The Degenerate’s Corner: Slim Shady at Glastonbury

This isn’t a literary exercise. This isn’t a place where difficult ideas are confronted, or even a place where worthwhile information is communicated. This thing right here is about as close as you can get to a gutter on your webpage. This might just be the journalistic equivalent of the crunchy sock tucked under your eighth-grade brother’s mattress. So while I hope some part of you enjoys what you’re about to read, I’d strongly suggest that you disinfect after doing so.

Welcome to the Degenerate’s Corner. Once a fortnight we come together to examine the latest in politics and pop culture, all through the obscure, legal-ish lens that is an online novelty bet. Maybe you’re looking to see the odds of an F-bomb being dropped at next year’s Oscars, or you might just be curious about the likelihood of the 2020 Presidential Election finding us in year two of a nuclear winter. Either way, you’re in the right place.

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE PROCEEDING TO PLACE A BET OR ALERT THE AUTHORITIES: While the odds are real, our endorsement isn’t. We don’t claim any responsibility for losses or winnings resulting from a bet placed. Read this for your enjoyment, and think long and hard before trying to use these odds to turn your student loans into a down payment.

Eminem to headline Glastonbury 2019 – 33.00 (Sky Bet)

Considering Eminem’s career trajectory of late, it’s quite possible that Glastonbury 2019 will find him touring his latest double-sided spoken word album—released exclusively on cassette—on which he rails against the hubristic notion of someone born after the release of 8 Mile becoming a rapper, while still making time for homophobic slurs and rape threats.

His latest album, Kamikaze, is a 45-minute tirade against everyone who criticized his last album, a tirade that still manages to do almost everything those critics deplored. Eminem has somehow managed to place himself in a paradoxical corner of reality usually reserved for philosophers and quantum physicists: he’s become the unaware artist launching a full-frontal attack on self-awareness, the rock that God cannot lift, the tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear him. The problem is that everybody is around, and we can hear him loud and clear.

Eminem shouldn’t be able to be doing what he’s doing, but somehow he’s doing it horribly well. Everything, even down to the album title, completely sums up his late career death spiral in such a perfect yet clearly unintentional way that it should make us doubt the existence of free-will.

The thought of Eminem headlining a festival, despite his undeniable greatness, becomes less appealing with every passing year. It seems to be that good times, the feeling at the heart of every summer festival ticket sale, aren’t that high on Eminem’s list of priorities nowadays. Instead, he seems to be more concerned with telling his audience, the majority of whom aren’t rappers and don’t intend to become one, that his way of doing the rappity-rap is the only way.

So despite how seminal you might think Slim Shady’s early work was in terms of developing the double-time flow commonly employed by artists like Kendrick Lamar, I’d suggest that you put the philosophizing to the side, keep your money’s best interests in mind, and bet on a headliner like Oasis or something.