MUSIC Unrepentant Eminem back on the offensive
GEORGE W Bush once dubbed him “the greatest threat to America’s children since polio”. Eminem, born Marshall Bruce Mathers III, is the trailer-park hip-hop Poet Laureate of America. His raison d’etre is being as offensive as possible. And then some.
On his new album Music To Be Murdered By (which takes its title from an Alfred Hitchcock LP from 1958), the Detroit superstar is saying sorry (on a track called No Regrets) to Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt for “misplacing my anger” and saying “dumb shit” on his 2018 album Kamikaze.
“I shoulda just aimed for the fake ones and traitorous punks,” he raps now.
Which leads one to wonder will Eminem be apologising on his next album for his beyond-the-pale lyrics on Unaccommodating about the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack in which 22 people lost their lives — “I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game/Like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting.”
His ghastly joke aside, Music To Be Murdered By is in parts a Joker-style satire of America and gun violence and its culture. It is not easy listening. On the track Darkness, Eminem is in the bloodstained shoes of mass shooter
Stephen Paddock, who murdered 58 people and injured 500 others at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017 before turning the gun on himself.
Darkness also drags in Eminem’s own inner pain with the father he said he never met, and his fight with pharmaceuticals and booze: “I’m so much like my father, you would think that I knew him/I keep pacin’ this room, Valium, then chase it with booze/One little taste, it’ll do.”
It is not all depression and gloom and guts, mind. On the dodgy Those Kinda Nights ,he is singing about how “this beat keeps taking me back/Like my ex does”. Ed Sheeran pops up on the track.
Elsewhere, Black Thought, Q-Tip, Royce Da 5’9”, Anderson Paak, Young M.A and — posthumously — Juice Wrld also make cameos. But none of it manages to lift Eminem’s 11th (and decidedly below-par) studio album.
Eminem posted last year on his social media that he was sober 11 years. He doesn’t sound quite as out-of-kilter as he did on 2010’s Recovery album when he sang about his battle with himself: “I’m hatin’ my reflection/I walk around the house trying to fight mirrors.”
Yet Eminem is hardly Michael Buble. Hello, darkness.