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‘It was only a matter of time for Slim’: Eminem to kill off Slim Shady alter ego on new album

Rapper trails summer release of The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) with a fictional crime report suggesting that the antic character will meet a violent end

50 Cent appears, describing Slim Shady – with mock fear – as a psychopath, and Eminem himself concludes: “I knew it was only a matter of time for Slim.” An image, possibly the album artwork, features a figure with a knife wound to the chest. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis said of Kamikaze: “Hip-hop’s former enfant terrible, a man who made a career out of saying things that even his most nihilistic peers would consider beyond the pale … reinvented himself as rap’s grumpy dad, baffled and horrified at what the genre had become.” Petridis said that on that album and its successor, Eminem was “going through the motions” with his Slim Shady provocations, but acknowledged that Music to Be Murdered By “offers one virtuoso performance after another: delivery that’s both warp-speed and perfectly enunciated, constant shifts in tempo and emphasis”.

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