The thing you have to remember is that Eminem was on Rawkus’ second Soundbombing compilation. Before he ever shook hands with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, Marshall Mathers battled Project Blowed members and Chicago’s future candidates for alderman. This, after all, was a nasally white rapper from Detroit with a rhyming dictionary and a taste for horrorcore. His first EP from 1997 was sort of staggering, but didn’t exactly scream “TRL.”
If you ran the simulation a thousand times, it would never spit out the actual results: the tens of millions of records sold, the merchandising and the Academy Award and the million little cottage industries. But that’s what happened, and so by 2000, the nasally white rapper from Detroit with a rhyming dictionary had a diamond-selling album that pissed off Bill Clinton and his former group The Outsidaz in equal measure.
It’s tempting to dismiss the endurance of Eminem’s career as the half-life of celebrity, and the man himself as a relic from the Clinton- and Bush-era boom years. But Music to Be Murdered By, released without warning last week, is defined by a certain kind of defiance, and even a peculiar integrity. It’s a messy, sometimes lucid example of a hyper-technical style of rap that fell out of favor and is now creeping back into vogue. It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but it boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention.
It opens with a long notebook dump called “Premonition,” in which Eminem vents his frustration with critics—he correctly notes that he’s been mocked for sounding too tame and too angry on consecutive records—and fans who want him to chase trends driven by rappers half his age. His concessions to this real or imagined pressure have, in the past, been disastrous: 2018’s Kamikaze wastes a Tay Keith beat on a middling “Bad and Boujee” riff, and his adoption of the Migos’ triplet flow on 2017’s Revival (“I conned her into/Ripping the condom in two) was ineffective, to say the least. That’s why it’s so striking when the same fixation yields radically more interesting results here. “Premonition” is followed by “Unaccommodating,” a duet with the inhumanly charismatic 27-year-old Young M.A; “Godzilla” pairs Eminem with Juice WRLD, who tragically died at 21 last month. On both songs, the younger performer sounds freer and looser than the headliner, but each ranks among the most effective cuts.
Eminem sounds even more engaged when fixating on rap from another era. (This is, of course, the guy who has been posing for pictures in King Sun shirts and doing his most inspired rapping over old Black Moon beats.) There’s the moment on “Premonition” when he relitigates a Rolling Stone review of LL Cool J’s Bigger and Deffer; elsewhere he name-checks King Tee and Chi-Ali. “Yah Yah” is built around a sample from “Woo-Hah!! (Got You All In Check)” and makes superb use of a hook from Q-Tip and a verse from Black Thought, who raps about borrowing an eyepatch from the Detroit rap power player Hex Murda. And Eminem’s final verse on the album comes alive when he mocks the idea of listening to “a 40-some bar Lord Jamar verse,” then continues to diss the one member of Brand Nubian—he correctly identifies him as the group’s weak link—who didn’t appear on Soundbombing II.
But it’s impossible to talk about Music to Be Murdered By, like it was impossible to talk about Kamikaze or Revival or The Marshall Mathers LP II before it, without talking first about technique. Eminem once rapped like a drugged-out rubberband, lurching between conversational rhythms and breathtakingly difficult passages. Lately, he just raps...fast. At its worst, this means enduring endless cascades of shout-rapping in the droning, arrhythmic machine-gun style that (generally white) rappers with a fraction of his talent so often utilize, long runs of double- and triple-time flows that bludgeon the song and exist for their own sake. (In one of the handful of genuinely funny moments, he says “I am the top-selling—who cares?/Stop yelling, then stop dwelling.”)
And yet—while it never approaches the schizophrenic rhythms of a “Kill You”—Murdered By does feature some genuinely astonishing technique. On the back half of his verse on “You Gon’ Learn,” he begins rapping on the back half of the beat but never quite slides off into the next measure, and ends by calling a truce with the rappers who he says “can’t even figure out where their words should hit the kick and the snare.” (“You Gon’ Learn” is one of three songs that features a reinvigorated Royce Da 5’9”, who acquits himself excellently on all three; his presence is a frequent reminder that dense, syllable-obsessed rap is adaptable to nearly all eras and production styles.)
The irony is that versions of the verbose, precise style that Eminem favors here have become very popular over the last decade. One just needs to listen to J.I.D, or the more ambitious J. Cole records, or Kendrick when he says things like “legalize your homicide” to grasp the appetite for wordy, athletic rapping in the mainstream today. His influence on Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt has been well documented. Even Juice WRLD, whose popular singles would seem to borrow little from Eminem, was in fact another stylistic descendent: This is a video of him freestyling nimbly over the “My Name Is” beat (“Eminem, Wayne, and Drake damn near made me”). All of this makes it frustrating when Eminem frequently lapses into finger-wagging at the kids on his lawn.
In 2004, Eminem wrote and recorded an entire song from the perspective of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a puppet that had a recurring bit on Conan O’Brien’s late-night shows. The most damning thing there is to say about Eminem’s work since 2010 is that it often makes you miss that sort of specificity. It is maddening that someone who’s exhibited such talent and wit, even on his worst records, defaults so often to the mawkish, mid-tempo stadium rap that has plagued his albums since the comparatively unhinged and anti-pop Relapse. The emotion behind the Skylar Grey-assisted “Leaving Heaven” feels earned—the song is in large part about the death of his estranged father—but it sounds as if it’s been crafted specifically for a video-game trailer. The album is at its worst when it’s at its blandest, especially when it grapples with failed romance (“In Too Deep,” “Farewell”). There is also an almost unbelievable song called “Stepdad,” a murder fantasy about killing a stepdad with a hook of “I, I haaaaaaate/My, my, stepdaaaaaaaad.” But that is such a perfect marriage of subject to form that it might circle all the way around and become transcendent.
The headlines generated by this album deal almost exclusively with “Darkness,” which uses a series of double entendres to tease the reveal that it’s a song written from the perspective of the Las Vegas shooter. Its video ends with a plea for listeners to vote and “help change gun laws in America.” Well-intentioned though it may be, “Darkness” cuts against Eminem’s strengths as a writer and as a vocalist. His best work is brash and irreverent, even when dealing with serious subject matter: See the way he once rapped almost gleefully about the addiction that nearly killed him, or recall the time he taunted, eight months after 9/11, the kinds of kids who would be conned into enlisting. While he still shows the capacity to surprise and exhilarate as a rapper, too many of his songwriting’s eccentric edges have been sanded down and replaced by what is comparatively automatic or, worse, anonymous. On one song, he describes himself as a cross between Blueface and the Boston Strangler—a level of absurdity that Music to Be Murdered By aspires to but achieves only in fleeting moments.
Buy: Rough Trade
