He broke the world record for fastest rap with “Rap God” and has subsequently broken his own record on “Godzilla”, where he raps 229 words in 30 seconds. Recently, in the absence of having anything interesting to say, Eminem has fallen back on the last resort of unimaginative rappers everywhere, attempting to prove his prowess and relevance by rapping about the same stuff, just more quickly. He reacts to this belief that no one is paying attention to him by metaphorically shitting his pants, while screaming "ARE YOU OFFENDED YET?!" Yet no one is offended.
Whether deliberately or not, Eminem has come to embody the defining boomer traits, a man who’s enjoyed vast success and found his decisions validated by all of society, yet now sees himself as an ostracised pariah, spurned by a new cohort of ‘snowflake’ millennials who are ruining popular culture by not laughing at rape jokes. He’s only 47 – a Gen Xer by chronology – but these days, Eminem is Clarkson, Hopkins and Brexit, a spiteful cultural force busy persuading deeply conservative and boring people that they are, in fact, radicals. As well as the customary support from white suburban teens who bathe in Monster and want to kill their mums for making them eat broccoli once a week, he seems to have become a voice for middle-aged weirdos who like to reminisce about how homophobic slurs were allowed “back in my day”. Instead of growing old gracefully, Eminem has become a rapper with a contradictory, boomer-like sense of entitlement.
There is simply nothing subversive about a middle-aged man with two grown children rapping about how much he hates his step-dad for “sticking his dick in my mom”. His attempts at stoking controversy in 2020 – including lyrics about the Ariana Grande Manchester bombing and a track written from the perspective of the 2017 Las Vegas shooter – have not been picked apart because they are offensive, but because they’re embarrassing. The tragedy of Slim Shady is that he is still writing fight music for high school kids, except now he’s nearly 50 years old, yelling at clouds in a world that has moved on without him.
“I don’t make black music / I don’t make white music / I make fight music for high school kids,” he rapped on "Who Knew" back in 2000. The problem is that these days Eminem is an adult too, yet appears to have been frozen in time by the people he perceives his audience to be. There is no denying that Eminem is (was) a talented rapper: his first couple of albums are legitimately good, even if some of the lyrics and content matter make me shudder as an adult (I absolutely cannot listen to “Kim” now without feeling like I’m going to have a panic attack). Unfortunately for Mathers, time and success have made him part of the same, smirking establishment he spent his early years making fart noises at, and in this era of constant, churning online outrage there has never been any less of a need for his brand of rap. In the years when internet use was prevalent among Western teens but before social media arrived to dominate attention spans, Mathers was basically a multi-millionaire Twitter troll taking potshots at everyone from Michael Jackson to Christina Aguilera to Moby to Pee-wee Herman, with no discernible logic connecting his targets other than they were recognisable figures who were there to be pissed on.
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The lauded white face of a black art form, he was compared favourably to Elvis Presley, played himself in the 2002 quasi-biopic 8 Mile, provoked street protests before a Grammys duet with Elton John and along with his protege 50 Cent was ubiquitous across cable music TV channels, where he bridged the gap between America’s two imperial musical exports of the time: rap and nu-metal. In anyone's terms, Eminem is still huge today – it was just announced that his latest release, January's Music to Be Murdered By, is only the second album to this year to be certified gold – but it's difficult to overstate just how colossal Eminem was in those early years of fame.
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