Eminem’s Return and Cancel Culture Fixation Baffle Critics
When Eminem dropped his first major-label album in 1999, The Slim Shady LP, critics and fans largely hailed the release, praising its lyrical originality, wicked sense of humor, impressive flow and novel hooks.
“Eminem has skills — he’s a warp-speed human rhyming dictionary with LL Cool J’s gift for the killer dis,” Rob Sheffield wrote in Rolling Stone.
The album made Eminem a household name and introduced his alter ego, “Slim Shady,” who would pop up on multiple albums in the years to come.
In July, Emimem released his newest album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, knocking Taylor Swift out of the top spot.
The album’s success earned Eminem the No. 7 spot on the latest Bloomberg Pop Star Power Rankings. In June, it racked up more than 200 million streams on Spotify and over 150 million plays on YouTube.
It’s a major hit. But unlike the 1999 release, critics are mostly unimpressed with the new album, which is preoccupied with “cancel culture,” and at a loss about where Eminem fits into the current, polarized cultural landscape, a quarter century after the first Slim Shady release.
“Em’s got nothing in the bag at all,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Sheffield this time around. “He goes off on Caitlin Jenner (Google her — a big deal eons ago) and Michael Jackson (he died once) and the ‘Gen Z’ ‘PC police’ (they’re a thing, according to Eminem).”
Sheldon Pearce of NPR made a similar critique. “The focus on cancellation is bizarre… and it forces to the surface an uncomfortable notion, that perhaps what he’s truly railing against is the decline of his viability as a respectable artist,” Pearce wrote.
See other Pop Star Power Rankings
On the New York Times music podcast Popcast, host Jon Caramanica and writers Jayson Buford and Rob Markman puzzled over who might comprise Eminem’s fan base in 2024. Maybe, they theorize, it’s younger listeners whose parents or older family members introduced them to Eminem. Or maybe it’s just the same old, longtime Gen X stans (the slang for superfans, which Eminem himself coined).
“This album is not going to make new Eminem fans,” said Markman, comparing it to a horror-movie franchise like Saw that doesn’t innovate much from sequel to sequel but consistently delivers the same gore for people who have come to expect it. “If you didn’t like him already, you’re not going to like it.”
On the new album, the critics noted, Eminem keeps hitting the same ideas — like jokes about Christopher Reeve — but with the new angle of potentially getting canceled for what he says.
The focus on cancel culture extends beyond the lyrics. The music video for Houdini, the album’s first single, features Eminem hurling a youth “participation trophy” and happening upon comedian Shane Gillis, who was booted from Saturday Night Live in 2019 after a clip of him using an anti-Asian slur surfaced, along with other offensive moments.
Despite the mystified critics, Eminem fans have been happily congregating on Reddit, celebrating the new music. “I think we all can agree,” wrote one poster. “This album was an instant classic, and exactly what we wanted.”