His technical proficiency on the mic is, at times, truly stunning. That’s not to suggest Eminem – whose new album, Revival, is expected to be released this weekend, his first since 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 – never had any talent. Put it this way: Eminem’s vicious beef with Ja Rule might have smashed the Murder Inc Records juggernaut 14 years ago, but I know whose singles I still hear go off in the club. Even his biggest hits rarely seem to get aired in public these days. Sonic evidence of his influence on the current generation of artists is extremely limited. That doesn’t mean Eminem’s music hasn’t aged as badly as Donald Trump’s 2013 tweets. I’m sure there are people who kept their Anger Management tour T-shirt and still bump My Name Is weekly. Instead, his most dominant era – roughly 1999 to 2002 – has fossilised, with little lasting appeal or relevance. But you won’t feel the reverberations from the impact today. His shtick was built on shock value and kids were drawn in like Icarus to the sunĮm (Slim Shady to some of those who absorbed his alter-ego first) didn’t leave a footprint in the pop landscape – it was more like a meteor crater.
The narrative of the white rapper who’d come up in the harsh arena of Detroit seduced the public so much that they made a semi-factual movie about it, 8 Mile, with the emcee himself in the lead role. His popularity was somewhere in the region of finding money you didn’t know you’d lost. It’s damn near impossible to describe the cultural currency Eminem had back then. At the turn of the century, Marshall Mathers was absolutely everywhere. But it also worked a microcosm for the wider pop climate. It was a clever performance, ribbing on the wacky single’s central theme: that when it came to the Detroit rapper, accept no imitators. Beginning his performance of The Real Slim Shady outside New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Em and his squad of lookalikes entered the arena and made a beeline for the stage like white blood cells rushing to a wound. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Eminem commanded an army of bleach-blonde soldiers.