Normally when a groundbreaking phenomenon materialises in popular music, it’s a given that every record company will have run off its own version within months. Yet not one has ever unveiled another Eminem and, examining the tracklisting for Curtain Call — The Hits, you realise why: he reconstructed the genre in such a way that it’s impossible to replicate it by simply handing a quick-witted white kid a microphone and a hot producer.

Until he materialised in 1999 it was a given that white people could not rap. Any latterday Colonel Tom Parker could see that the crossover potential of a white rap act was enormous if it could only stand up in the hip-hop community. The gold at the end of that particular rainbow is what drove the struggling Marshall Mathers on.

When he eventually broke through with The Slim Shady LP he sold four million copies but, as he later noted of his impact, on The Eminem Show's White America — “If I was black I would have sold half”.

Mathers came from the United States’ other great underclass, white trash, and like Elvis he upset just about everyone when he hit the charts, from Middle American conservatives to intellectual East Coast liberals. To one he was a foul-mouthed threat to American values, to the other he was a misogynistic homophobe. “God sent me to piss the world off,” he announced on the still impossibly catchy My Name Is, which turns up as the third track in this chronologically convoluted 16-track collection, and he did it in style, inventing the persona of Slim Shady — essentially Bart Simpson with Tourette’s — to say whatever he liked.

His raps were fuelled by raw anger and bitterness but his greatest weapon was his wit. At the start he used it to cut down his rivals and then, when his records came out, to cut his audience up. Jay Z’s flow may be smoother but Eminem had the gags, and this collection is filled with more one-liners than a top stand-up, right down to the intro in which he asks an appreciative supper-club type audience if they want more before screaming “then shut up” and launching into FACK, one of three new tracks that act as sales bait for completists. Hilarious in a juvenile way, the bass-heavy FACK is composed almost entirely of expletives and scatological sexuality, while its partner, Shake That, is a lewd duet with Nate Dogg in which the pair muse about the unspeakable acts they would like to practise on the opposite sex.

However to frame him as a potty-mouthed comic with some funny rhymes sells his talent well short, which is precisely why he killed off his alter ego Slim Shady in order to put some emotional honesty on display. Eminem opened up about himself, particularly the turmoil of his domestic life, in a way no one has done since John Lennon, and those moments are captured here in the searing Cleaning Out My Closet and Mockingbird, which explained to his daughter the chaos of his marriage. The presence of Stan meanwhile is a reminder of the narrative ability that had the likes of Seamus Heaney heaping praise on him.

His career trajectory has run into its inevitable crash-and-burn phase with a spell in rehab for addiction to sleeping pills. The rumour is that this collection is his parting shot and the title of the tired-sounding single When I’m Gone suggests as much. The pressure of being No 1 in a field of one is much harder than it sounds, and listening to Curtain Call it’s hard to see anyone else stepping up to the plate soon.

Aftermath

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