Eminem and Common confront the same milestone — middle age — from opposite angles

In route to his spiritual flute transformation last year, Andre 3000 made clear that he considered himself too old to rap anymore. “Sometimes it feels inauthentic for me to rap because I don’t have anything to talk about in that way,” he told GQ. “I’m 48 years old. And not to say that age is a thing that dictates what you rap about, but in a way it does, and things that happen in my life, like, what are you talking about? ‘I got to go get a colonoscopy.’ What are you rapping about?” It was disheartening for rap fans to hear one of its greatest practitioners shrug off his practice; disheartening for rappers, too — Lil Wayne, who has been rapping since he was a teen and is now just north of 40, felt differently, calling the comments “so depressing” and saying, “I have everything to talk about.” Reflecting on Andre’s comments, which I think are better understood as a personal admission than some ageist referendum on rap as a whole, I still found myself fascinated by the question he posed: What exactly should older rappers be rapping about? It’s well known that rap is youth culture, and that it has often struggled to care for its elders. In a genre that caters primarily to the whims of those coming-of-age, how can experience manifest as maturity — without feeling like a put-on?

In recent years, the most compelling middle-age success stories have come from hip-hop’s hard-striving independent scenes. The Brownsville rapper Ka, who turns 52 next month, has created a little self-sustaining kingdom rapping about honor, serving the community and minding your own business. Just last year, billy woods made his best-ever album, Maps, by surveying the many places he’s traveled and the things discovered there, only to follow it a few months later with another alongside his Armand Hammer partner Elucid, among their punchiest in a catalog of Orwellian industrial rap capturing a cheerless present. Once among the wordiest rappers known to man, Aesop Rock has spent recent years taking on projects that allow him to drill into various elaborate setups — hallucinatory otherworld explorations in 2020’s Spirit World Field Guide, breakdowns of modern advancements on last year’s Integrated Tech Solutions — using his wicked-sharp penmanship to craft photorealistic exhibitions.

What, then, of two boldfaced names, Eminem and Common, who released new albums last week that also must reckon with this question? At the turn of the millennium, the two MCs emerged from Midwestern cities to become figureheads in their respective arenas, bonded by a #RealHipHop ethos but separated by comically different dispositions. Eminem captivated the TRL generation with rambunctious daredevil stunts, treating his raps like pranks played on a pearl-clutching American populace and becoming a commercially unstoppable hellion in the process. Further underground, Common interrupted rap’s coastal domination as a woke-minded bohemian, seeking to lend you some neighborly advice from beneath the brim of a newsboy cap. As Common preached a civility gospel, Eminem rebuked decency and good taste. In middle age, they have only drifted further toward their respective poles, a division that makes one far more palatable than the other. Neither has quite cracked Andre’s quandary, but charting their respective growth curves along the axes of maturity and purpose reveals how close they are (or aren’t) to finding their own answers.

Tuning in to the Eminem Show at this stage feels like giving the prestige TV drama you abandoned a second chance, fingers crossed that it might have returned to form. It can be easy to forget just how great he once was: The Marshall Mathers LP is among the best rap albums ever made, knotty and naughty and just self-conscious enough, the centerpiece of a truly colossal three-record run. In 2003, Rolling Stone called him the Voice of America. By 2008, he was voted best rapper ever by readers of Vibe magazine. He’d done so disrupting a staid pop landscape, bleaching rap blond, crashing suburbia’s gates and waging war with the whole world, or at least as much of it as could fit into the household set-top box. At the center of all this instigating was Slim Shady, an alter ego Eminem created to repackage his worst impulses as maniacal inside jokes. The Shady character always felt weakly defined, but its broad-strokes function was to bring every intrusive thought to the surface, as a representation of his and — as he tells it on “The Real Slim Shady” — America’s sordid underbelly. At its devilish best, this second self could feel like a vessel for collective disillusionment, animated by the sneering, misanthropic pessimism of youth.

In time, though, his record-smashing career began to feel in need of a more grounded turn. Since The Slim Shady LP in 1999, Marshall Mathers has strung together violent yarns with the knotted grip of a noose, leave anyone at risk for a figurative hanging: his mother, his ex, the figures of Y2K teen-pop, White America, The Source, the Grammys and, most relentlessly, all who dare challenge his artistic right to be hateful. And since the beginning, that hatefulness has been powered by an extrasensory rhythmic dynamism that made such tantrums seem like displays of dark wizardry. As the years went on, and he found himself more and more at odds with the culture he mocked — which was growing less tolerant of his antics, and his reluctance to grow out of them — his lyricism took a turn, too, from the fluidity of a raving demagogue to the bombastic wordiness of a cult of one, volume and speed and multisyllabic Jenga preceding efficiency and narrative flow. Without real motive or metrical fluency as his engine, a harsh light shone on the childish provocations that remained, which didn’t even seem particularly attuned to the zeitgeist anymore. Now 51, Em has yet to make meaningful strides toward any kind of creative evolution — refusing to do the late-career reevaluating that Jay-Z and Nas performed after turning 40, failing to age into a more fully developed version of his style like Black Thought or Killer Mike, unwilling to rethink what he does like Andre or Danny Brown. It isn’t simply that he hasn’t grown up. He hasn’t grown at all.

All of which, in a different world, might have invested a sense of promise into his new LP, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), a concept album whose premise pits Eminem directly against his foulmouthed familiar, recasting Shady as something like a malignant tumor. If Marshall Mathers were really willing to kill Slim Shady, that would be a procession worth attending; there is great narrative possibility in freeing oneself from a well-worn mechanism. Instead, this is if anything an album about how the two are inseparable. Two songs in, on “Habit,” he’s already playing cancel culture bingo: bemoaning censorship, complaining about pronouns (and misgendering Caitlyn Jenner), bellyaching about “fat-shaming” and “mansplaining,” reminiscing about all of the feminists he has annoyed, insulting little people. He’s mad at women Me-Tooing men, women spending too much time on the internet, women getting implants for attention. But he also needs you to know he’s just kidding, using artistic license as a shield for a non-apology —“I do this s*** in jest and it's just a-messin' up with your head / And if men wanna wear lipstick and women's underwear / Who cares? Their s*** is their business, now bear witness” — and pulling the As a Father of Daughters tactic. A song later, Shady asks Eminem, “You gonna cancel me, yeah? Gen-Z me, bruh?” — a reference to scattered online movements of young people being put off by his music after listening to it for the first time (which doesn’t seem to truly reflect the demo at large).

The focus on cancellation is bizarre, considering Em is 25 years into his derogatory onslaught artistically, and likely set for life financially — and it forces to the surface an uncomfortable notion, that perhaps what he’s truly railing against is the decline of his viability as a respectable artist. In a 2014 Grantland essay that remains strikingly applicable, Molly Lambert noted that his work’s stasis reflected both a changing world and a man of misplaced commitment. “Rather than the toxic ambition of a young man determined to get his,” she wrote, “he has the poisoned, defensive entitlement of a man who feels like he has earned his keep and is terrified that someone is going to take it away from him.” Look to Dave Chappelle for a perfect model of this entrenchment: a powerful, revered figure convinced his very profession is being threatened, using his massive platform to insist that one can no longer say the exact things he’s saying. Realistically, Eminem should thank those nags — he couldn’t play the martyr without a cross to bear, and it’s hard to imagine anyone with less reason to be angry today.

There is a moment, on “Guilty Conscience 2,” where Em feigns something like accountability. He raps to Shady, “You wanna judge people? Matter of fact, ain't you the same one who hated bullies calling you bad names? Then you turned around and did the exact same? Just immature, and literally, you're still mentally 13 and still thirsty for some controversy — you still picking on Christopher Reeves.” To which Shady replies: “Yeah, but you’re me — and we’re a team.” That is where the album’s conceit really fails: All of this is the product of the same man, and just because he frames his internal monologue as dissonance doesn’t make it any less hostile or unsavory. The track ends with an “It was all a dream … or was it?” setpiece that supposedly puts Shady to rest, at least for record's final act. It is in the songs that follow that he’s at his most thoughtful, and yet the margins are still so slim: He can only ever really think about himself in relation to others, and even then he struggles to summon interiority. “Temporary” is a maudlin Skylar Grey ballad left as a keepsake for his daughter, Hailey Jade, full of Hallmark aphorisms but saying nothing of their bond or how she has affected him. “Somebody Save Me” imagines the ways his years of drug abuse might have led to many missed family milestones — a tragic framing, and yet it plays like a checklist, never quite reckoning with the pull of addiction. As the closing track, “Somebody Save Me” is quite the sour note to end on, and not simply because it’s Marshall and not Shady being lowered into the ground this time. It feels representative of an artist who doesn’t know what voice he’s speaking from anymore, for whom a symbolic death is merely a means to more pessimistic roleplay.

If Eminem has spent his later career thriving on negativity, the 52-year-old Common has in the same period become a beacon of optimism. A rapper whom Robert Christgau once described as an unpretentious man with an earnest, down-to-earth flow “no more charismatic than his monikers,” Common has since leaned into that lack of charisma as shorthand for a world-weary insightfulness and clear-eyed conviction. He has always been somewhat unassuming, maybe even artless in performance of an enlightened soapbox laureate of the hard knocks school, and there can be a real TED Talk energy to his rhymes, which are didactic and composed. But Common doesn’t fashion his music as activism so much as a general petition for a more wholesome world, which centers hip-hop as a near spiritual force. If his 1994 cult classic, “I Used to Love H.E.R,” imagined rap as a woman he was falling out of love with, he has spent the rest of his career fostering an immutable connection. “My presence is heard, I’m investing in words / Like Nikki Giovanni or Amiri Baraka / Jessica Care Moore, Morgan Parker,” he raps on “Poetry” from 2021’s A Beautiful Revolution Pt. 2. “Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison / Poetry in motion, we moving forward today.” With lyricism as the crux of his ideals, it’s no wonder he still longs to stay connected to the bars-first ethos of a certain era.

That era, which found rap in a moment of fast-moving innovation, now reads as vintage, saddled with the rosy glow of the golden oldies. And even in his youth, Common was playing on quaint rap ethics of virtue and earnestness, seeking knowledge and worldliness. With maturity more or less built into the Common experience, there hasn’t been much need for him to recalibrate in middle age, but he fully leans into old-head aesthetics with The Auditorium, Vol. 1, a collab with the DJ and producer Pete Rock. “For rap fans of a certain age” may as well be stamped on the packaging. His method isn’t to be the Common of 20 years ago; it’s to serve those who came of age during that time with music that restores the feeling, while engaging them where they are now.

In uniting with Pete Rock, who represents a specific kind of turntablist rap production, there is an inherent turning back of the clock — performing a classicism imbued with all the history of the genre and seeking the essence. The single “Dreamin’ ” sets the stage for this retrospective, holding rappers and civil rights leaders in the same regard throughout a tour of his Afrocentric vision board. You can find the guiding philosophy of the project in many lyrics, none more so than the genesis myth Common conjures for himself on “We’re On Our Way”: “The Lord spoke, I listened to the vision I was given / It’s the second Common, I’ve risen with the wisdom of the elders,” he raps. “Food, clothing, shelter / Prosperity, health and joy, it’s what I knelt for / I’ve been dope once I learned who I dealt for / Knowledge of self, I felt more.” He performs it with a certain knowingness, his flow steady and measured, full of images drawn from the past that, when taken together, help explain his everlasting link to the hip-hop continuum. The beats all smolder beneath him, as if encouraging or even powering his memory, pulling reminiscent songs out of him that are often about the power of rap itself.

Common’s career has been defined, in large part, by producers and his relationship to their sample beds, the ways in which they express the gradual progress of a reformist. In his early days in Chicago, he worked closely with No I.D., who helped him find his practical attitude as Common Sense. His 2000 opus, Like Water for Chocolate, was handled primarily by Questlove and J Dilla with a single by DJ Premier, extending him deeper into so-called “conscious rap.” It was Kanye West, a No I.D. protégé, who brought him into the pop consciousness in the mid-aughts, melding his matter-of-fact slam poetry with a warm soul sound. In the last 10 years, he has found kindred spirits in Karriem Riggins and Robert Glasper as purveyors of jazzy dinner-party rap. At each turn, he has been emboldened to embrace his seniority. Working alongside Pete Rock, it is clear that he has welcomed the opportunity to reminisce over you, reaching for and harnessing the authority of accumulated wisdom. His verbose lyricism can be just as herky-jerky as Em’s, but at least his aims are purer.

What most dramatically separates the two MCs these days is a certain sense of ambition. Where it seems as if Eminem is rapping mainly to spite others, wandering through a lyrical process that has no true stakes and no clear destination, Common has found resolve in his desire to honor the craft he loves, the legends who helped make it what it is and the audiences who, in part, discovered who they were through its songs. There is far more goodwill to be found in mining the past for connection than in turning to it for regressive means. But if we’re being honest about an answer to Andre 3000’s existential question — “What are you rapping about?” — I think the ideal is, for now, somewhere beyond the reach of both artists.

For guidance, each of them might do well to look a few rungs down the commercial hierarchy at someone like Open Mike Eagle, a paragon of grown-man rap. Eagle has spent his early middle age performing self-assessments of his career trajectory and personal life — rapping about the struggles of being indie, honoring DOOM, and how a Black Mirror episode ended his marriage, all with self-effacing wit and humor. There is a complex inner world to his songs, something missing from these albums. “I still got the same worldview / A brain full of old-school rules / And memories like flesh wounds / The cure isn’t in a test tube / It’s the sound of my son belly-laughing in the next room,” he raps on 2022’s “79th and Stony Island.” It is in that kind of mindfulness that a clear rebuttal to Andre’s cynicism presents itself.