The rapper returns with his most commercial-sounding record in years. A shame, then, about the time-warp lyrics and wasted concept It begins with a ‘hawk tuah’ : ‘Renaissance’, the first track on Eminem ’s exhaustingly self-obsessed 12th album, finds him spitting on a grave. That might be a very modern reference, but he’s clearly trapped in the early 2000s.
The rapper even says so himself on ‘Antichrist’: “ Somebody needs to come and hit the reset button / Back to 2003 ’cause how did we get stuck in / This woke BS? ” Here is the modus operandi of ‘The Death of Slim Shady (Coup De Grâce)’, which is 51-year-old Marshall Mathers yelling at clouds for a claustrophobic 64 minutes, albeit within a narrative that occasionally gets him off the hook. He’s described the record as a “conceptual album” and implored his stans to consume it in order. Otherwise, he warned, the story “might not make sense”.
In truth, Em might be overestimating the complexity of what unfolds throughout these 19 tracks. The aforementioned grave is that of Slim Shady, the outrageous, say-anything alter-ego who swung a chainsaw through turn-of-the-century pop. The idea is that Slim has crash-landed in 2024, leading him to affect bug-eyed rage at so-called wokery, snowflakes and, y’know, increased awareness of the challenges faced by people who aren’t white, male millionaires.
So there’s a bizarre, extended tirade against body positivity (‘Road Rage’), a joke about .
