Eminem becomes a parody of himself and everyone else: NPR

The hardest thing as a hip-hop fan in 2018 is to watch the legends turn into cannibals. Do not suggest that rap should never be above self-criticism – this has always been a major principle of the genre. But some artists seem to have forgotten what it is to be young, stupid and numb. In their quest for lasting relevance, some have even begun to feed on their own babies.

August 31, surprise released Eminem Suicide bomber, his 10th studio album, titled appropriately. And by the accounts of the industry, he managed a suicide mission. He made his debut at No. 1 on the Display panel 200 this week, pushing 434,000 units of equivalent albums. But these recipes do not even begin to reflect the division of the LP. In the digital age, even numbers are located. Or, as Mark Twain rightly said, "Lies, lies and statistics".

Welcome to the era of hate flows. A close cousin of hate clicks – the media-worshiped metrics that drive readers into submission with controversial clickbits – hate flows are the equivalent of zero-sum music. And Eminem is the latest to benefit from a year set by mega-hip-hop stars that are coming out of the underlying albums while taking advantage of the controversy surrounding irregular rollout strategies and boiled beef with competitors. perceived. The list of 2018 offenders (or beneficiaries, depending on your take) range from Kanye West, whose MAGA hat mania has led you to debut at the top of the charts despite having a critical beatdown; to Nicki Minaj, whose tweetstorms in the weeks before and after Queen has earned more coverage than the actual music, which debuted at No. 2. Even an artist like Drake, who is virtually guaranteed to get on the charts for weeks at each new release, gets a shot at buying. This is partly why Drake could be considered a win-win for the prior release of Pusha T ("Story of Adidon"). Forget the rap of battle; for a pop phenomenon, winning the war means privileging mass consumption to credibility.

The music seems to be no longer enough. Maybe it has never been. (Hell, even the king of pop has won his biggest hit "Billie Jean" topping the charts with the help of the legendary tabloid fodder.) But today, the shock and wonder for a lack of creativity . What they are really selling is the drama.

Eminem has always had a flair for drama. If ever there was a rapper who would not be able to age gracefully, to stay youthful and bellicose at the bitter end, we should have known that it would be Marshall Mathers. It's the same emcee who has climbed the ladder by wearing his childhood insecurities on his sleeve. Throwing fits of anger has always been his M.O. It is his years of sober career, even innocuous, which pushed the fans to make a loop. He can go out with a cliché bang on Suicide bomberbut he did not look like himself for years.

Perhaps no other genre in contemporary music gives artists enough rope to lasso their dreams or hang themselves. In one way or another, the big guys always manage to do both. The oddest part of Eminem's career arc has looked to become one of those foolish pop music stars, he spent his years of training at the clown without end. The blond-haired jester who once scoffed at acts ranging from Britney Spears to Moby is now a bearded fool who screams for kids to get out of his lawn.

The new album of Eminem is so bad. It's bad like that? So bad that in one year of laughable hip-hop hysterics, Suicide bomber has become the lowest fruit. The trap is that it is conceivable in the joke. At least he desperately wants us to believe that he is there. Why else would he open Suicide bomber with a diatribe of five and a half minutes pointing fingers … well, everyone: the critics who put his previous album in December The comeback; rap Lils who have made his penchant for complex lyricism more and more obsolete, if not totally obsolete; The president, who continues to be a huge point of contention between Eminem and his team of fans from Central America, since his appearance at BET, last year, in the trump freestyle club. Even the album cover brings a subtle eyebrow by replicating the work of art from the classic debut of the Beastie Boys in 1986, Bachelor's degree for sick. The tail of a fighter jet features the letters FU-2 and a secretly spelled SUCKIT on the tail, similar to the reverse spelling of the original EAT ME album. Other hints made by the cover are more subtle. Like the Beasties, Eminem is a remnant of a time when white rappers had to earn the hard-earned respect of the black public before they even thought of crossing. Or, in this case, crossing each other.

"Last year did not work so well for me," Eminem freely admits on the introduction of the song. Yet, the former rap clown prince, who has always loved to take the lead of important people, manages to take himself too seriously. After releasing an album that everyone has earned eight months ago, a sure way to make themselves known throughout the industry is to dissolve the entire industry. He shoots at active and recently retired rappers (Drake, Lil Yachty, Vince Staples, Tyler, the Creator, Machine Gun Kelly and Joe Budden) and old and new personalities (Charlamagne, Dieu, DJ Akademiks and, yes, Joe Budden). He hates mumble rap and anyone who replicates the Migos feed. Basically, his beef is with all the status of hip-hop.

But what is beef? If you're Eminem, the beef is when a rapper of your age with even less relevance flirts with your teenage daughter on Twitter. In 2012, Machine Gun Kelly, a clone of Eminem up in her fair hair, tweeted that Hailie was "very sexy", adding "in the most respectful way possible that Em be king". Dad did not like it and MGK alleges that a quarrel has persisted between them ever since. But by dissuading Kelly, Eminem has given him more relevance than he has enjoyed since signing with Puff Daddy six years ago. Kelly's return, "Rap Devil", which reached first place on iTunes this week, is a bitter pill: "You do not get better with time / It's alright, Eminem, put the pen".

Indeed, Eminem is what happens when the ground reigns on something that you have spent all your life changing under your feet. He is the confused groom, thrown to the altar. And like everything he's ever felt betrayed, especially the women of his life, he feels compelled to call for rape. He is less an example of a rapper who has matured beyond the genre than one who has yet to go beyond his own immaturity. Even his criticism of hip-hop is based on the type of paternalism that has characterized rap since his years of wonder.

When Common released the song "I Used To Love H.E.R." in 1994, he was already an old soul at the age of 22, disillusioned by the changing identity of rap. He personified hip-hop as a desirable young woman who had abandoned her affections and had left her heartbroken. She had sold her soul for the funk of that. Now that anyone in the hood could knock, she was considered a hot commodity. More than a personal ode, his song encapsulated a moment. Rap was in the midst of a quarter-life crisis. A white guy from Detroit would eventually serve as a catharsis.

Marshall Mathers, also 22 in 1994, was barely a few years old before being signed by the biggest hitmaker of the genre, Don Dre. Together, they would change the game. But with the release of Suicide bomberIt is clear that he is suffering from his mid-career crisis by watching Rap pass him.

The metaphorical misogyny of Common was acceptable for this time, presented as a voice of conscience at a time when rap was shaking the last vestiges of self-awareness. Eminem's conservation role-playing game also throws hip-hop as a lost muse. Just as he blamed so many women in his life – from his mother to his ex-wife and to the mother of his child – Em believes that hip-hop has also betrayed him. It is the unifying theme of the album, intentional or not, and it attacks in its typically hypermasculine way.

Through this lens, his controversial but familiar use of the homophobic slogan "fagot", referred to Tyler, the Creator on the song "Fall", for a dissuasive The comeback, takes a new context. (Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, who contributed to the song before its end, has since it's far from itSuddenly, a song like "Normal", apparently about a story that goes wrong, becomes a metaphor for its dead-end relationship with rap. "How can I continue to have relationships like that? Maybe it says something about me," he says on the intro of the song. "Do I have to look in the mirror?" When he gets closer to the end of the album with "Nice Guy" and "Good Guy", both with singer Jessie Reyez, the toxic motif seems too familiar. It's Eminem who wonders why he's no longer good enough to answer his question. Because the truth is Eminem also cheated on hip-hop.

The album's best song, "Stepping Stone", discovers that Em is making amends to his D-12 homies with a confessional that acknowledges his inability to hold the band together after the assassination of his friend and singer Proof in 2006. I do not know how to reconquer this time and this time, "he says in a moment of honesty. "I have tried to listen again, but I am fighting for air / I am barely managing. When he acquiesces in the truth, Eminem is his most convincing. "One minute, you are waking up, but your audience is dividing / You can already feel that the climate is starting to change / For these children, you do not exist anymore."

Ironically, he sounds most thrilled when he is paired with Joyner Lucas, a young disciple of Eminem who leads his lyrical onslaught on "Lucky You." The song finds him in his favorite position, his back to the wall as an oppressed. But elsewhere on the album, he returns in the territorial mode of an old head. It's like these images of comedian Chris D & # 39; Elia mocking Eminem's angry dad rap: "I drive a Porsche over the floor / on foreign parts while you are in a Ford Taurus / abortion and divorce at the same time as Harrison Ford". The lyrics are not those of Eminem but the rap-rap acrobatics are quite his. Strangely, the more verbose he is, the less he has to say. It is painful to see a master of his caliber get involved with the lyrical miracle whip, as if he really needs to impress us with multi-syllabic rhymes at this stage of his career. Em spends so much time on Suicide bomber Slamming Mumble rappers for their unintelligible and repetitive flows that he fails to realize that his rap techniques are no less ridiculous.

It's unfortunate that the man who made a name for himself as a self-aberrant battle rapper, then as Slim Shady of gag-rap and finally as a composer of great depth , able to shed light on his own inner demons lost his sense of humor. Suicide bomber may not be a success on the surface. But Eminem has unintentionally managed to make the biggest joke of his life. It's so funny that he forgot to laugh.