Dems, listen to Eminem's one-man culture war

Eminem presents himself as a one-man culture war on his latest, "The Death of Slim Shady." The album has been universally panned by critics and yet debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It’s a populist album. 

Critics complain that Eminem has exhausted his material. After all, he’s already killed Slim Shady off — twice. Anticipating their responses, Slim Shady raps to Marshall Mathers, “Now they’re saying you lack ire, that’s why your satire backfires.” Many of the album’s references are tired: imitations of "South Park’s" Cartman, potshots at Caitlyn Jenner and Christopher Reeve. He returns to culture war standards from transgender rights to fat shaming. His response to critics sounds like Eminem during his imperial phase, that period in a pop career when anything an artist releases will be both a hit and a cultural phenomenon: “This my s**t, I'm going to spit it how I wanna spit it / Whoever gets offended, suck a d**k and f**k a critic.” For Eminem, that phase was 1999 through 2004. Is Eminem stuck in the past? Yes and no. 

Two months before the album’s release, Mathers published a mock obituary for Slim Shady in the Detroit Free Press. “His complex and tortured experience [has] come to a close," the obit reads, “and the legacy he leaves behind is no closer to resolution than the manner in which this character departed this world.” Jordan Bassett, writing for NME, is more insightful than most: “Eminem is attempting to have it both ways here – to emulate his 2000s hits while lampooning Shady as a cultural relic.” This may be true, but it’s not a full description of the album, which is doing something new. 

Whereas previous material represented Eminem and his alter ego in relative harmony, the album stages an extended rap battle between creator and creation: Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady. The rush of lewd and offensive lyrics spew from the mouth of Slim Shady while Eminem tries to rein him in. Shady’s adenoidal whine is nowhere to be found on this record, replaced with a sinister, very adult scowl. The album’s lyrics reveal an artist at war with himself.

There's times when I lay down to sleep
I argue with myself
Am I the only one who thinks this way?

A one-man culture war is a lonely thing to be. Marshall Mathers wants company. Eminem’s latest satirizes the culture wars tying the nation up in knots — as well as his participation in them. Like so much of Eminem’s music, "The Death of Slim Shady" cannily reflects a cultural moment. Mathers is bored, as exhausted and confused as a lot of us. He’s bored with a doppelganger that traps him in an apparently endless series of culture war sniping. Not just bored, but tired, afraid. He raps, “I see the fear in your eyes, America.” Americans listening to this album might say the same to its maker. 

It’s not true that Eminem lacks the capacity for new material, new stories. When Slim Shady isn’t around – and his appearances have diminished over time – the artist’s repertoire stretches. The anthemic carpe diem of 2002’s “Lose Yourself” is one example of many: the exploration of domestic abuse in his duet with Rihanna, 2010’s “Love the Way You Lie”; his anti-Trump cypher at the 2017 BET Awards; his many songs to his daughter Hailie, from 2002’s “Hailie’s Song” to “Temporary,” the track that introduces "The Death of Slim Shady’s" denouement; depression on the single “Beautiful” from 2019’s "Relapse," an album about addiction.

In fact, Slim Shady has been largely on hiatus since 2004. It’s more accurate to say Eminem resurrects him than to argue that he’s been using him as a crutch for 25 years. Still, it’s fair to ask Eminem, as Basset does, “We get it – Slim Shady was a shocking character. Now that he’s dead, how about getting some new material?” Over the next several weeks, the country will be asking the same of the Democratic Party. 

Upon the album’s release, the so-called left was losing the culture wars, in large part because they’ve been meeting Trump’s brand of thoughtless, deceptive certainty with more of the same. One problem with culture wars is an insistence on premature resolution. They goad people into taking extreme – often simplistic – stances on issues whose complexity is way beyond our capacity to resolve. From Gaza to abortion, people express certainty when confusion and doubt are in order. As if searching for an antidote to all this certainty, Eminem made an album expressing his uncertainty. Then Joe Biden shattered certainty by bowing out of the election. 

Enter Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – a man you can imagine listening to Eminem. With their sharp campaign and electric convention, the Democrats are hitting notes they’ve flubbed since the Tea Party declared a monopoly on populism. They’re addressing the feelings of the American people. Though he doesn’t go as hard as Eminem, Barack Obama expressed the ambivalence and ambiguity that comes with the job. “To make progress on the things we care about, the things that really affect people’s lives, we need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices," he said in his convention speech. Obama, like Eminem, is addressing the fear in the eyes of Americans. But neither of them is running for office. 

In her convention speech, Harris is more buoyant, expressing her promise to expand the middle class with certainty:

And we are charting — and we are charting a new way forward. Forward to a future with a strong and growing middle class because we know a strong middle class has always been critical to America’s success, and building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency.

It’s a big promise, to reverse the increasing income inequality at the heart of the global economy. As David Sirota has pointed out, there’s a disconnect between the populist message and corporate sponsorship of the convention. In his writing for "The Lever," Sirota has made a beat out of covering the many ways both parties put the profits of corporations before the people they serve. At this convention, the Democrats are eschewing the contradiction by condemning corporate greed. To be fair, you have to say a thing before you can make it real, before you can build policy out of it. 

But building policy involves confronting contradictions politicians aren’t willing to express to the public. Contradictions are difficult for them, especially in a polarized world driven by online expressions of angry certainty from both sides. For an artist, contradictions provide motive; Eminem built his career on them. On “Habits,” this album’s second track, he raps with astonishing verbal dexterity, “So all my statements are basically contradictive (What?) / Like using the F-word for gay is wrong and offensive (What?)?” Parenthetical questions throughout the song represent the artist arguing with himself. (For what it’s worth, Eminem eschewed that particular F-word since a beef with Tyler the Creator in 2018 – and insisted he is not homophobic for at least a decade before that.

On “Lucifer,” he lands a Candace Owens diss, making it clear where he doesn't stand politically:

I ain't gon' throw the fact b***h forgot she was Black back at her
In a cute MAGA hat with her brand-new White Lives Matter shirt (Haha, nope)
Or say this MAGA dirtbag in a skirt.

In a response, Owens has been widely declaring she feels sorry for him because he’s obviously a closeted gay man. She doesn’t seem to realize queerness is no longer his kryptonite. Shady wants homophobia from his maker, but Mathers refuses.   

Eminem may be bored with Slim Shady, but despite the album title and the obituary, he can’t quite kill him off. “Guilty Conscience II,” the album’s climactic battle between Mathers and Slim, ends with a Frankenstein moment, banishing his creation with a bullet to the head. But in the skit that follows, Marshall Mathers casts the murder as a dream, a trope Eminem has used throughout his career to inject ambiguity into the scenarios he spins. Critics have found the device cheap, too easy – and, frankly, an artist of Eminem’s verbal dexterity can do better. Mathers can’t kill Slim because the character lives in his nervous system. There’s another reason, too: As long as poverty is rampant in America, Slim will crawl his way back. His obit, after all, refers to a lack of resolution around both his death and his legacy.             

In his book "White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy" Reverend William J. Barber argues that the culture wars mask the rampant poverty in the world’s richest nation. He writes, “The problem in American politics isn’t that poor white people vote against interests, so much as it is that poor people don’t have anyone to express their interests.” Eminem knows that because he grew up poor in America. He’s has been expressing the interests of the poor for 25 years. Trump and Vance, separately and now together, have been pretending to the same for close to a decade. The Democrats are just getting started. 

Since at least 2013, when he launched his “Moral Mondays” campaign in North Carolina, Barber has been calling on Americans – and, crucially, our leaders – to recognize that white poverty is built into systemic racism. For Barber, the culture wars are a distraction from the fact that “nearly half of Americans – people of every race, creed, and region – are united by the experience of being poor.” When enslaved Black people made crops cheap, poor white farmers suffered because they couldn’t compete; white supremacists push the myth that the success of Black people and immigrants are responsible for white poverty. Barber tells a more accurate story about poverty in America: “The issues impact poor people [like Slim Shady, like Marshall Mathers well into adulthood]” are not “matters of right and left, but right versus wrong.” As Pete Buttigieg told Barber and his congregation in 2019, “Rev, I’m probably not supposed to say this. I might get in trouble for saying it here. But the reason we don’t talk about poverty is that the consultants tell us not to.” When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks about “working people,” she uses euphemistic code for poor people.

Is there room for Slim Shady in the vision of America we heard at the DNC? If the answer is yes, Eminem might just be able to kill him off. In the meantime, he haunts the album because he haunts American culture. On a skit near the end of the album, Slim sounds like he’s crawling out of a grave, groaning like Tolkien’s Golem:

Been waiting a long time for this s**t,
Long time no see, 
Thought you got rid of my a**, huh?

Then he croaks the hook from the album’s first single, “Houdini,” a riff on the chorus of Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra”:

Half a bag of Viagra, 
I’m gonna reach around and grab ya, 
Bruh,
Sometimes I wonder if my homie’s gay, 
Wait, where’d everybody go?

We hear footsteps leaving the scene. He’s lost the magic.

Eminem is no lover of politicians. But he is a genuine hater of Donald Trump. If you listen closely to "The Death of Slim Shady," you can hear an artist tired not just of himself, but of the partisan warfare Trump stokes. American disaffection crosses parties. Eminem upends them — easier to do in art than politics. While we’re stuck with the two-party system, Harris and Walz are catching on as they veer toward populism. They must appeal to the millions of Americans buying this album. If they can do that, they have a chance of winning the presidential and down-ballot elections — and moving beyond impasses of the culture wars toward productive policy. The Harris-Walz ticket must not simply look new, it must be new. 

The radical change hinted at but not quite promised at the convention seems beyond reach. Slim Shady wouldn’t buy it. But as Pete Buttigieg — Shady’s opposite in just about every way imaginable – reminded us on the convention stage that marriage equality and mainstream cultural representation of LGBTQ people seemed impossible just a couple of decades ago. And LGBTQ rights are no anomaly. As Heather Cox Richardson writes on Substack, “I keep coming back to the Ernest Hemingway quote about how bankruptcy happens. He said it happens in two stages, first gradually and then suddenly. But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe democracy happens the same way, too: slowly, and then all at once.” Think the Rove v. Wade, the New Deal or the abolition of slavery. Her words rang through my mind as I witnessed the crowds dancing to the riff from “Lose Yourself” as Michigan delegates pledged their votes for Harris and Walz: “You only get one shot, one chance to blow / This opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo.” The joy of the convention was infectious and necessary. People need motivation to join in on the hard work of grass roots organizing necessary to make the most of a sudden opportunity for cultural change. It’s on all of us to work to make a new chapter in the American story possible.

Eminem is not bored with his craft. Even as they pan the album’s themes, most critics admit that Eminem’s rhymes are as deft as ever. He experiments with new tones and cadences; the beats bounce, the production is subdued, but innovative. The album is packed full of infectious hooks. It’s streamed by millions because it’s so damn listenable. In other words, populist. A politician’s craft requires rhetoric and policy. Policies that make the radical change Barber, Robinson, and Sirota imagine will require passing laws and making policy. This is a job Joe Biden excels at (think The American Rescue Plan, new gun laws, and the infrastructure bill). Without a super majority or serious filibuster reform in the Senate, the bills – abortion, affordable housing, lowering drug costs, the minimum wage – Harris promises to sign will never make it to her desk. How refreshing would it be if she and Walz ignored their consultants and addressed the challenge directly? What if they addressed what Biden was not able to get done: raising the minimum wage; solving the border crisis; meeting our stated climate goals? Might they appear more trustworthy if they confessed to the ambiguities, ambivalence and contradictions their jobs entail? 

It works for Eminem. His track record is solid when it comes to pumping his fans through admissions of failure. It’s a weird move – especially in hip-hop – for an artist to explore his own artistic ennui. It’s honest, but difficult to hear. It requires close listening to hear the internal conflict of a middle-aged artist who feels his youthful poverty no matter how rich he gets. Politicians want to send broad messages, not subtle ones. They avoid the doubt, fatigue and frustration that dominate "The Death of Slim Shady." One might go so far as to make an analogy between the fatigue that led to Biden’s retreat from the election and Eminem’s decision to kill off Slim Shady. 

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The five songs that follow the shooting of Slim Shady are mostly about money. The two strongest explore typical American problems, with a sincerity more characteristic of an Eminem interview than his music. On “Temporary,” a song about his own mortality, he worries he’s neglected Hailie and the other three children he raised because he worked too much. “Somebody Save Me” opens with a dialogue between Mathers and his daughter Alaina. She pleads with her opiate-hazed father to eat. Hip-hop country artist Jelly Roll sings the song’s title and hook. It’s not Marshall Mathers, sober since 2008, who needs saving. It’s a refrain that the coalition of poor people of all races Barber envisions might chant. Jelly Roll, a white artist embraced by country radio and hip-hop culture, croons the yearning chorus like he’s addressing a coalition – one the “new” Democratic Party hopes to appeal to.

The reception of "The Death and Slim Shady" makes it clear that Eminem has the popular vote, but not the delegates. The Democrats will need both. As they consider this, the party might want to add Eminem’s latest to the DNC playlist.