The Twisted Genius of Eminem
Eminem’s 13th studio album, “The Death of Slim Shady,” proves that the fifty-one-year-old rapper is as dexterous as ever before
To hear Eminem speak in interviews, it would be easy to miss his love for words. He talks at a below-average tempo and with a laid-back drawl that feels more suited to the late Euphoria actor, Angus Cloud, than it does the man who’s by and large considered the greatest rapper and lyricist of all time.
He makes little attempt to employ the vocabulary that makes its way onto the page in his songs. But walking away from interviews and with a pen and paper in hand, he comes to life with words and metaphors in a way that most writers and linguists could stand to learn a thing or two from.
Like the non-communicative dementia patient who begins to sing when the right childhood melody emerges, there’s a prowess with words the rapper possesses that lays dormant and comes alive on the lyrics sheet alone.
One could be forgiven for believing that the rapper who said, rather inarticulately, in a 60 Minutes interview, “I think it was, uh, one of the things that helped me, actually, was having to deal with the, you know, the pressure of just being a kid and, you know, having to deal with the bullies and stuff like that,”…
