22 July 2000
One thing that jumps out at me from ‘The Real Slim Shady’ is how defensive and chippy it is. How many other Slim Shadies were out there, exactly? If he’s dissing other white rappers, does he mean Mark McCabe and our blessed ‘Maniac 2000’? Confusingly, he then quotes approvingly the Discovery Channel / mammals rhyme from ‘The Bad Touch’ by white rap-rockers Bloodhound Gang, and favourably namechecks white rap-rocker Fred Durst, who in 2000 was both lead singer of Limp Bizkit and Senior Vice President of A&R at Interscope, the record company releasing ‘The Real Slim Shady’.
Another feature of this record is how nasty it is. Between song and video, we get a celebrity domestic abuse joke, homophobia, misogyny at the expense of Christina Aguilera, playground puerility about putting your arse on someone’s face, and cheap digs at easy targets like boybands and girl groups. Edgy? Authentic? Perhaps – if you’re an asshole. The plastic keyboard sound adds to the air of cheapness. For all Dr Dre’s cred-donating patronage, Fred Durst and ‘The Bad Touch’ are the more apposite references here. Eminem is just another whiny white rapper reducing a music form of Black origin to cartoon commercialism; the Vanilla Ice for a nastier frat-boy generation.
