He self-identifies as an unevadable inflatable en route to breaking his own record for fastest rap verse. He’s in your house eating carrot cake while he sits there and he marinates. The more his students study his music, the more he’s reminded of eyeballs: he’s watching his pupils get cornea.
Eminem is back with his 11th studio album, titled “Music To Be Murdered By.” The 47-year-old threw the music world into a frenzy on Friday with the surprise release. Fans have speculated for months that a new album was coming, but the midnight announcement by Tweet was shocking nonetheless. “It’s your funeral…” Eminem wrote.
The project features big names like Ed Sheeran, Royce Da 5’9, Skylar Grey, Anderson .Paak, and Young M.A. Late rapper Juice WRLD makes a posthumous appearance.
“Music To Be Murdered By” has so far been received differently by the media and by different groups of hip hop fans. Metacritic gives it a 6.6 while the average User Score is 9.0. On Saturday morning, media outlets reported “disgusted” Ariana Grande fans after Eminem referenced the 2017 Manchester bombing on a song. #EminemIsCancelled and #EminemIsOverParty were trending over the weekend.
Eminem eats criticism for breakfast and controversy for dinner. Some like it, some hate it. Many in our generation of hip-hop listeners see Eminem as bitter and out of touch after he took shots at several young rappers in his 2018 album “Kamikaze.” Eminem voiced his frustrations with the Lil Pump, Lil Xan type of “mumble rap,” a microgenre growing increasingly popular among hip hop artists and fans. Meanwhile, Eminem has become somewhat of a meme online, his fans lumped into one group of obnoxious white teens named “Kyle” who wear saggy jeans and Monster Energy snapbacks.
Yet taking a step back, Eminem is one of the most accomplished music artists ever, and he’s widely considered one of the greatest rappers of all time. His 220 million album sales are the most by any rapper in history, not including his new album. He holds the world record ahead of Drake by 70 million. Eminem has had an enormous impact on the music industry since his first studio album dropped 24 years ago. That he is still releasing albums at 47 years old is by itself a remarkable achievement.
The Detroit rapper is approaching 12 years sober after nearly dying from an overdose in 2008. Since then, Eminem has turned his life around and drastically changed the style and content of much of his music. Now, in 2020, “Music To Be Murdered By” combines elements of his Slim Shady alter-ego with newer ingredients from his last two albums. The resulting product is genius. The album is an opportunity for hip hop fans to appreciate one of rap’s most dynamic artists blow up like an inflatable as he defends his legacy, rips his critics, combines old and new styles, and raises all sorts of controversy in a 20-track project. The artistry, cleverness and overall content presented in this album make it one of his best projects to date.
Here are some highlights from the first few songs.
“Premonition—Intro”
The album opens with the sound of a brutal murder followed by an intense bass drop. Eminem goes straight at critics in his opening line. “They said my last album I sounded bitter, no I sound like a spitter.” After his 2018 album “Kamikaze,” some perceived Eminem as sounding bitter toward the media and other rappers who didn’t like his previous album, “Revival” (2017). Eminem paints artists like himself, Tech9, Jay-Z, 2Chainz as victims of unrighteous criticism. “Instead of us being credited for longevity and being able to keep it up for this long at this level, we get told we’ll never be what we were.” He brags, “If I’m half as good as I was I’m still twice as good as you’ll ever be.”
Eminem feels like he can’t please today’s rap fans, no matter the music he puts out. “They said I’m lyrically amazing but I have nothing to say, but then when I put out Revival and I had something to say they said that they hated the awake me. I lose the rage, I’m too tame. I get it back, they say I’m too angry.”
“Premonition” is one of the best tracks on the album. The beat goes extremely hard, the flow is crazy, and Eminem defends his honor as one of the greats while blowing off his frustrations with critics and the media over the past few years.
“Unaccommodating” ft. Young M.A.
This is one of two tracks that really got blood boiling last Friday night. Eminem compares himself to the bomber who terrorized Ariana Grande’s concert in Manchester, England in 2017. “I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game, like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting.” Right after this line, Eminem refers to himself as Sadam Hussein, Ali Khamenei, and Osama Bin Laden.
While some are upset, others are busy decoding Eminem’s lyricism in “Unaccommodating” with lines like:
“I don’t smoke but I got paper, to be blunt I’m rolling Indo.” Marshall subtly brags about his fortunes while making marijuana jokes. He’s got “paper,” and to be “blunt” he’s “rolling Indo” (in dough).
“You Gon’ Learn” ft. Royce Da 5’9
It’s always lethal when Eminem and Royce Da 5’9 combine forces. Royce spits out a ridiculous tongue-twister in his opening line: “I’m a product of properly hoppin’ up out of that poverty profitin’ all for coppin’ and swappin’ that property out for a possible monopoly.” He mocks white politicians who are debating reparations but can’t understand the difference between segregation and separation, spelling it out for them: “Segregation is bein’ told where I’m gonna go, separation is bein’ woke and goin’ wherever I wanna go.”
Two lines especially stuck out from Eminem’s verse. He recounts how writing rhymes got him out of the gutters in Detroit as a teenager. “As I got a little bit older, my hate was making me get cold, and began to get a chipped shoulder. Started to spit vulgar, my ZIP code had been skid row, but I ate every single beat that I spit over, the s***hole I escaped, then I began to explode, detonate, now the Eastside went schizo.”
Now a multimillionaire, Eminem’s hellish childhood story is often forgotten. He talks more about this part of his life later in the track “Leaving Heaven” featuring Skylar Grey:
Another line from “You Gon’ Learn” maybe takes the award for most clever line on the album. “I treat the paper like I’m choppin’ a letter. Dre will tell you I shred, so when you refer to the guy next to the document shredder.” Dr. Dre, aka Doc, is Eminem’s producer; the one who helped him come up. Eminem “chops letters,” so when you refer to the guy next to the Doc-you-meant-shredder? Document shredder? Come on.
“Godzilla”ft. Juice WRLD
Besides the awesome Juice WRLD feature on the chorus, the best part of this song is the last 30 seconds. Some calculate Eminem as rapping 10.97 syllables per second. If accurate, that’s his fastest rap of all time. His previous fastest raps were 9.6 syllables per second during a 16-second stretch on his 2013 track “Rap God,” and a 2018 feature on Nicki Minaj’s “Majesty,” where he notched 10.3 syllables per second over 12 seconds.
“Darkness”
Hands down the best song on the album. Eminem tells two stories at one time through double entendres. One details Eminem’s past struggles with depression, anxiety and substance abuse. The other describes Stephon Paddock on the night in 2017 when he terrorized concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people. In a wildly creative plea to end gun violence in the United States, Eminem applies double meanings to almost every line.
The music video shows a graphic depiction of the Vegas shooting, closing with TVs stacked on top of each other forming the shape of the United States. Each TV shows footage of news reporters updating viewers on mass shootings. Incrementally, the reporters are replaced by pieces of the American flag. A message appears:
“When will this end? When enough people care. Register to vote at vote.gov. Make your voice heard and help change gun laws in America.”
The way Eminem created a first-person perspective from the Las Vegas shooter in such grim detail is naturally questionable to some.
A conversation about how celebrities, news outlets, and musicians should respond to mass shootings in a helpful way is welcome. But outrage at Eminem is misplaced. He chose to use his platform to speak out against gun violence, and the uneasy feelings created from the song are meant to be translated into outrage toward the normalization of mass shootings in the United States.
Elsewhere, Eminem similarly tells two stories simultaneously on “Never Love Again,” one about his past drug addiction and another about his dependency on his ex-wife.
The rapper goofs around on “Farewell,” the catchiest song on the album. He speaks from the perspective of his second-grade self inconfronting his abusive stepdad in “Stepdad.”
Eminem’s longevity in the rap game can only be admired. “Music To Be Murdered By” is one of his most artistic, creative albums to date, a testimony to his longevity. Overall, the album captures what makes Eminem great, what makes him controversial, and what makes him who he is as an individual. In “Godzilla,” Eminem claims he has “no plans to retire” as we forge into a new decade of music.
