Detroit tradition: so in the samples, funk and soul relics marry a certain fairground pop-rock flavor, and the dark, horror-tinged côté meets the frat-boy, circus-like one.

The hilarious fake trailer/warning that ironically marks its distance from the album's content (almost anticipating what critics would stubbornly refuse to understand) gives way to the first great cabaret number of his career, the chart-topping anthem "My Name Is". It marks the change of identity, pulls back the curtain on the show, the transition from man to character as Shady takes the stage, his monologue summing up the defining traits of Eminem's worldview (the tragicomic flaunting of his own madness, the misogynistic tirades, the abuse suffered in adolescence, the accusations against his mother, the cartoonish hyperbole about drug and gun use) over a funky/vaudeville groove that, by contrast, sounds carefree and playful. Then there's the brilliant "Guilty Conscience" (throbbing bass, rhythmic piano, orchestral snippets), which pushes this sense of estrangement even further through a cinematic kind of editing (a narrating voice introducing the verses, dialogic narration that marks the interplay/split between performers and characters) across three surreal sketches (as in the most classic of cartoons: Shady is the devil tempting the protagonist on his shoulder, Dre the angel offering good advice) built around moral dilemmas that resolve themselves in the most paradoxical and tasteless way possible (robbery, sex with a minor, double murder). The trilogy of the album's most effective and groundbreaking tracks is rounded off by what stands as one of the absolute masterpieces of the Detroit rapper's career: "97 Bonnie & Clyde", a kind of cinematic murder ballad set against radio-drama sound effects and hazy, melancholy synthetic soundscapes, in which Eminem stages the murder of his wife with his daughter as an accomplice, adopting a gentle, regressive spoken delivery that clashes with the violence of a narrative that is in some ways unbearable, in others moving in its need for empathy and purity — symbolized by the father and daughter's outlaw flight toward the impossible dream of resurrecting their denied childhood.

But the rest of the record also stays at an extremely high level: take "Brain Damage", which echoes the "wu-sound" with its orientalizing arpeggio and its bare, caustic beat, while Marshall, half in earnest and half in jest, retraces his wild misadventures as a bullying victim (with flashes of stratospheric humor, as in this exchange between young Mathers III and the school nurse, which seems to have come straight out of Matt Groening's pen: “[N] Mr. Mathers, the fun and games are over/ And just for that stunt, you’re gonna get some extra homework/ [E] But don’t you wanna give me after school detention?/ [N] Nah, that bully wants to beat your ass and I’ma let him.”); il dark-soul avvolgente di “If I Had” — perhaps the most poetic and intimate track of the bunch, through which Eminem is able to lay out his pessimistic worldview of life as appearance and betrayal (“What is life?/ Life is like a big obstacle/ put in front of your optical to slow you down/ And everytime you think you gotten past it/ it’s gonna come back around and tackle you to the damn ground/ What are friends?/ Friends are people that you think are your friends/ But they really your enemies, with secret indentities/ and disguises, to hide they true colors”); the almost alternative hip-hop (sequences of shrill, metallic sounds, jazzy horn lines) of "Just Don't Give A Fuck"; the country-rock riff of "Role Model" (intro: “OK, I’m going to attempt to drown myself/ You can try this at home/ You can be just like me!”) in which he fires off his dissing ("I'm cancerous, so when I diss you wouldn't wanna answer this") against half of star-spangled celebrity America (among others: the Clintons, Sonny Bono smashing into a tree, Lauryn Hill, O.J.'s victims); "Rock Bottom", a graceful synthetic madrigal with a Latin-tinged harmony, painting a stunning portrait of the most desperate working class, almost like an uncensored version of the film "8 Mile"; the disco-funk shades of the diptych made up of "My Fault" (a superb, hallucinogenic chronicle of ordinary bouts of youthful madness while high) and "I'm Shady" (an old-school interlude); "As The World Turns", horror-core disguised as g-funk, halfway between horror comic and porn comic, in which Shady's savage rampages reveal a particular vendetta against obese women.

As we said: if the album is the perfect caricature of the cynical, disillusioned spirit of its times, its success could only be an unprecedented crossover one: it debuted at number 2 on the Billboard chart with 280,000 copies sold in its first week, and would go on to sell around 9 million copies worldwide.

And that's almost nothing compared to what was still to come.

The Marshall Mathers Lp: the masterpiece

In the summer of 2000, Eminem landed for good the one-two punch that would change the face of rap music and, amid controversy and wildly irrational commercial results, bring the world of international pop to its knees. The aesthetic and musical formula of The Marshall Mathers Lp mirrors the debut in many ways: a whirlwind interplay of social satire, imaginative dramatizations of real or invented events, nihilistic and demented humor, all-out invective on one side; on the other, a classic hip-hop with a pop-rock edge (most evident in the singles "Stan" and "The Way I Am"), swinging ever more wildly between freak and dark, with greater variety and refinement in the arrangements. Although the title (which shifts the emphasis from the character's name to the person's own name) might suggest a more "realistic" and "autobiographical" thematic approach, mapping out the moments of truth versus those of fiction proves extremely tricky and tangled, subject as it is to constant shifts in tone, focus and perspective (Shady, Eminem and Mathers repeatedly swap roles and run riot in an even more shifting, kaleidoscopic fashion), besides being essentially pointless for the purposes of analysis.

It's the artist's world that interests us, certainly not the real one. In that sense, most of the lyrics center on his controversial and shocking, longed-for/hated collision with sudden fame. On the fallout from finding himself, within the space of a year, catapulted onto screens and magazine covers all over the world, while at the same time, and all the more so, claiming the role of bad conscience of American society. A society against which he turns, one by one, the very accusations leveled at him. Dragging it kicking and screaming and shoving in its face, with even more surgical, obsessive precision than on the previous record, all of its taboos: drugs, guns, violence against women, racism, incest, homophobia, suicide, sexual and non-sexual abuse of minors.

The similarities and callbacks to Shady's twin album are obvious from the public announcement that opens the record (which ends with a less-than-reassuring: "Slim Shady is fed up with your shit, and he's going to kill you"), and while "The Real Slim Shady" is the ideal sequel to "My Name Is" and the high point of the vaudeville/sitcom vein (built on effected bass and electric piano), as well as a sharp satire of showbiz respectability as an assembly line of trends and clones ("'Cause I'm Slim Shady, yes I'm the real Shady/ All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating"), "Kim" is a "Bonnie & Clyde", even more realistic and, if possible, more disturbing, a harrowing murder ballad in which the thin veil of disbelief separating art from life is burned away by a family psychodrama screamed at the top of his lungs all the way to the catharsis of murder-suicide.

On the horror-core side, standouts include the meta-linguistic "Kill You" (syncopated funk full of breaks and stop'n'go) in which he answers the criticism that rained down on him after the first album ("These motherfuckers are thinking I'm playing/ Thinking I'm saying the shit cause I'm thinking it just to be saying it"), stages a mock incest scene ("Oh, now he's raping his own mother, abusing a whore/ snorting coke, and we gave him the Rolling Stone cover?"), dons the mask of Norman Bates for a few seconds and dares his detractors on the terrain of provocation; "Amytiville" stages a funky-horror with hard rock moves; "Criminal" debates, with an almost Brechtian attitude, the identification between person and character, actor and stage mask (“A lot of people think that.. what I say on records/ or what I talk about on a record, that I actually do in real life/ or that I believe in it/ Or if I say that, I wanna kill somebody, that/ I’m actually gonna do it/ or that I believe in it/ Well, shit. If you believe that/ then I’ll kill you”), and picks back up the sketch structure of "Guilty Conscience"; and the grim "Remember Me?" (featuring Sticky Fingaz of Onyx).

And it doesn't miss a beat from there: the epileptic dance of "Who Knew," a brazen self-defense (“get a sense of humor/ Quit tryin to censor music, this is for your kid’s amusement/ (The kids!) But don’t blame me when lil’ Eric jumps off of the terrace/ You shoulda been watchin him – apparently you ain’t parents”) and a portrait of a country that would rather hunt for the causes of its own sickness in depictions of reality than look that reality in the face (“So who’s bringin the guns in this country? (Hmm?)/ I couldn’t sneak a plastic pellet gun through customs over in London/ And last week, I’ve seen a Schwarzenegger movie/ where he’s shootin all sorts of these motherfuckers with a uzi”); the acrobatic r'n'b of "Drug Ballad," with its dissonant piano chimes, an imaginative recollection of a youth of chemical and alcoholic excess; the more intimate introspection of "Marshall Mathers," a dark, syncopation-streaked acoustic ballad that shows us a lonely, disillusioned man beneath all the stage masks (“You see I’m, just Marshall Mathers (Marshall Mathers)/ I’m just a regular guy/ I don’t know why all the fuss about me (fuss about me)/ Nobody ever gave a fuck before,/ all they did was doubt me (did was doubt me)/ Now everybody wanna run they mouth/ and try to take shots at me (take shots at me)”); "I'm Back," sharp and tough, with dub echoes in the background, where the sideshow freak Shady regains the upper hand by desecrating the last taboo: the recent Columbine tragedy (“I take seven kids from Columbine, stand ‘em all in line/ Add an AK-47, a revolver, a nine/ a Mack-11 and it oughta solve the problem of mine/ and that’s a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time”).

Finally, two of the absolute high points of his songbook, the tracks that best sum up the record's central themes: his role as a merciless mirror held up to the rot pulsing beneath moralism, and the paranoid, vampiric relationship of dependency that forms between a mass idol and his fans. We're talking about "The Way I Am," a hardcore juggernaut carried almost entirely by ultra-syncopated screaming (the rest is just a piano riff and reverbed bells in the background), in which Eminem calls out the pressure he faced to soften his persona and the album's content, lashing out at practically everyone: fans (“But I can’t take a shit, in the bathroom/ Without someone standin by it/ No I won’t sign your autograph/ You can call me an asshole I’m glad”), detractors (“And it seems like the media immediately/ Points a finger at me (finger at me)/ So I point one back at ‘em, but not the index or pinkie/ Or the ring or the thumb, it’s the one you put up/ When you don’t give a fuck”), record executives and hip-hop purists. The other is, of course, "Stan," his cinematic, novelistic masterpiece (every bit as much as, if not more than, "Lose Yourself"), the track that, measured against today's music-industry standards, represents for him something like what "Like A Rolling Stone" was, in a sense, for Dylan: the shock of a nearly seven-minute mega-single, made all the more startling, in this case, for being crammed with violence, madness and despair, and gilded with heavy rotation on MTV. The song, gothic and melancholy (propped up by an Actor's Studio-worthy rap delivery, a killer bass line and Dido's sweet vocal), is at once a way of distancing himself from his own excesses and a brave poetic effort to highlight the ever more blurred line, in an age of morbid spectacle made out of the mundane, between art and life.

The Eminem Show and Encore: the show must go on

The Marshall Mathers LP is a monstrous success: 21 million copies sold (almost two million in the first week alone). Eminem is now the bogeyman, the "white man," the reincarnation of Ted Bundy, Jason risen yet again. Sociologists go crazy trying to figure out the reasons for his success. Parental associations demand the harshest possible punishment. The right accuses him of immorality and of glorifying youth violence. The left accuses him of racism, homophobia, and of having improperly appropriated African-American culture while stripping it of any ideological content. Even his mother drags him to court on defamation charges, suing him for several million dollars. But he's also the Elvis of the new millennium: thanks to him, an entire generation of middle-class kids falls in love with hip-hop, and on the strength of this outsized commercial response he manages to turn into gold - and make palatable even to the most buttoned-up broadcasters - all the dirt they'd rather sweep under the rug, pushing the limits of graphic representation and freedom of expression in pop music even further.

Even though plagued by controversy and legal and family problems, in the two years separating him from his third album Eminem keeps himself busy: first of all he founds his own label, Shady Records, through which he produces the debut of D12, a collective in the vein of Wu-Tang Clan, formed with old friends from the days of "Infinite" (among others Proof, Kon Artis, Bizarre, Eye Kyu) and Obie Trice; he then plays the part of Jimmy "B-Rabbit" Smith Jr. in the film "8 Mile," an effective, fictionalized retelling of his own life story (from his impoverished youth to his first successes), directed by the unexpectedly prestigious "fan" Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential," "Wonder Boys"). Besides providing input for the original story and lending the film his star power and charisma, Eminem, backed by his usual team (Dr. Dre, Marky Bass, and the increasingly influential composers Luis Resto and Mike Elizondo), carves out for the soundtrack a priceless gem like "Lose Yourself" (which, a first in hip-hop history, would win the 2003 Oscar for Best Original Song), a stunning self-portrait of the artist as a young man, a furious existential flashback, a breathtaking piece of poetic self-analysis and a meditation on the American myth of the opportunity that never comes twice (“Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity/ To seize everything you ever wanted/ One moment/ Would you capture it or just let it slip?”), in which the escape from the cage of failure and poverty turns into the prison of golden spotlights always aimed straight at his face, and the chaotic, undifferentiated orgy of public and private life ("Make me king, as we move toward a, new world order/ A normal life is boring, but superstardom's close to post mortem"). Driven by razor-sharp guitar stabs, the tachycardic pulse of kick and snare, swelling synths and rambling piano, the track remains one of the finest examples of rap/rock fusion ever recorded.

The success of the single and the film (nearly 250 million grossed worldwide against a 41-million budget) feeds symbiotically into that of the third album The Eminem Show, which hits stores in the summer of 2002, three months ahead of the film.

As already signaled by the title and the cover art (which shows the rapper, dressed as a classic showman in evening wear, lost in thought behind the parted folds of the curtain that frames the stage), The Eminem Show inaugurates a process of slow but steady stylistic normalization for the Detroit rapper. It's an evolution reflected both at the linguistic level, more declamatory and controlled, focused largely on satirizing the media that had gorged themselves on his rap-novela after the success of "Marshall Mathers," with hints of social commitment and ideological criticism of post-9/11 American politics, and at the musical level, giving rise to the most rock-oriented, instrumentally driven (partly indebted to a youth vogue crystallized in the crossover sound of those years), heaviest (even in sheer scale: a 20-track, 80-minute colossus) and most layered album of his career. The framing device (not for nothing does the record open and close with two brief skits, "Curtains Up" and "Curtains Close," made of stage noises, in place of the usual hilarious, provocative announcements) is that of a grand "off-pop" spectacle, in which the new Eminem, no offense to Shady, has made peace with Marshall and finally feels at home.

So while his evil twin carries on his saga on autopilot in the provocative "Without Me" (“I’ve created a monster, cuz nobody wants to see Marshall no more/ they want Shady I’m chopped liver/ well if you want Shady, this is what I’ll give ya”), a brilliant close to his trilogy of goofy lead-off singles, and in the original "Drips" (gypsy melody and brass-band tune) built around raunchy sex and venereal disease, what dominates is the anthemic rap/rock of tracks like "White America," in which he seems to take his role as populist champion of free speech just a bit too seriously; the less successful "Soldier" (martial cadence and guitar arpeggio); the power ballad "Sing For The Moment" (built on the theme from Aerosmith's "Dream On"), a more emphatic, simplified reprise of the autobiographical narrative of "Lose Yourself"; the heavy epic of "'Til I Collapse," with a chorus that already seems to foreshadow 50 Cent's breakthrough; and the intimate, open-hearted "Cleanin' Out My Closet," a slightly more restrained, reconciled reflection on his usual family rifts, featuring, almost mirroring one another, his mother, ex-wife and daughter (the only three women, for better or worse, who matter in his life).

The rest falls within the bounds of a solidly good record, though clearly a step down from its predecessors, with some lapses in taste such as the two songs dedicated to his daughter, "Hallie's Song" (a sung number that's decidedly superfluous) and "My Dad's Gone Crazy" (self-mocking or cloying, depending on your tolerance), and "Say Goodbye To Hollywood," crocodile tears over the inconveniences of fame and success - alongside tracks worthy of his talent, including: "Business," an energetic, polished, cinematic funk exploitation number (soul choruses, the strut of a '70s TV theme, a montage of background noise) in which he and Dre play comic-book superheroes; the refined "Square Dance," with bluegrass touches and Mitteleuropean orchestral cadences blending together beautifully; the intriguing mix of alternative rap and Hollywood-style climax in the self-congratulatory duet with Dre, "Say What You Say"; and the breakneck pass-the-mic session with D12 on "When The Music Stops."

Despite a substantial drop in quality, sales keep climbing: The Eminem Show sets a new record, reaching an overall tally of 27 million copies, which also makes it the third best-selling album of the 21st century (only Adele's "21" and Norah Jones's "Come Away With Me" (Norah Jones) do better). Over the following two years he keeps up his producer work, pioneering a hybrid, pop-leaning, emphatic style that would come to be called "mid-west hip-hop," finding its most worthy standard-bearer in the breakout success of 50 Cent's "Get Rich Or Die Tryin'" (2003) (a spectacular genetic mutation of gangsta rap, applied, with more premeditation and less irony, to Eminem's own meta-cinematic, multimedia lyricism).

As for his private life, meanwhile, he tightens the reins on the media circus he's spent years locking himself into, and tries to steer clear of trouble. Though sometimes trouble catches up with him anyway: in December 2003, a leaked intelligence report reveals that the rapper is under investigation over alleged threats against President Bush in the song "We As Americans" (the incriminating lines: "Fuck money/ I don't rap for dead presidents/ I'd rather see the president dead/ It's never been said, but I set precedents...").

The track will in any case be cut from the tracklist of the new album, due out in November 2004. Here the callbacks to The Eminem Show are made explicit both in the title - Encore, that is: an encore, the show's second act - and on the cover (with Eminem, dressed as impeccably as ever, stepping through the parted curtain to take his bow and bid farewell to his audience) - but the content is decidedly lesser in tone. Now without the Bass brothers and with Dre's contribution reduced to a handful of rather unremarkable tracks, Eminem tries his hand at a lighter, softer, more danceable sound (crucial here is the input of the Hispanic-American duo Luis Resto and Mike Elizondo, responsible along with the rapper for most of the compositions), in which mainstream electronic pop (with more than one nod to Jay-Z's "The Black Album") decisively supplants both the gothic funk of his earliest work and the blazing rock of its predecessor.

The lyrics, too, plainer and more restrained than in the past, fall into line with the sonic surroundings. Bending his flow more and more toward melody, Eminem seems intent on proving he's the only true "rap singer" out there, but the uneven, inconsistent quality of the songs doesn't always back him up as it should: starting with the obligatory, farcical lead single "Just Lose It" (easily the weakest of the series), which stands out more for the usual manufactured controversy (this time the target is Michael Jackson's alleged pedophilia) than for its musical merits; then the kinetic pop with dark overtones of "Evil Deeds"; the "scatological" pairing of "Puke" (nu-soul leaning) and "My 1st Single" (built on a drum'n'bass backbone); wrapping up with the robotic "Never Enough" (notable for featuring 50 Cent, by then his designated heir) and, worst of all, the pathetic pacifist anthem (little better than a hold-hands-and-sing-"We Are The World" moment) of "Like Toy Soldiers."

Fortunately, especially in the second half, there's no shortage of standout tracks: the epic, distortion-heavy anti-war statement "Mosh"; the sharp circus routine of "Rain Man" (in which he sketches out a satire of homophobia); the cabaret-juggernaut of "Big Weenie"; right down to the chanting "Ass Like That" (Dr. Dre's one magnificent flourish here), somewhere between a belly dance and a lap dance, for which Eminem concocts a hilarious Middle Eastern accent, almost a ventriloquist's reprise of his Bin Laden parody. Neither the fine, sentimental storytelling of "Mockingbird" nor the successful disco-pop of "Crazy In Love," however, manage to lift the album's overall standing much above a passing grade.

Relapse and Recovery: crisis and rebirth

Encore is Eminem's lowest-selling album since The Slim Shady Lp, but it still manages to sell over 11 million copies. The rapper seems to have finally exhausted all the lyrical and musical resources tied to his autobiographical plot and, presumably in search of new directions, disappears from the scene for almost five years.

But it's anything but a peaceful retreat, marked by a second marriage and a second quickie divorce from his wife Kim, by persistent rumors of his retirement, and by the murder of his friend Proof, who was beaten to death following a brawl outside a Detroit club — an event that, as he has recently stated, would plunge Mathers into an intense and prolonged period of drugs, depression and subsequent dependence on anti-depressants. To tide fans over, along comes the release of Curtain Call: The Hits (2005), his first greatest-hits collection: an ideal watershed in his career, it goes seven times platinum at home and 8 times platinum in the UK, eventually selling more than ten million copies worldwide. It amounts to the celebration of an all-in-all unrepeatable period for Eminem, a snapshot of the seven years between 1997 and 2004, in which he turned the hip-hop world upside down and churned out an impressive run of hit singles, tracks worthy of any genre anthology, and albums that left their mark on the music of the era and on international pop culture.

Only in 2008, by all accounts rehabilitated, would he reappear in public, announcing he was working on his sixth album, a double album titled Relapse, split into separate releases both slated for 2009. In practice, this idea would later be shelved in favor of producing two distinct albums, rather than one single, sprawling double work.

A work that tries, without fully succeeding, to close the stylistic circle of the Detroit rapper's entire (major) discography. A return, above all on a thematic and iconographic level, to the reckless and provocative aggression of his early days is matched, on the musical side, by a rather melodic and sweetened form, anchored to the skillful mainstream leanings and pop gradations of the preceding Encore. So while tracks like "My Mom" (a brass-band cabaret complete with fanfares and a little orchestra), "Insane" (one of the best flows on the album), "3 am" (pianistic, orchestral goth-pop flattened by an overly whiny delivery) and "We Made You" (the album's goofy flagship single, with its almost dancehall swagger and its jabs at Amy Winehouse — who, incidentally, or perhaps precisely for that reason, is the figure who most resembles him in today's pop stardom) attempt, with results that are all things considered commendable, an update of his basic, theatrical hip-hop, the rest is little more than routine "Eminem-style" entertainment ("Hello" has some timid dubstep touches, "Same Song And Dance" has a title that says it all, "Deja Vu" plays the power ballad card on his stint in rehab, "Beautiful" is pitiful, the kind of thing meant for teenage girls, the duet with Dre on "Old Times Sake" and the "threesome" with 50 Cent on "Crack A Bottle" are pure rap-game self-indulgence).

It would be an outright failure if not for two tracks that save the day and shed a glimmer of hope on a possible second "relapse": "Stay Wide Awake", a gothic, orchestral drum'n'bass track with staccato guitar and choral trimmings, and above all "Underground", dulcis in fundo, a spectral horrorcore number worthy of a kolossal ballet choreographed by Tim Burton, in which Eminem, like a Rocky Balboa before the decisive bout (or like himself in the finale of "8 Mile"), finds his "eye of the tiger" again and, with a syncopated, unstoppable charge, tears apart the uncertainties scattered throughout the last stretch of his career. It would sell 3 million copies, a flop by his own extremely high standards.

Titles, sometimes, say a lot. Though maybe not everything. In Eminem's case, after the "relapse" (Relapse) comes the "recovery": Recovery (2010). The production turns more pop and glossy — with Dre relegated to the bland role of executive producer and old hands like Jim Jonsin, Dj Khalil, Supa Dups and Just Blaze taking over the sound — while meatier rhythms and a more prominent guitar presence highlight the rocky side (evident in the samples: "Changes" by Black Sabbath, "Drive" by Rem, "Cry Little Sister" by Gerard McMahon, among others) of his hip-hop, while a more introspective streak emerges in the lyrics. Lyrics that, for the rest, cyclically revolve around the classic Eminem themes: showbiz satire built on "triple-x" dissing and pitch-black humor, cartoonish cruelty meant to épater le bourgeois, the autobiographical reality show, here centered on his recent battle with drug addiction. The vocal shine is there, the flow is as dazzling as ever, though the linguistic hyperbole and punch lines bite far less than they used to.

And the tracklist seems arranged, with plenty of variety, to please everyone. There are chart-ready anthems like the singalong "Cold Wind Blows", the urban-leaning "Talkin' To Myself", the polished single "Not Afraid", the embarrassing "No Love" (sampling Haddaway's "What Is Love" and featuring a trendy guest like Lil Wayne), and a kind of bittersweet love duet with Rihanna on "Love The Way You Lie".

Elsewhere, fortunately, Mathers proves he can do better: in the old-school goth-funk of "On Fire", for instance, in the energetic crossover of "Won't Back Down" (with an inconsequential feat. from foam-rubber ex-punkette Pink), in the vaudeville rap of "So Bad" and the closing "Untitled" (a spot-on nod to the vintage girl-group chorus of Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me"), in that oddball yet irresistible synthetic stomp that is "Cinderella Man", in the cinematic number "Almost Famous", and even in the two power ballads "Going Through Changes" and "Space Bound" (based, respectively, on the Black Sabbath and Rem tracks we mentioned above).

An honest popstar's work. This is the 2010 Eminem, take it or leave it. The public, in the broadest and most generic sense, decisively decides to "take it": the album sells over 10 million copies, and the singles "Love The Way You Lie" and "Not Afraid" are massive commercial successes: the former stays atop the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks and hits number one on dozens of charts worldwide, selling 12 million copies at home alone and earning another 30 international platinum certifications; "Not Afraid" wins a Grammy for "Best Rap Solo Performance", goes diamond in the United States and picks up eleven more platinum certifications worldwide.

Proof that it's precisely these singles that introduced the Detroit rapper to a younger generation of listeners comes from the extraordinary results of the videoclips on YouTube: over two billion views for the duet with Rihanna and more than 1.5 billion views for "Not Afraid".

The Marshall Mathers Lp 2, Revival, Kamikaze, Music To Be Murdered By: becoming a classic

Having recovered from his well-known personal and health issues, Eminem reaffirms his by-now virtually unassailable status as a rap star, pulling off the ambitious project of giving a sequel — not merely a nominal one, as we'll see — to what remains to this day his masterpiece, with The Marshall Mathers Lp 2 (2013). He only partly succeeds, but the attempt is still more interesting than the average of his recent work, and reveals a depth, a vitality of ideas and themes not seen, at least in this writer's opinion, since The Eminem Show (2002).

If, from a musical standpoint, the album indeed presents the classic pop-rap format of latter-day Eminem — overproduced and redundant, polished down to the last detail and measured out as precisely as the screenwriter/director/star of a Hollywood blockbuster — the flow and depth of the lyrics here reach some genuinely interesting peaks. Writing that is finally more introspective and not centered on dissing and scandal-seeking at all costs, which ends up taking the shape of a reflection, at times genuinely touching, on the relationship between the person and the persona, between his own troubled past and the use of that past for promotional ends, and above all on the epiphany of hip-hop as an existential choice and the one chance at redemption from private and social misery.

Leading the charge is "Bad Guy", the trait d'union with the eponymous album and a literal sequel to "Stan", from which it borrows the splendid, cinematic narrative arc, the sound effects and the melancholy chorus (Dido-style) sung by Sarah Jaffe in contrast with the violence of the verses; it's immediately followed by another striking single, "Rhyme Or Reason", which kicks off his unprecedented collaboration with veteran producer Rick Rubin and essentially vampirizes the Zombies' "Time Of The Season" a bit in the manner of P.Diddy — certainly effective, but decidedly passive; still with Rubin, he then delivers "Berzerk", a tasty tribute to the Beastie Boys and to the white, blue-collar Detroit roots of his rap-rock (a sound later revisited with less inspiration on the muscular "Survival" and the southern-flavored "So Far"); another well-judged track is the glossy, supple pop-hop of "Monster", a duet with Rihanna that introduces a welcome melodic streak over more pained, personal lyrics, a vein that reappears to good effect elsewhere, drawing on the cold, unsettling piano riff of "Legacy" (with another "Rihanna-style" chorus, even though this time she's not the one singing it), the electric piano and synthetic strings of "Asshole", and again on "Headlights"; a further valuable piece is added with "Love Game", a composite, refined track distinguished by the sparkling verse of the excellent Kendrick Lamar and by 60s-pop atmospheres (the sample of "Game Of Love", a catchy hit by Clint Ballard Jr).

Little else worth noting beyond this: while "Rap God" is a dizzying showcase of flow, packed with rhythmic and lexical virtuosity over a minimalist beat (the whole thing, perhaps, stretched out a bit too long), "So Much Better" is the classic gothic-circus vaudeville in the style of the original Shady, as is "Brainless", which warps a jazzy groove to create an atmosphere of psychotic suspense.

"Rap God" comfortably clears a billion views on YouTube, racking up another 7 platinum certifications, while "Monster" has less thrilling results with its video but still lands major commercial honors: another 21 platinum plaques, a number that makes "Berzerk"'s own impressive seven discs of the finest metal look almost like a trivial detail by comparison. The album itself, however, fares worse, with total sales of 3 million copies.

The only film written by screenwriter Karl Sutter, Southpaw (2015), about a boxer from the suburbs, is directly inspired by Eminem's troubled life, and the rapper came within a hair's breadth of taking on the lead role himself. He will still contribute to the soundtrack with the single "Phenomenal" (2015).

By now desperately scrambling for inspiration, Eminem seems to find a strange blessing in Donald Trump. "Campaign Speech" (2016), a piece of propaganda, and "The Storm" (2017), a denunciation, are essentially improvised sermons with no instrumental backing, really just launch pads for his ninth album, the pharaonic Revival (2017). Yet another sprawling, overlong tome, yet another costly production job helmed by Dr Dre and Rick Rubin, yet another autobiographical scrapbook. Mathers has simply worn out his welcome. The listener (and this time a good chunk of his die-hard fanbase too) is left wondering why they should spend over an hour and twenty minutes once again hearing what amount to nothing more or less than other people's private business (often sloppily written): drugs, his daughter, his wife, his suicide attempt, and so on. The music ranges from generic (heavy-handed, uninspired beats, aside perhaps from the explosive big-beat of "Untouchable") to embarrassing (a small parade of pop stars old and new, from Pink to Ed Sheeran, by way of Alicia Keys and the ever-faithful Skylar Grey). It's his first album to sell under a million copies, and even the singles show a clear dip in public interest: the best performer is "River", with 10 platinum certifications, though it's reasonable to assume much of that owes to the pull of guest Ed Sheeran.

In July 2018 Eminem performs in Italy for the first time, a historic date also for the choice of venue, Milan's Experience (the former Expo site).

In the last two songs on Revival, both "Castle" and "Arose", Mathers rapped ⟦I'll put this last album, then I'm done with it⟧. It's therefore even harder to accept a Kamikaze (2018) arriving just months after its predecessor, aside from a possible touch of irony, a faint echo of his original irreverence. On paper it's roughly the opposite of its predecessor, lacking that classic fanfare that once used to accompany the rapper's moves (thanks to its surprise release), with a mercifully modest runtime (forty-five minutes), and thus a certain restraint in its conception. If anything, the substance makes things worse, with songs that grow ever more long-winded and ever less musical, gripped by an unjustified verbal intensity ("The Ringer", "Greatest", "Fall", "Kamikaze"). The one small exception is "Stepping Stone", nicely balanced between a singable hook - genuinely one of his best in years - and an electronically intricate arrangement. The public's response to the album was lukewarm, one of the weakest results of his career, and enthusiasm for the singles was similarly muted, never going beyond double platinum: disappointing numbers for a box-office champion like Eminem.

For his eleventh album, Music To Be Murdered By brings back names essential to his career, such as producer Dr. Dre and longtime ally Royce Da 5'9", alongside a host of collaborators both new and familiar. Take "Darkness", for instance, which even credits Paul Simon, since it's his mournful, sparse and desolate melody that drives the track: "The Sound Of Silence". The album is a grab-bag of Eminem's usual tricks of the trade, trotted out again for a newly begun decade, across 20 exhausting tracks that raise a simple but legitimate doubt: what if not one of these twenty songs ends up among his classics? Now more than ever, it feels urgent to imagine a future for Slim Shady, who can no longer rely on risky promotional gimmicks or desperately dubious rhymes to survive in a hip-hop landscape that, fine, may still recognize him as the "rap god", but won't necessarily go on worshipping him forever. Can he keep offering up the same musical ideas going forward, perhaps just slightly updated so as not to seem too outdated?

The public's response was timid but on the whole positive, earning "Godzilla" five platinum certifications. The deluxe edition includes "Music to Be Murdered By – Side B", that is, 16 additional tracks which, if nothing else, prove that churning out songs at this (less than stellar) level is child's play for a heavyweight like Eminem.

In 2022 he also releases a second greatest-hits collection titled Curtain Call 2. It's 35 tracks starting from Relapse (2009) up to the present, with precious few surprises in the shape of three new songs: the blustering, chaotic "The King and I" feat. CeeLo Green (from the "Elvis" soundtrack), the hypnotic "From the D 2 the LBC" feat. Snoop Dogg, and the nostalgic "Is This Love (dating back to 2009)" with 50 Cent. In an age dominated by streaming, this compilation sounds structurally outdated and could easily have been replaced by a simple playlist, but - perhaps partly for contractual reasons, and given the star's celebrity status - it's what gets chosen as the rap star's release for 2022.

After all, it's clear that his masterpieces have by now been enshrined in history, rightly taking their place among the great music of the early twenty-first century. Born, artistically, at the tail end of the legal physical-format era, a witness to the peer-to-peer revolution, and an unexpected protagonist of the window in which YouTube served as the world's main barometer of musical success (in 2021 his channel topped 20 billion total views), Eminem has essentially become a classic: he has crossed generational boundaries, and by the late 2010s Billboard certified him as the fifth most-streamed artist of the entire decade on Spotify, while as recently as 2021 he still ranks, according to Chart Masters, among the ten most-listened-to artists in the world. If there's one case where it's not absurd to call someone a possible greatest-of-all-time of hip-hop, it's his.

Eminem After Slim Shady: The Death of an Alter Ego

Will Eminem's twelfth studio album tell us anything the rap superstar hasn't already said (and said again) on previous ones? The reasonable answer is "no", even before hitting play. After listening, though, this simple and somewhat simplistic observation can grow into a broader assessment of the Detroit rapper, his career, and indeed of how music in general - and rap in particular - has changed.

The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce) starts over from the platinum-selling, viciously violent and irreverent alter ego that made Marshall Mathers famous the world over, in order to kill him off, move past him, and perhaps give his own career a new direction. Close your eyes and start listening to "The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)" and its opening track, "Renaissance": following the voice, you could genuinely feel like you're back in 2004, and even following the lyrics, tracking the flow, savoring that shrill, grating tone of voice. Eminem lashes out at the haters and really lets them have it, arguing that everyone gets criticized, that they'd criticize even Picasso. The productions, the beats, as well as the collaborations, all help refresh a rap persona that is a quarter-century old, still plagued by addiction ("Habits"; the closing "Somebody Saves Me", which we'll return to), internally split between his more level-headed side and the alter ego intoxicated by his own provocations ("Trouble"; "Evil"; "All You Got"; "Lucifer"; "Guilty Conscience 2"; "Bad One").

The Eminem of Without Me (2002) resurfaces on "Brand New Dance", though it really has very little in common with that era and takes aim at Christopher Reeve as if we were still at the turn of the millennium (he died in 2004; Eminem claims it's a leftover track cut from "Encore"); on the lead single "Houdini" he openly quotes himself, verging on self-parody.

Slim Shady would like to go back to 2003, before woke, before mee too, before cancel culture, but this is clearly just another of Eminem's ways of muddying the waters to provoke, divide and get people talking about him, same as at the turn of the millennium: the trouble with a track like "Antichrist", which leans hard into those very themes, is that these outbursts sound stale, and even when he kicks it into high gear, spitting out rhymes at double speed, it's hard to claim to be surprised, since it's exactly what you'd expect from him. Clearly, there's also a risk that someone less familiar with the Slim Shady character, or too young to remember how these things worked a good twenty years ago, might take what he says in the lyrics at face value, but that's an issue decades old by now, and it can simply come across as trickier today mainly due to the communicative dynamics of social media, nothing more. In fact, the very indefensibility of Slim Shady's positions exposes the act as fiction, and it becomes harder to overlook when, as on "Road Rage", he steps further out of character to talk about trans rights, sliding dangerously into overkill rhetoric and the use of a straw-man argument.

When JID, the best of the many guests, shows up on "Fuel", it's clear that there's a whole generation of Eminem's offspring that doesn't just risk making him obsolete - it already has, at least in his most traditional incarnation.

After about fifty minutes the listen becomes wearying, pulled here and there by Slim Shady sparring with Eminem, a barrage of lines designed to cause a stir that never quite manage to truly shock, flashbacks to the past and a few attempts to rejuvenate a formula that's by now too old. On "Temporary" the rapper turns introspective, even moving, dedicating a song to his daughter Hailie meant to be listened to after his death:

I knew that you was gonna take this the hardest

Sweetie, get up, I know that this is breaking your heart, it’s

The hardest thing I’ve ever wrote (Daddy)

Hailie, sweetheart, it’s okay for you to let me go

It could have ended there, an album that's far too long and with no tracks worthy of replacing his classics, but between songs and skits we reach track 19: "Somebody Save Me", an emotional closer that uses Jelly Roll's soulful voice to lend extra weight to the mea culpa of a man tormented by addiction, possessed by an alter ego that made him enormously famous but also plagued him. The final words are left to a sample of Jelly Roll's "Save Me":

I’m a lost cause

Baby, don’t waste your time on me

I’m so damaged beyond repair

Life has shattered my hopes and my dreams

I’m a lost cause

Baby, don’t waste your time on me

I’m so damaged beyond repair

Life has shattered my hopes and my dreams

The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce) is a minor album from one of the greatest rappers around, one that will struggle to find a place on a playlist of his best cuts even a few years from now. Looked at more closely and in a broader light, as we've tried to do here, it's also the endpoint of a tormented rapper, split in spirit, belatedly trying to overcome his inner demon. The gap between rap persona and the man was hard to swallow even when Slim Shady first arrived on the scene — all the more so here in Italy, where the very notion that he might be a character escaped the sensibility of (almost) the entire audience — but today it's even harder to manage: stars are expected to back civil causes, show activism, and maintain consistency between private and artistic life; for anyone living in the mainstream, it's untenable to say in a song something you wouldn't say in a TV interview or wouldn't put your name to, publicly, on social media. The death of Slim Shady is a move that isn't musically all that interesting, but one probably necessary to secure a future for Eminem, a second life now that he's past fifty and, for the man behind the rapper, seems eager to find a synthesis between his various natures.

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