Will the Real Slim Shady Please Sit Down?

The Tragic Greatness of Eminem

In the heady final hours of the 2024 presidential campaign, get-out-the-vote rallies were everything, everywhere, all at once. It felt like events were moving a mile a minute. Even 8 Mile’s own native son, Marshall Mathers, introduced former president and liberal supersurrogate Barack Obama at a Detroit rally:

“People shouldn’t be afraid to express their opinions, and I don’t think anyone wants an America where people are worried about retribution.”

Eminem called on voters to reject Trump’s threats against “the enemy within,” a late-stage catchall for his record of (and campaign promise to expand) mobilizing the mob, the media, and the federal government itself against political opponents, journalists, uncapitulating business leaders, and White Christian Nationalism’s dehumanized others.

Censorship of artists may pale in comparison to deporting 20 million Americans (constitution and human rights be damned), but the free expression of artists that shrivels under autocratic regimes is essential to challenging them and nurturing the spirits of their victimized people. As Woody Guthrie showed us, “this machine [his guitar] kills fascists.”

Eminem was just one of a steady stream of rappers to attract cultural blowback, and his whiteness afforded him advantages unavailable to Black artists who have been censored and–at times–criminalized on the basis of their constitutionally protected song lyrics.

Were we to interrogate in good faith Eminem’s lyrics for social impact, one relevant consideration would be exaggeration for dramatic effect. Consider Brain Damage, the fourth track on 1999’s Slim Shady LP:

My mother started screaming, "what are you, on drugs?! Look at you, you’re getting blood all over my rug!" She beat me over the head with the remote control Opened a hole and my whole brain fell out of my skull.

Marshall Mathers’ brain did not, in fact, fall out of his childhood skull. He did, however, suffer unmitigated bullying and a traumatic brain injury from the actual bully he names in the song. DeAngelo Bailey sued Mathers for defamation, a case the judge dismissed in the form of—and I shit you not—rhyming couplets.

Brain Damage echoed in the hearts of a generation of bullied kids, many of them neurodivergent just like Eminem. This track also contributes a key biographical puzzle piece to the Slim Shady LP’s introductory character sketch: Eminem is a menace because he was traumatized by people and systems that didn’t care to understand or protect him. Hurt people hurt people.

But hurt people also produce powerful art, the fruits of that most solitary form of emotional labor. Pay close attention to the wordplay, the advanced structure and rhythm in Brain Damage. Whole sequences of words rhyme, not just the final syllables of each sentence. Alliterated and visceral language opens a window into Eminem’s bleak adolescence:

A corny looking white boy Scrawny and always ornery ‘Cause I was always sick of brawny bullies picking on me

And after the colorful description of the beating from his mother’s hand:

I said fuck it, took it and stuck it back up in my head Then I sewed it shut and put a couple of screws in my neck

The Frankensteinian imagery mirrors the song’s bubbling beat, evocative of Outkast’s sci-fi Synthesizer (feat. George Clinton) released the previous year on Aquemini. Eminem has a hand in producing most of his music, and has produced and written for other rappers including close friend and collaborator 50 Cent.

If you listen closely to 50’s mesmeric warning track In My Hood, you’ll tap into a strange phenomenon: Eminem’s signature flow crafted specifically for—and voiced through—the singular sound of 50 Cent. In My Hood opens with an orchestral flourish (think curtains up at the theater) and cuts right into the first 50 verse. I dare you to listen to this song, which Eminem also produced, only once: its first twenty seconds stand alongside the great opening sequences of literature and film. The whole saxophone-inflected song is a banger, but its opening is sublime.

When I heard In My Hood and noticed that distinct Marshall Mathers cadence, I was so proud of my applied knowledge I called a friend with Hip Hop expertise to discuss the discovery. “If you like hearing Eminem’s lyricism in 50 Cent,” he said, ”wait til you hear the Masta Ace in Eminem. He really inspired Eminem in the 90s, before Slim Shady.”

The record on this is actually blurry: Masta Ace and Eminem credit each other as fluid influences, and they collaborated on a small but remarkable set of projects. Most beloved among them: Hellbound, famous for sampling unlicensed music from the Sega Genesis game Soul Calibur, was released in 2000 but as a result has never been accessible on an above-board streaming service. Mercifully, copies of the song are almost always available on Youtube.

Hellbound doesn’t showcase the most smooth or sophisticated version of Eminem. But his unvarnished raw talent and unflinching grotesquerie shines alongside Masta Ace, as a priceless time capsule from the era before he took over the world.

25 years on, it is not a little remarkable to see Eminem introducing liberal elite standard bearer Obama on the stump for a second term of the status quo Biden Harris administration. Or was it the fourth term of the Obama administration?

Eminem’s transformation to immense privilege and distance from his working class roots reflects the evolution of the Democratic party over his lifespan. The Slim Shady LP’s Rock Bottom is dedicated to “all the happy people who have real nice lives and have no idea what it’s like to be broke as fuck.” Since then Eminem has become one of the happy people, with a real nice life.

I can’t help but imagine a younger, hungrier, angrier Eminem voting for Trump, if at all. The 2002 Eminem Show lead single Without Me denigrates indiscriminately, including establishment scion and eventual Harris endorser Dick Cheney.

But here we are. Eminem has become one of the most successful musicians of all time, and one of the greatest rappers ever. This is an especially remarkable feat given the majority of his finest work emerges in the short period between February 1999 and October 2002. And he’s been an avowed never-Trumper for some time, embarrassing himself by taking on the president with a too-earnest diss rap video pre-recorded for the 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards.

So it’s not surprising to see Eminem leverage his good name on the campaign trail against Trump in 2024. And he’s not alone: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen and scores of lesser known musicians all weighed in for Harris this election season. But did any of this actually help?

I don’t know how much the endorsements from cultural icons like Eminem and Oprah hurt Harris’ chances, but the attempt to recreate the electrifying 2008 and 2012 star-studded Obama campaigns feels misplaced and, ultimately, indicative of a greater failure of Democratic strategy.

Today the age-old ways of campaigning—indeed the tired philosophies driving quotidian governance and messaging—reflect wholesale disconnection from the tumultuous lived experience of the American voter. Lebron James matters as little as Larry Summers: these days the presence of any kind of elite only further signals the Democratic party’s distance from real life.

Had Vice President Kamala Harris won the election, perhaps Eminem would have performed at the inauguration of our nation’s 47th president–or at the very least, at one of the multitude of parties held in conjunction with the official state inaugural events.

Alas, instead we can look forward to Trump’s J6 Choir, a collective of seditionist convicts, performing at the peaceful transfer of power on January 20, 2025. Hellbound indeed.

Thanks again for indulging me in a daily dose of certainty. See you tomorrow.