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This whole record is begging to be hated on, and not just from a lyrical standpoint. Being hated seems like a running goal throughout Mathers’ career - he’s like an enfant terrible who conflates negative attention with acclaim - which aligns him with other seemingly lost middle-aged man-children provocateurs like Louis CK. Kamikaze is the aural equivalent of watching a Twitch stream or reading a Reddit thread.Ĭonvoluted politics aside, one thing you can’t take away from Mathers is that his whole aesthetic has been widely influential, especially in Soundcloud rap culture, where beating women and being generally hateful and tortured are not bugs, but rather, features. On Kamikaze he tries to recapture that #resistance magic with barbs like, “I empathize with the people this evil serpent sold the dream to that he’s deserted.” This is telling, because in reality, though he often tries to roast Donald Trump, Mathers’ music is probably consumed as much (if not more) by the right as by the left in 2018. He’s reinforcing the most traditional white male American tropes through a classically black medium.īiggest Targets, Revelations From Eminem's Surprise Album 'Kamikaze'Īlmost a year ago Mathers was momentarily relevant again after his BET freestyle, which gave us lines like, “’Cause what we got in office now’s a kamikaze / That’ll probably cause a nuclear holocaust” and “I’ma walk inside a mosque on Ramadan / And say a prayer that every time **** talks / She gets her mou- ahh, I’ma stop.” It went viral. This isn’t #resistance music this is music for Trump’s America. Even when he’s trying to be woke by criticizing Trump, it falls flat, partly because he uses slurs like “retarded” on this record in the same way Trump weaponizes casual hate. Mathers’ style has always been somewhere in the blunted fog of horrorcore, where shock is valued above all, and Mathers dials the cartoonish and dark elements to different levels. The record opens with “The Ringer,” which finds Mathers venting like an adolescent, “I feel like I wanna punch the world in the fuckin’ face right now.” It only takes thirty seconds of this album before he raps, “I’m about to rape the alphabet.” This sort of lazy, edgelord attitude gets old real fast and pervades the album so much that Justin Vernon has disavowed “Fall,” his guest spot with Eminem, because Mathers takes shots at other rappers and throws out “f*ggot” on the track. And while his intentions in this song may be good, it runs counter to the violent, toxic, macho nonsense coursing through the rest of the record. “Stepping Stone” is a track in the middle of the record that feels like an addict taking inventory, reflecting on whom he may have trampled along the way and what happened with D12. Pills and booze accelerated the death of Elvis, of course, but Mathers got clean, showing that untimely death isn’t the only endgame of megafame. They both came from poverty and became the great white hopes appropriating a black cultural form.