Slim Shady will return. Well, technically. Eminem is gearing up for the release of his album The Death of Slim Shady, which will be the final chapter in his alter ego's storyline. The catch is, like the title suggests, Slim is dead. The teaser that announced the album was structured like an old procedural show, in which witnesses reflect on what went wrong. It's too early to tell how meta the lyrical content of the album will be, but the promo has definitely been consistent. Em has even posted an obituary in the newspaper.
"Slim Shady made lasting impressions" read the Detroit Free Press headline. The piece treats Slim like a real person, despite the comically exaggerated photo of him wearing a hockey mask above the headline. It does, however, address some of the satirical elements that Eminem has played with whenever he used the Shady moniker. "[His] audience was soon exposed to the extreme darkness of the muse/rapper," the write posited. "As he led millions of music fans down a road glorified a demonstrably nihilistic worldview." Slim's background is common knowledge. It's the revelatory details about his death, however, that make the piece fun to parse through.
Eminem Continues To Mourn His Alter Ego's Death
The obituary notes that Slim Shady's path was always going to come to a tragic end. "His complex and tortured existence has come to a close," the writer posited. "And the legacy he leaves behind is no closer to resolution than the manner in which the character departed this world. May he truly find the peace in an afterlife that he could not find on Earth." This is all consistent with the way that Eminem has talked about the Slim Shady persona over the years.
During a 1999 interview with Video Music Box, the rapper revealed that Slim Shady allowed him to free up his creative impulses without having to worry about whether they went too far. "Everybody's got two sides to them," he posited. "Slim Shady's just an angry side for me to vent. Eminem is just me. When I sit down with a pen, sometimes I write Eminem rhymes, sometimes I write Slim Shady rhymes. It depends on what type of mood I'm in that day." Two and a half decades later, it seems like the rapper is finally ready to let go of the Slim Shady safety net.