This is a modified-for-a-blog-post version of a talk I gave at my kid’s high school FCA meeting this morning.
Three quick stories, if I may.
Before we get into it, to address two pressing points:
First, YES, this is another instance of some 40-something white guy insisting that Eminem is the best rapper alive, and that it’s not close. But the fact that Em singlehandedly created the genre of “I’m going to stop trying to compete with Eminem and just be impossible to understand instead” mumble-rap is not what I’m here to talk about.
Next, YES this is a “sermon” about Eminem and NO I’m not sure if I’m allowed to share it at a high school, so if I get escorted out someone please grab a photo for Instagram, because that will seriously up my street cred.
Ok, to the stories: First up Marshall Mathers, who you might know as the rapper Eminem. But to understand his story you should grasp something critical about the genre of rap (which I’ll also refer to as Hip Hop even though there are distinctions).
Hip hop started as a protest genre, speaking truth to power. Rappers, DJs, Break Dancers, and MCs were in large part a mostly-peaceful alternative to gang violence and aggression. Instead of taking up a gun, an emcee could pick up a microphone to resolve a beef. By its very nature Hip Hop is explicit.
A good rapper or rap lyricist therefore is someone who looks around (or looks internally) and then describes what they see in ways that help others see and feel something. That’s honestly true of any artist, only that rappers get a pass for making the explicitness a feature of the art.
Back in 1997 Eminem released an EP (Extended Play–like an album, but shorter) called “Slim Shady” where he introduced an alter-ego who was like an uncensored version of himself. Eminem (who he’d self-reference as “Marshall”) might not get away with saying especially offensive and lewd things, but Slim could get a pass.
Slim Shady is a character who represents what it’s like to remove all morality and sense of “right and wrong” from who Eminem (or Marshall) is. He’s “free” to spew whatever blasphemous, vile, and sick things he thinks without having to worry about the “shackles” of a conscience.
The Slim Shady EP was a monster hit that got Eminem noticed and the rest is history (financially speaking) as Marshall skyrocketed in popularity and notoriety. Nearly 30 years later, and he’s honestly still playing with the concept of Slim Shady.
That brings me to story 2: the one about Henry Jekyll.
It’s a “story” in a more literal (and literary!) sense, written down in the 1886 novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.
I can’t help but think that Marshall Mathers used the story as inspiration for Slim Shady.
As the story goes, Henry Jekyll saw in himself a similar evil impulse, and sought a way to repress those tendencies. There’s even an alter-ego (this time named Edward Hyde… a wonderful play on the fact that we humans naturally try to “hide” this side of us). Stevenson follows the same train of thought as Eminem, exploring what it would look like if there were a potion that actually turned Jekyll into Hyde. How dark could it get? (spoiler? pretty dark.)
Sidenote: In 1997 Dr Timothy Keller gave a sermon on Romans 7:1-25 where he does a better job of making the point I’m going to aim at today. I owe much of the insight to Dr Keller. I’m honestly just tacking on a more-recent example of Slim Shady to his already-masterful application of Romans 7.
Last week Eminem released another album, and as before ever since the concept of “Slim Shady” was introduced, he spends a lot of time making Slim the scapegoat, and playing with the concepts of causing offense, being a sort of dark prophet committed to truth-telling at all costs, as well as typical “I’m the best rapper ever”-style bravado and machismo.
In 2024 Marshall is still dealing with the same exact struggle and he even went about solving the problem (so far!) in much the same way that Henry Jekyll did.
It should go without saying, but just so we’re clear: I don’t recommend listening to this album on a regular basis, and I certainly don’t condone anything that Eminem says, how he says it, or the implications that might flow from it.
But as a case-study in how the non-Christian mind works, I’ve never seen a better and more honest text.
In the song “Guilty Conscience 2” (again, lyrics not for the faint of heart, and don’t say I didn’t warn you) takes a blatantly Jekyll/Hyde approach and has Slim and Marshall rap at each other, battle-rap style. From a production standpoint, whenever he’s “Slim” the tone of the vocals are a little more compressed and filtered, and when he’s Marshall it’s clearer and unfiltered.
The setup is that “Slim” has taken “Marshall” hostage, setting the stage for the conflict. By the end of the song “Marshall” convinces “Slim” to untie him, and the song ends with a self-described murder-suicide. The “good guy” murdering the “bad guy.”
There’s a masterful bit of production that goes on through the song. As he has this internal battle between “the real Marshall” and “the fake Slim Shady” there’s a spot a little over halfway through where “Slim” says this (with parenthetical interjections throughout by “Marshall” and only one bit of censorship—which feels like a record in quoting Eminem đŸ˜†)
Yeah, and I scare you ’cause (why?)
Eminem
I’m who you used to be (who?)
The you who didn’t crumble under the scrutiny (wait, what?)
When it was you and me (yeah)
I gave you power to use me as an excuse to be evil (I know)
You created me to say everything you didn’t have the {guts} to say (yep)
What you were thinking but in a more diabolic way
You fed me pills and a bottle of alcohol a day (okay)
Made me too strong for you and lost control of me (you’re right)
I took over you totally
You were socially awkward ’til you molded me (yeah)
As this section of the song builds, the two “styles” of production start to blend, and you can hear both Marshall and Slim rapping together. The track is literally doubled, and the two sides are perfectly in sync.
Back real quick to Henry Jekyll.
Apologies for potentially spoiling a 135-year-old book, but late in the novel, Dr Jekyll is sitting on a park bench, having run out of the “potion” that turns him into the unfettered and evil Edward Hyde, but something happens: he begins comparing himself (favorably) to those around him, and that “vainglorious” thought is the direct preamble to him once again turning irrevocably into Edward Hyde. The “bad guy” summoned by dark impulses of the “good guy.”
Wait, what? What’s going on there?
That brings us to the Apostle Paul, for a potentially shocking take.
By way of introduction to this Biblical text, it was written by inarguably the most famous Christian preacher of his day, and the author of a significant portion of the New Testament (most likely after he’d written much of it!), so I want you to take special notice of the verb tenses.
This is a world famous pastor, and he’s speaking very intentionally in the first person, singular, present tense.
Here’s Romans Chapter 7:
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
Romans 7:14-25
So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in my sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
If you stop reading before the last paragraph there, the story bears a LOT of similarities to how both Jekyll and Marshall’s ends come about.
The preacher here is saying something majorly profound: if you follow through on *effort* to be holier, trying really hard to be the “good guy” or to do the “right thing” it’ll end the same place as Eminem so explicitly draws out: staring down the barrel of a loaded gun that your own effort to be good enough is pointing at you.
That vainglorious comparison, that insidious and self-justifying pride, that scorekeeping Jekyllism is exactly the fuel that the unredeemed flesh feeds on, and it will (guaranteed) end in the same spot Paul gets to: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”
Both the Slim Shady obscenity and the Marshall self-justification (though he never really gets to that corner to turn it) are attempts to not need Jesus. The “good guy” turns out to not be so “good.”
So how is Paul’s response any different? Well we have the last few lines of the text to show us.
We’ve established that there’s no hope in just muscling it out to do better, so the only freedom can come from *gratitude*. Paul rebounds HARD off of the “ground” of reality by aggressively turning to GRATITUDE. “Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ.”
Thanks for what? Well you kinda have to read the entirety of Romans up to that point to really get it, but here’s the summary, which Christians have called the “gospel” or good news.
Paul has spent the previous chapters of this letter to the Romans explaining the NEWS. (Sidenote: there’s a difference between news and instruction. The Gospel is news.)
Briefly: Jesus Christ came and lived the perfect life that Eminem, myself, and you couldn’t. Even at the level of motive, all of his deeds were right, his actions were glorifying to God, and he never failed. He never once gave in when tempted.
Then, he died the death that we deserve, and offers his record of perfect righteousness for our record of sin. His death pays a ransom, averting the righteous wrath of God that has to exist against sin.
Paul goes on later in the letter to tell the Romans exactly how to be saved: rest in Jesus, declaring with your mouth and believing in your heart that he was raised from the dead for you.
I really do hope that Eminem can make it there. As it is, I’ve got such respect for his ability to own, call out, and publicly do battle with his demons. But it’s not enough. I don’t have a hundredth the platform that Eminem does, and I can’t imagine calling out my sins and owning them the way he does. He’s both flippant and dismissive of the hurt he’s caused and deeply and openly troubled by it. His lyrics are startlingly raw.
My challenge to Marshall, that he seems to have already figured out: keep digging into that self-justifying and “righteous” facade, and what you’ll find is that no matter how you slice it from skin to core, you’re a bad apple. A “wretched man.”
Then bounce off of Jesus, turning the corner. All you need to turn that corner is nothing. Surrender. Discover the news of what Jesus did for you. Cease the striving to save yourself. Join our line of screwups and failures.