And just as the rapper’s release strategy is becoming predictable, Music to Be Murdered By repeats the worst mistakes of its predecessors, including leaden beats, insufferable choruses and tasteless punchlines that are devoid of humor.
All of this makes it frustrating when Eminem frequently lapses into finger-wagging at the kids on his lawn.
But has he really earned the right to proselytize?
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. “I shoulda just aimed for the fake ones and traitorous punks,” he admits, adding, very Eminem-ishly, that said nameless fakes and traitorous punks are “cunts” who “can get fucked with 800 motherfucking vibrators at once”. I cover numerous festivals, interview local and national touring musicians, and. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
This is best demonstrated on frenetic rap-rock track “Yah Yah,” where Eminem verbally contorts himself into a pretzel while the Roots MC Black Thought delivers a gut-busting, effortlessly smooth guest verse that proves to be the finest performance on the album. Mock developments in the genre and angrily reassert your bona fides, with the accompanying implicit suggestion that things have gone steadily downhill since your days as middle America’s favourite folk devil?
This, after all, was a nasally white rapper from Detroit with a rhyming dictionary and a taste for horrorcore. The problem is that six songs later, Eminem swings for the fences with Music’s big “statement” song, “Darkness.” Over a bed of mournful piano keys and Simon & Garfunkel samples, Eminem painstakingly recreates the actions of the gunman who opened fire on the 2017 Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas. It is not, strictly speaking, a good record—Eminem hasn’t made one of those in a decade—but his latest boasts enough technical command and generates just enough arresting ideas to hold your attention.
I know that just by writing about “Unaccommodating,” I’m feeding into his desires and stoking the flames of controversy. It’s a stark, chilling portrait of a mind unravelling, filled with grimly telling details: the shooter’s concern that the festival is underattended, his proud touting of the gun licence and lack of prior convictions, his realisation that the notoriety he craves will be fleeting, because mass shootings have become a regular occurrence.
On Friday morning, just as the 25-year-old pop star dropped her third album, Manic, Eminem surprise released his 11th studio album, Music to Be Murdered By, borrowing its title and cover art from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 macabre easy listening and spoken-word album of the same name. But Music to Be Murdered By, released without warning last week, is defined by a certain kind of defiance, and even a peculiar integrity. Music to Be Murdered By offers one virtuoso performance after another: delivery that’s both warp-speed and perfectly enunciated, constant shifts in tempo and emphasis.
Like what you see? 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. Em’s pissed off because he still gets no respect after 20-plus years in the game and a gazillion album sales, and he’s willing to bet his fellow elder statesman Jay-Z and 2 Chainz feel the same way. But don’t worry: Music to Be Murdered By still has its share of ghastly lyrics that are engineered to spark outrage and grace headlines. If the passing of time has robbed him of his place as part of hip-hop’s steering committee, it’s done nothing whatsoever to blunt his talent as an MC, the sharpness of his puns or the brilliance of his wordplay. 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. Em’s spent the past 20 years glorifying violence and spewing misogynistic and homophobic vitriol; he even does so across much of Music to Be Murdered By. Lately, he just raps...fast.
He does that on “You Gon’ Learn” and the rest of Music to Be Murdered By with surgical precision. 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”). In fact, choruses are a bit of a problem throughout: Ed Sheeran does his best to sound part of the drugged-out party action on Those Kinda Nights, but it’s clearly not his milieu, while Stepdad’s lumbering rap-rock crossover brings back grim memories of nu-metal. The verses of “Stepdad” make for an amusing albeit one-note murder fantasy, but the grating, singsong chorus sounds like it’s trying to parody itself. The sheer physicality of it is occasionally breathtaking, such as the final 30 seconds of the Juice WRLD-assisted “Godzilla.” But how many times can Eminem rap about being the GOAT and killing his enemies at unintelligible speeds before listeners tune out?
Eminem sounds even more engaged when fixating on rap from another era. This is Eminem’s second surprise release in a row after 2018’s Kamikaze, a haphazard but somewhat redeeming follow-up to 2017’s abysmal Revival. Eminem’s confounding lyrical acrobatics might sit better if the instrumentals on Music to Be Murdered By were more palatable, but the rapper’s ear for hooks has only atrophied over time. When enough people care,” Eminem’s website currently reads below a link to the “Darkness” video. (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.). But don’t worry: Music to Be Murdered By still has its share of ghastly lyrics that are engineered to spark outrage and grace headlines.This time … 2018 in Manchester, Tennessee. But the smattering of musical flaws is easy to overlook if you concentrate on Mathers’ voice.
I met Flavor Flav in a Las Vegas bowling alley and haven't stopped talking about it. The best thing here is Darkness, a genuinely chilling attempt to view the 2017 mass shooting at the Las Vegas Route 91 Harvest music festival through the eyes of its perpetrator, Stephen Paddock. (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. Follow me on Twitter for more. The thing you have to remember is that Eminem was on Rawkus’ second Soundbombing compilation. 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.
Em begins spinning his wheels right off the bat with the prickly “Premonition (Intro),” slamming the critics who panned Kamikaze—which opened with a track slamming critics who panned Revival— and dredging up an incendiary Rolling Stone review of the album. On paper, it looks like another nihilistic sick gag, but it isn’t. Music to Be Murdered By does both, finding room for features from Young MA and the recently deceased Juice WRLD alongside suggestions that their contemporaries can’t rap properly (“They can’t even figure out where their words should hit the kick and the snare”) and Yah Yah. It’s a state of affairs compounded by the fact that Eminem’s whole persona is predicated on being an angry, disenfranchised outsider: what do you find to get mad about when you’re a sober 47-year-old with a net worth of $230m, so successful that you “sell like 4 mil when [you] put out a bad album”? Neil McCormick, Music Critic 17 January 2020 • 3:33pm. As a demonstration that Eminem is still capable of being a potent force, regardless of changing times and fashions, it works perfectly. As a whole, Music to Be Murdered By is as hit-and-miss as anything Eminem has released this side of the millennium.
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