1 singles “Love the Way You Lie” and “The Monster,” both featuring Rihanna, but this strategy makes no sense on an album whose sound and aesthetic are clearly meant to re-establish him as a shock-rap provocateur.
The enlistment of pop stars only makes things worse, as Skylar Grey injects unnecessary melodrama into the garish rap-rock song “Leaving Heaven,” and Ed Sheeran gets his grubby paws all over the aspiring club banger “Those Kinda Nights,” which sounds like a boneless retread of Liam Payne and Quavo’s “Strip That Down.” Eminem took the radio-friendly pop-rap collaboration to stratospheric heights with No. 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. Half the songs on this album literally sound like nothing on rap radio right now-and that’s not a compliment. 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.Įminem’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. 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? At this point, I would rather hear Eminem rap five words that reveal something about his personal life or emotional state than 5,000 more words of empty chest-beating. But his Herculean verses typically follow the same blueprint: He opens with the swaggering, slow-drip taunts then he hits the clipped, word-salad flows that rhyme just for the sake of rhyming and finally he shifts into his signature hyperspeed, stringing together words so quickly they require a Genius read-through to parse them. He does that on “You Gon’ Learn” and the rest of Music to Be Murdered By with surgical precision. The problem is that lately for Eminem, proving oneself is just a matter of spitting bars, bars, bars. That perennial chip on his shoulder keeps Eminem moving, which is why in “You Gon’ Learn” he feels the need to revisit the adversity he experienced as a fledgling white rapper long before the Grammys tried to sit him next to Carson Daly and Fred Durst. It’s what allows them to keep making consistently entertaining and occasionally forward-thinking albums, while Eminem keeps relishing in years-old grudges and lashing out at writers who make less in a year than he does at the first weekend of Coachella. But for all the accolades they may share, Jay and 2 Chainz have one virtue that eludes Eminem: discretion. 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. 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.