“I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game / Like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting.” Families of some of the 22 victims have expressed their upset on social media. It pops up as an almost throwaway remark during Unaccommodating, a track detailing his disdain for rival rappers. Nevertheless, within hours of the album’s release, Eminem was mired in controversy over a reference to the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bombing. The message is driven home by the song’s chilling coda, in which one broadcast of a mass shooting is piled on top of another while a voice sadly sings “hello darkness my old friend.” The astonishing Darkness (which circles around a haunting musical quote from Paul Simon’s Sound of Silence) offers a chilling take on Stephen Paddock’s 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, building a powerful case for gun control. On the rocky Stepdad, Eminem invests the narrative of a teenage boy killing an abusive stepfather with the emotional heft of social-realist drama.
EMINEM SHOW REVIEW SERIAL
He may pepper rhymes with dubious associations to American serial killers John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez (known as The Night Stalker), Albert de Salvo (the Boston Strangler) and Charles Manson, but there is something grittier and more substantial in many of Eminem’s murder stories.
Homicide is a repeated subject (as it has been throughout Eminem’s career), although the angle shifts from lurid first person fictional narratives of violence to jokey threats and musical metaphors, with Eminem rapping about poisonous pens and threatening to “murder this beat” on closing track I Will. The lugubrious tones of Alfred Hitchcock provide spoken interludes and thematic context, sampled from a 1958 orchestral compilation from which Eminem has also borrowed the title, Music to Be Murdered By.
The grandstanding champion has pugnaciously inserted himself into the new decade by dropping an unannounced double album as punchy, melodramatic and brilliant as anything he has ever done. He declares “I’m unfadable / You wanna battle, I’m available, I’m blowin’ up like an inflatable / I’m undebatable, I’m unavoidable, I’m unevadable.” I am not sure the latter is actually a word but you know exactly what he means: every rapper who wants to lay claim to the hip hop crown is going to have to get past Eminem first. What is more impressive is that he makes every word count. At 47, Marshall Mathers III shows no signs of slowing down – if anything, he’s speeding up. At the frenetic conclusion of monster new track Godzilla, he knocks out 229 words (containing 339 syllables) in 30 seconds some rap websites are already claiming the average of 7.6 words per second a world record. More than two decades have passed since Eminem’s breakout single My Name Is… arrived, announcing him as the most outrageously skillful rapper of his time.