Eminem

Marshall Mathers was born in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1972 and built a career on a second self. Slim Shady was the outlet for the sadistic, violent, deliberately indefensible material, and inventing him is what got Eminem noticed after a first album had failed to. The alter ego let him say things in character which he could then disown, the oldest move in transgressive art, used more systematically than any rapper had tried.

The technical case for him is separate from the controversy and considerably stronger. He raps in dense internal rhyme, bending pronunciation until words that should not match are forced to, and he can move from comic to menacing inside a single bar without changing tempo. He is also, unusually for a rapper of his stature, a narrative writer: several of his best-known tracks are short stories with a fixed point of view and a shape you can feel closing.

His commercial peak, from 1999 to 2002, made him a cultural flashpoint and one of the most influential rappers there has been, credited with carrying hip-hop to an American audience that had not been buying it. He holds Grammys for Best Rap Album and Best Melodic Rap Performance, and an Academy Award for Best Original Song. The mid-decade records lost the thread. The 2010s brought a recovery and then a run of albums preoccupied with proving he could still out-rap younger artists, an argument he was always going to win and never the interesting thing about him. In 2024 he made a record about retiring Slim Shady, a quarter century after inventing him.

On screen he has been careful. 8 Mile cast him in 2002 as a version of himself in a Detroit rap-battle story, and he was better in it than anyone expected. Since then he has mostly played Eminem, in comedies and documentaries, which is the sensible use of him.