The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce)

The Death of Slim Shady (Coupe De Grace) isn’t a blazing return to glory, but it is an intriguing album filled with some legitimately light-hearted and funny moments – something I feel has been sorely lacking in his material for years now – the battle between Eminem and Slim Shady is a great concept that is explored pretty competently here, and the instrumentation, while far from perfect, captures the essence of what he’s trying to accomplish here.

It’s evident that his pen game remains sharp, but the aforementioned polarization causes Eminem to also remain as an acquired taste even now: You either like him or you don’t.

As its lead single suggested, Eminem is attempting to have it both ways here – to emulate his 2000s hits while lampooning Shady as a cultural relic who makes geriatric barbs at sensitive Gen Z-ers (as on ‘Trouble’), which enables him to say the same old thirstily provocative stuff. The extent to which he does so only overshadows the point he’s apparently trying to make.

The Death of Slim Shady feels like just another late-period Eminem album. It has successes and misfires in equal measure. It’s not bad enough to count as terrible, not good enough to count as great. It’s bolstered by technical ability but afflicted by a creeping sense of purposelessness.

An album buoyed by its technical prowess and bogged by its crass subjectivism.

‘The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace)’ doesn’t quite feel like an ending, but neither does it feel like a continuation. A mixed, often muddled album, it features some of Eminem’s best rapping in a decade – those fast, skippy-yet-intricate flows will never fail to thrill – but his pen is often blunted. It’s at once an effective piece of fan service, while also being a record that disappoints.

It’s a long slog to get to “Guilty Conscience 2,” but there are moments of genuine inspiration along the way.

Em is largely in defense mode; it’s a self-consciousness that leans closer to stagnation than catharsis.

The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) has a runtime of over 64 minutes. It would be more fun to pick one good song and listen to it on repeat.

It’s funny how his hyped comeback hit “Houdini” had a joke about participation trophies, since that’s what this album turned out to be. On The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace), he’s a legacy artist who’s turned into a professional collector of participation trophies, so he’s giving himself a new one for his display case.

For as much as Eminem is still a technical master at spitting non-stop stream-of-conscious tongue twisters, his purported profundity as a social critic is often wielded axiomatically rather than thoughtfully interrogated. The actual content of his lyrics remains as incoherent as ever.

Mathers’ rapping maintains his signature sharpness of diction throughout; it’s the content that’s at fault: punching relentlessly downwards, so joylessly, so without inspiration.

For the most part, however, The Death of Slim Shady is a bewildering slog to get through. The general concept gets old almost immediately, and from there we're left with a painful lack of new ideas

What a shame, then, that The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grace) is such a regression in aesthetic, subject matter and quality, full of shock-value material that sounds painfully forced in 2024.