It’s tough to listen to, even at a merciful-for-Eminem 45 minutes. He’s got incredible command, but his once-playful voice has curdled into a strained perma-yell. His style’s become harsh, pummeling, militaristic. Plus, even with him being as polysyllabic as possible, he’s still prone to rapping the corniest shit in the world, laboring over internal rhymes and connecting dots just so he can call the Grammys leeches. He sounds miserable on this album, gritting his teeth, rhyming nearly every word with the next, never losing his breath, trying with all his might to prove that he’s still got it. He’s great at the physical act of rapping. What Eminem is really great at is spitting a lot of really intricate lines really quickly.
There are so many ways to be good at rapping. The defense for Eminem records, ever since sometime around Recovery in 2011, has been that Eminem is great at rapping, nearly unmatched. He bites flows from Migos and Playboi Carti so he can say how much he hates them he entices Tay Keith to twist up the “Look Alive” beat and proves that he can make any song no fun if he tries hard enough. He’s written that Kamikaze is a second try after Revival, that he “tried not 2 overthink this 1,” but it feels far less like a corrective than it does like a punishment for the listeners who’ve moved past him. There’s a moment on “Fall” where Eminem writes, “ Somewhere some kid is bumpin’ this while he lip-syncs in the mirror / That’s who I’m doin’ it for, the rest, I don’t really even care.” But it just rings entirely false. And that’d be fine, I guess, except he can’t seem to understand why he doesn’t get to be the biggest star in the world. Aside from a chosen few, Eminem regards rap with contempt, taking potshots at everyone from Lil Yachty to Machine Gun Kelly. It’s funny, too, because for as much as Eminem claims to be “the greatest in the world,” he doesn’t seem to like rap very much. But at some point we all stop being the one brash enough to speak truth to power and become a kid playing the Penis Game in a park. It was childish in 2000, too, but 2000’s Eminem at least seemed like he was having fun, being the batshit provocateur he wanted to see in the world, finding out what people didn’t want him to say and then screaming it at the top of his lungs. But Em’s 45 now, and his single-minded focus on and inability to accept criticism of his own work is honestly childish at this point.
Eminem’s a reactionary-he always has been-and time was that his cultural hyper-awareness was a strength. So this backslide is both disappointing and entirely predictable. But backlash hit, as it always does, and even if Revival sold well-and it did-Em took the dearth of critical acclaim for the project as a loss. Even if the music wasn’t there, it was clear that Em was trying to take a stand. Revival might have been an overlong, schlocky mess of an album, but it had a few moments where it felt like Em was maturing the sober recollections of his addiction on “Castle” and “Arose,” and especially the caustic anti-Trump anthem, “Like Home,” on which Em offered support to disenfranchised trans veterans. That’s always been part of what draws people to him. Look: Eminem has made a career out of clinging to his adolescence. It’s a line that stings for a lot of reasons, but mostly because Tyler recently came out, however tenuously, as a gay man. Maybe the most miserable moment on Kamikaze, Eminem’s tenth studio album and second in as many years, comes on its tenth track, “Fall.” Atlanta skronk-rap wizard Mike Will provides an honestly gorgeous beat with a spare, pinball-ing synth lead and 808s that split the difference between trap and boom-bap Justin Vernon does his Auto-Tuned falsetto and murmurs the album’s best hook and then Eminem decides that even though he’s a straight, white, cisgender, 45-year-old man, it’s still cool for him to call Tyler, the Creator, who didn’t like Em’s (terrible) 2017 single, “Walk on Water,” a faggot.