On ‘Leaving Heaven’, he challenges the notion that he’s a toxic figure: “It’s only one percent/Who overcome the shit/They underwent… Don’t tell me about struggle, bitch – I lived it… And I don’t know if I would call that white privilege”. Eminem makes stupid and tasteless jokes, but this stuff is happening for real every day.
It’s as challenging as any brilliant satire, and leaves you with a queasy feeling in the pit of your stomach.
In it he adopts the role of a shooter – specifically the perpetrator of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas – who guns down rows and rows of concert-goers, loose percussion and tinkling piano crawling through the track as he coldly recounts “ Leaning out the window… Finger on the trigger/But I’m a licensed owner/With no prior convictions/So law says the sky’s the limit… Got ‘em hopping over walls and climbing fences.” The song peters out behind overlapping audio of countless news reports of mass shootings in America. 21 years since ‘The Slim Shady LP’ sent a wave of fear through Middle America, what’s more surprising than the lyric is the fact that Eminem still gets a kick out of this stuff.Įlsewhere he doubles down on the killer cosplay, though ‘Darkness’ is in fact a bitter and effective satire of American gun violence. It’s a lame, flippant line precision-engineered to create exactly the kind of backlash it has done. “I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game/Like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting,” he spits, stuttering like a fax machine in the strange, robotic cadence that’s come to define his latter-day output. Within hours of the album dropping this morning (Friday January 17), outraged listeners had already decided that the answer was well and truly Eminem, who in ‘Unaccommodating’ makes a joke about the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack in which 22 people were murdered. The rapper appears to be asking: ‘who’s sicker?’ At one point he intoned: “By now you have learned the sad truth – that being a murder victim can be inconvenient at times… You may already be on a cold slab in a draughty room.” The cover depicted him holding a gun and an axe to his own head, a pose Eminem recreates on that of this new album. The original record featured the acclaimed ‘Psycho’ director purring vague threats to the listener in-between a soothing, orchestral score for an imaginary film. That’s perhaps the underlying gripe espoused on Eminem’s surprise-released 11th studio album, which borrows its title from 1958’s ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents… Music To Be Murdered By’. There’s something very specific about our shared cultural sensibilities that leads people to clutch their pearls when a rapper says something in a song, but barely shrug when a filmmaker depicts despair and bloody conflict on screen. Well, there’s always been a distinctly cinematic bent to his melodramatic horror-core, which evokes violence and warped fantasy as vividly as the gnarliest of slasher flicks.
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