“The Death of Slim Shady” and Why Rap Careers Can’t Last Forever

Despite an undisputed mastery of rhymes and epithets, Eminem finds career revival an increasingly impossible task

May 09, 2025

Album produced by Aftermath Entertainment and distributed by Interscope Records

There are few occupations with more clearly cut expiration dates than those of hip-hop artists. Like the professional sports player whose career expires as soon as their athletic prowess does, the world of hip-hop centers largely around masculinity and youthful energy.

As athletes get older, the natural process of aging keeps them from achieving peak performance. Their joints and muscles are less resilient. Recovery takes longer and they’re more susceptible to injury than their younger counterparts. They’re slower.

But the professional rapper runs into constraints that are almost entirely cultural. While it’s rare for agility to linger into an athlete’s fifties, we can rhyme as long as our mental acuity allows. To continue to do what the career asks, though, can seem unbecoming of people who’ve been on this earth for half a century or more. Eminem continues to hone his dexterous brand of bravado; at fifty-one, his verbal acrobatics are arguably more impressive than ever before.

But no matter how impossibly talented Eminem gets at rhyming syllables and obscenities, there just aren’t many who want to hear them emerging from the mouth of this middle-aged man. It’s hard for me not to feel a certain pity for the genius he’s cultivated. He’s one of the best rappers who will ever live, and even one of the inspirations behind my writing. Yet the music he makes today is pedaled to a public that’s lost patience as he’s continued to create. The Death of Slim Shady is no exception.

People get bogged down in his wordplay, metaphors, and elaborate rhyme schemes and yearn for the simpler lines of simpler times. As much as I’ve wanted to love his last four studio albums, they’ve never quite risen to the heights of sheer listening pleasure of any of his works prior to 2013.

Even the most raving rockers and death metal stars can be revered into their old age. But the fifty-one-year-old rap icon may be the most well-known lyricist yet to reach the limits of his career before his talent even begins to dwindle.

The hip-hop craft is treated more as a physical sport than a form of art. It has an unspoken age limit that painting and standard songwriting do not. Superiority and domination are bigger priorities to many within the world of rap, and people don’t want to see rappers “dominate the game” when they’re only a decade shy of retirement age.

But people would still line up to sell out Dead and Company shows even if their lead singer were on life-support and the rest of the band were six feet under.

The culture of rap is prone to feuds, and Eminem has famously found his way into his fair share of them throughout his enduring career. But for him to continue picking fights and clawing his way toward some unreachable crown as his bleach-blonde hair turns gray won’t be received in quite the same way. It won’t be the same experience as cramming into stadiums to listen to the atonal tidings of an aging Bob Dylan. It matters not whether he can sing now or ever could.

Notes and poetry are timeless in a way that lyrics like:

And you know I’m here to stay ’cause me
If I was to ever take a leave, It would be aspirin to break a feve
If I was to ask for Megan Thee Stallion if she would collab with me
Would I really have a shot at a feat?

likely never will be. Fans probably won’t sell out stadiums to hear the words rapped by a quavering, slurring, and septuagenarian Slim Shady (Eminem’s alter ego). It’s not his fault. It’s just a drawback of his trade. It’s an occupational hazard of his career that however talented he gets, the subject matter of his work will never be more at home in the world of hip-hop than it was in the 2000s.

Judging by sheer technique alone, his latest album has no shortage of his signature groundbreaking wordplay. Even if the message can’t be appreciated by more progressive audiences, there’s little denying the talent it takes to compose his lines so meticulously.

Despite career-long attempts to distinguish himself from the wifebeater-wearing misogyny and ignorance with which he’s so commonly associated, the unsavory image of the rapper has persevered in the public eye. And the songs he writes, with his hallmark filterless style and smattering of curse words, don’t go very far to assuage this perception.

I don’t doubt Eminem is capable of sacrificing his more questionable rhyming material in the interest of mere wordplay and poetry. But he finds himself between a rock and a hard place.

To tone down the lyrics and make them more palatable for the dinner table would run the risk of losing the fan base he’s spent decades building. Yet to continue along the path he’s outlined in this current social climate, he’s destined to continue courting controversy at each and every turn.

His work of recent years has repeatedly returned to Donald Trump and all of the dangers his brand of politics poses. But this most recent album has begun to take aim at a new target. With a greater focus on the pitfalls of censorship than any prior Eminem album, the aging hip-hop star makes no attempts to conceal his frustrations with “cancel culture” and “wokeism.”

Even while Eminem has been a vocal Democrat since as early as the 2000s, he’s struggled to get past the stigma his name elicits. The criticisms leveled against him have only grown louder in many regards. Perhaps it’s understandable why he’d take such profound issue with these heightened calls for cancellation that he’s fielded.

But it’s equal parts understandable why he’s so routinely struggled to separate himself from the images and prejudices that his words appear to impart. To hear him speak on social issues in interviews, it’s as clear as day that there’s a difference between the artist and the art.

And yet, his words betray his beliefs. Some people see real calls for violence and hate in rhymes written for the sake of verbosity alone. They run counterintuitively with his calls for advocacy and proud performances on stage with Elton John.

As much as I admire Eminem for his lyrical talent, I can’t help but feel he’s reached a dead end in his career. He’s defied stereotypes and colored the direction of hip-hop as a whole. But the prioritization of youth and dog-eat-dog dominance has also been his downfall. He’s become the butt of jokes and fallen victim to the culture of feuding and throning that he helped to spearhead.

This article was originally published on Medium.

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