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Rap fans who came of age during the crunk, snap, and trap eras that flourished during the Detroit MC’s five-year sobriety journey and musical hiatus post- Encore don’t subscribe to the idea that a rapper needs to be the sharpest rhymer to sell a song. Nearly 20 years after the Slim Shady LP, Eminem has come to embody the very Establishment he once worked to overthrow.
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The ascendant rap god, born Marshall Mathers, was destroying and rebuilding pop as we knew it. The records took like wildfires, an ecosystem’s natural act of destructive course correction. His craft was a fruit of a decade of practice, but on television, he never seemed very rehearsed. He made the machinery of celebrity look slipshod and silly. If you were a smart-ass, Em was your man on the inside.
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In the beginning, Eminem was defined as much by the irony of a scrawny midwestern latchkey kid’s unprecedented success in rap as he was by the row it created to have a razor-sharp battle rapper holding court with the pop elder statesmen and well-groomed, media-trained former child stars dominating the charts at the end of the century. Squeaky clean, cookie-cutter pop acts personified the homogenization of the American teenager, the logic went. For a time, as the cool-but-not- that-cool ’90s bucked to the culturally and politically conservative strictures of the Bush administration, the outlook felt vital. To a certain brand of existential crank, Eminem albums were once affirmations that it was okay to be angry and defiant.