‘Everybody’s choking now’: the rapper’s coolness has taken a battering this week

Cool is an odd concept, isn’t it? Coolness is ethereal, impossible to pin down. Cool can be bestowed upon you and leave you again before you even know it, all without you changing at all. Society can deem you cool and then revoke coolness from you at chilling speed. The harder you try to be cool, the less cool you are. As someone who is frantically, almost medically uncool, I can only assume that being cool is a very difficult, stressful thing.

Just ask Eminem, whose veneer of coolness has suffered death from a thousand cuts this month. He’s not content with being pinned as responsible for the rise and rise of Ed Sheeran – Britain’s favourite acoustic gnome told Desert Island Discs that rapping along to Eminem cured his childhood stammer, meaning there is an alternate universe where a stuttering Sheeran never got over his impediment, never released Shape of You, and so its version of 2017 has been an entirely musicless zone, and all the better for it. Now Eminem’s people are suing New Zealand’s people for copyright infringement. Namely the National party’s use of a song called Eminem Esque in a party advert three years ago.

I’m no legal expert, but you have to wonder for how long you can argue that a song called Eminem Esque – which, if you look closely, includes both the words “Eminem” and “Esque” in there – isn’t at least mildly inspired by 2003’s Lose Yourself, but nonetheless the case has given us some joy: the video of a room full of solemn New Zealand lawyers silently nodding along to Eminem shouting about his mom’s spaghetti is essentially avant-garde performance art.

All of these incidents ran into the car of Eminem’s cool, but didn’t quite finish the job.

Thank the gods, then, for Iain Duncan Smith, who took the concept of Eminem’s cool to the side of a road earlier this week and finished it off with a spade: he – and I still can’t quite believe I’m saying this, that I’m describing this event as real, because it seems more like the final aching spasms of a 48-hour fever dream that leads immediately after towards death – he went on Good Morning Britain and rapped Eminem in a bid to mock Diane Abbott.

Iain Duncan Smith slams Diane Abbott via Eminem lyrics – video Guardian

“It’s halfway down,” Duncan Smith said, with all the panache of someone who had to Google lyrics on his phone and make the font 200% bigger just to read them, “and he says he opens his mouth, but the words don’t come out, he’s choking now, everybody’s joking now, and the clock’s run out.” This only begs more questions than it answers: is Duncan Smith an old-school Eminem fan? Does he play the 8 Mile soundtrack as pump-up music before going on Newsnight and describing migrants as “low value”? A shuddering vision of the future: IDS, in full black beanie/grey zip-thru combo, offering Jeremy Corbyn out for a rap battle in lieu of a televised debate.

It’s hard to imagine the election getting much more absurd than this, but we still have a full month to go. It will.