The Slim Shady Essay

As shtick, Eminem’s somewhat petulant late-2005 decision to prepare the second act of his American life in rehab was tedious, like the Hollywood role that in late 2002 persuaded pundits to validate an artist whose three hip-hop albums had enriched public discourse more than they ever would by the time 8 Mile opened. For Marshall Mathers the Vicodin fan, on the other hand, rehab came right on time, just as Eminem the artistic seeker needed a film credit to broaden his options. The loser in both cases was Slim Shady, the bad-boy projection of Marshall Mathers who surfaced on Eminem’s indie Slim Shady EP in 1997 and went public after former N.W.A mainstay Dr. Dre oversaw 1999’s Slim Shady LP for Interscope. Not that Slim ever went away. But his logorrheic schizo-slapstick was swamped by the rock anthems of 2002’s The Eminem Show and disappeared altogether from the agonistic 8 Mile. When Slim once again fulfilled his destiny as a pain in the ass on the only album Eminem has released since 8 Mile, 2004’s preemptively entitled Encore, he was taken to task for his immaturity by a music community a lot less discerning than he is—or than Eminem is.

That I have a right to expect readers to follow the shifts and feints of Marshall Bruce Mathers III’s triune persona is proof of the respectability that became his lot after 8 Mile. Though a superior vehicle in its class, the film was a neorealist romance that diverged from Mathers’s true story in many ways. It gave fictionalization Rabbit Smith a nicer mother, a saner love life, a healthier hip-hop scene, a John Updike reference, and a job stamping auto bumpers where Mathers’s employment was strictly service-sector. By presenting Eminem as a working-class hero financing his demo on OT, it convinced the sociologically inclined of his essential virtue. Finally they bought what he’d claimed from the very beginning: that his descriptions weren’t prescriptive nor his threats literal. But this missed the bigger point—that rock and roll perennial, the triumph of smarts over school. It missed the organic intellectual, and the little big man talking circles around the bully who stole his lunch money. It missed the natural-born alien who knew just from living that character and identity are mutable, with race an example rather than a defining case, and that moral responsibility in the public arts is equally mutable—a fact he accepted, explored, exploited, and expanded as the good people cringed.

In 8 Mile’s climactic battle-rhyme scene, Rabbit is the anti-Slim: he preempts his black rival, Papa Doc, with improvised confessional poetry...