Idiotic from the fuckin’ Embryonic sac to the body bag – an Eminem playlist from 1995-2020

While waiting for the main event to start, I put together a playlist to get into the mood.

This isn’t intended to be a Greatest Hits compilation (although I have included some major hits that were too indomitable to pass up) and neither is it a list of my favourites. Instead, it’s supposed to be a broad overview of Eminem’s changing style, highlighting some of his more transitional phases and interesting experiments. It’s aimed at casual fans who may be familiar with Eminem’s biggest singles but not much else, and for lapsed fans who may have stopped following the story – my aim is that the blurbs provide a new way into songs that maybe were less entertaining the first time you heard them.

Playlist (YouTube)

1995-1999: Don’t Give ‘Em A Demo, Kidnap ‘Em

INFINITE
Eminem
Infinite
YouTube Spotify

Eminem’s 1995 persona was an innocent, wise-beyond-his-years hero, who, despite the stresses of his life, has a faith in God and love for his baby mama that will get him through anything. Two years later, he would be worshipping Satan and throwing his baby mama’s corpse into the lake. This, the lead single (here, remastered in 2015 for the song’s 20th anniversary) was the only Infinite song Eminem considered worthy of inclusion in his 2001 Angry Blonde lyrics book, scoffing at it as a dated example of “rhyming for the sake of rhyming”. He’s right, but it captures the sense of floating expanse the word “infinite” conjures up, and the wide-eyed euphoria of his bratty delivery over echoing, car-headlight-streaked jazz foreshadows glory he’d be far less happy to have once he actually got it. Later braggadocio will be tainted by more self-loathing than this, later rhyming-for-the-sake-of-rhyming will have more blood and bitch-bashing, but even as a kid with no shady affectations he’s clear with us that he was sent from Hell.

JUST DON’T GIVE A FUCK
Eminem
The Slim Shady LP
Remixed from Slim Shady EP
YouTube Spotify

Although Eminem’s writing had already warped to to the point that his friends would corner him after freestyles with concern about his mental health, Eminem considered “Just Don’t Give A Fuck” to be his first ‘real song’ – pitching his voice up, putting on a sneering Detroit-projects accent, the mask of Slim Shady lets him become his real self. Over a loop of bitcrushed mechanical screeching (courtesy of D12’s Denaun Porter, a collaborator through to the present day), and after coughing on a blunt, Slim unloads a salvo of career-funniest punchlines, built from his battle-rap arsenal. The morbid, slacker-gothic melody delivers a sense of inevitability and disgust to proceedings as he rhymes “naughty rotten rhymer” with “Marty Schottenheimer”, terrorises you with guns, beats you up after your show, rapes his classmates, transforms into a giant robot and attends AA. Look out for the passage where he disses every other popular white rapper for no reason, and finishes it off with an ahead-of-his-time brag about being the one white boy who can do it – “flava with no seasoning“.

’97 BONNIE AND CLYDE
Eminem
The Slim Shady LP
Remixed from Slim Shady EP “Just The Two Of Us”
YouTube Spotify

Marshall’s daughter Hailie Jade is a recurring theme in his music, representing what will be lost if he succumbs to his rage and madness. Here she’s a co-conspirator, taken down to the studio to sing on a song about Daddy murdering Mommy. An artefact of abuse, then, but Daddy is fully aware of the pathetic nature of his own misogyny. He’s not concerned with the gore, just the dull cleanup  – body disposal, parental taxi, diaper changing. It’s a good joke he’ll come back to, though never more effectively. And despite Daddy’s lectures, Hailie’s aware her mother is gone, revealing her father as a loser who can’t even fool a toddler.

It’s also redeemed by a streak of compassion. The dreary logistics of Daddy’s hatred of Mommy aren’t as interesting as his care for Hey-hey, and Daddy believes in ‘a place called Heaven’ even as he acknowledges he will never go there. Even at his worst, there’s an Olympian love within this dangerous, full-of-shit asshole that will soon earn him the emotional investment of millions of teenagers.

MY NAME IS
Eminem
The Slim Shady LP
YouTube Spotify

Through the same alchemy that turned Nine Inch Nails into a country song for Lil Nas X, Dr. Dre introduces his whiteboy to the world by transmuting a Labi Siffre sample into bong-giggling slacker rock – which Eminem tackles with a conversational drawl so as not to spook Beavis and Butthead watching him on MTV. The nose-pinch parody-disc-scratching doesn’t take the stink out of lyrics dribbling with blood and shit, a novelty pop hit marketed to kids but filled with gags intended to raise squeals from tough-guy adults – and in case you still think it’s a trivialising parody of hip-hop, here’s Dr. Dre! Slim’s in full cartoon incarnation here, a personification of garbage TV deadening children’s brains, but it’s animated by real pain, with references to Eminem’s childhood abuse and suicidality. And there’s just enough of a structure and conceit to feel like a real song; starting with Slim in the present, finally on TV, then hopping back to his childhood, then forward to his death. Too scared to kill himself, he substitutes suicidal stupidity, until he blows his head off just to piss off his absent father.

FORGOT ABOUT DRE
Dr. Dre feat. Eminem
2001
YouTube Spotify

Eminem gets possibly the most infectious hook of his career out of a babble of words that barely even rhyme, a flex of a rule-break, working off the melody of Slim’s conversational cadence and his outrageous, bratty vocal fry. (Note the trace of Snoop Dogg in his delivery – he’d written the hook for him to deliver, but the good doctor preferred Eminem’s demo.) What a gift to Dre to write him a song like this, where every single line has the same catchphrase wit of “My Name Is”, but without the gimmicks. It’s the last we see of the immature (read: non-famous) Slim, but it foreshadows his future work: Em trials a stiff-pocket rock-drummer timing in Dre’s verse that suggests his midlife flow; and it’s also a trial for 2018’s Kamikaze, with Eminem having his first shot at writing as an old veteran raging at his critics for thinking he got too harmless and poppy. 

The fact that Eminem himself was seen as yet another of Dre’s attempts to crack the pop market is never addressed. Slim spends his verse participating in idiotic crimes, trusting his skills would distinguish him from Backstreet Boys in the minds of anyone paying attention. He would not have that trust for very long after.

2000-2003: I Blew Up, It Makes You Sick To Your Stomach, Doesn’t It?

CRIMINAL
Eminem
The Marshall Mathers LP
YouTube Spotify

Slim, propelled by a music hall piano stride, rides off with the listener on a carnival thrill ride of such shameless bad taste that many LGBT+ people never forgave him. (On 2013’s “Bad Guy”, he would agree that they shouldn’t.) Eminem has made plenty of moral-indignation-horror songs, but none so exuberantly unconcerned with the real feelings he’ll inspire in his audience, whether ugly hatred or pain.

But on the album, “Criminal” serves two jobs. Its first is to tie off the album’s closing trilogy – the bloodcurdling murder climax of “Kim”, the D12 curtain call of “Under the Influence”, and “Criminal” as a post-credits sequel hook showing that the villain survives. Its second job is to conclude the album’s moral argument. Yeah, you feel scared just hearing these words, in case they leave a stink of corruption on you that others will be able to pick up on. But work up the courage to endure another listen – it’s his words that will stab you in the head, not the dagger; his horrible thoughts aren’t his own, but those of TV and corrupt politicians and outmoded religion that he was raised by in lieu of parents; and even as he vows there’s nothing he won’t say, he’s mute when he reaches for one particular word that doesn’t belong to him. But those other words don’t belong to him either!, you might reasonably complain, but the song both opens and closes with a promise that he doesn’t mean any of this shit, which you should take into context when writing the slogan out on your rainbow picket sign.

THE WAY I AM
Eminem
The Marshall Mathers LP
YouTube Spotify

Eminem’s great punk record and his first solo production credit, written when a piano melody invaded Eminem’s brain on a jet. Pressured for a radio single for The Marshall Mathers LP that could stand up to “My Name Is” (Eminem had wanted “Who Knew?”, a rather didactic explanation of the whole joke), Eminem instead channelled his rage into a gallop of four anapests per bar and a screaming, drug-roasted double vocal (forever theatrical, he works the sound of him hitting his blunt into the meter). Let’s see – this is his signature vocal sound going forward; Eminem’s label heard it and forced him back into the studio to record “The Real Slim Shady”, typecasting him as a novelty hit guy; his biography and autobiography are named after this song; he’ll recycle the anapestic flow on multiple other tracks, like “Stimulate” and “Mosh”; and, in his un-perial phase, the minimalistic piano fame-rant will be the template for his defeated 2017 comeback single “Walk On Water”. As tinny and insubstantial as the production is – you could have made it on a SNES – his astonishing voice, channeling 2Pac, the Beasties, Johnny Rotten and Marilyn Manson, his consonants buzzing from the pills in his system, fills out every part of the track enough that only the Spaghetti Western tubular bells taking us into the hook are of interest.

WITHOUT ME
Eminem
The Eminem Show
YouTube Spotify

Iconic pop disco banger, with its cartoonishly fake saxophone and music-hall Orientalism.  Catchy, due to its effortless, intricate rhyming, in the same way as how epic poetry used rhymes to make it easier for storytellers to remember. There is a hint here of the darkness that is to come – that saxophone is from “Purple Pills”, those are the funny mouth sound effects from “My Name Is”, there is the boyband assault threats and fag-slinging invective from “Marshall Mathers”, and the song even starts with a frustrated Marshall moaning about everyone wanting him to do the same act all the time, before slapping his hockey mask on, going through the motions while analogising himself to the fat Vegas Elvis. But we’re all having so much fun that it’s almost impossible to notice. Did Eminem ever do anything more, primordially, Eminem than finishing “Without Me” with a singalong of the archaic playground doggerel of “nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh-nyeh“? Maybe when he rhymes an entire sentence with onomatopoeia of the 1966 Batman theme.

WHITE AMERICA
Eminem
The Eminem Show
YouTube Spotify

After learning how to produce music (not just from Dre, but from J Dilla), The Eminem Show had Eminem, at his most invincible, finding the voice he’ll iterate on for the rest of his career – toybox-horror melodies, double-tracked raps, drawled octave-stacked half-sung hooks, video-game-classical portent and the distorted guitars and stadium factor of classic rock. Over Queen’s “We Will Rock You” beat, a pattern he’ll go back to so often you’d think it was his heartbeat, Eminem launches proceedings with a Robert Plant scream in what is, somehow, a genuinely great hip-hop song about racism from the White perspective. The Shady conceit frees him from sanctimonious claims of being one of the good ones – Slim’s hilarious as he gloats about his pretty blue eyes and compares criticism of his homophobic lyrics to being lynched (!!) – but he states as objective fact that he’d have sold half if he was black. Many years later, when the middle-aged Eminem would be freestyling against Trump, I’d hear it said that probably no other celebrity in America has more people who relate to him than Eminem, a man admired by both the white and Black working class. In this song, Eminem is aware of what that means about who he speaks for – wrapping his artificially blond hair in a do-rag, a blanched infiltrator sent into White America as an ambassador of Black America.

RABBIT RUN
Eminem
8 Mile: The Official Soundtrack
YouTube Spotify

If you thought the pure technical showcase rappity-raps were something Eminem only did in his midlife, you’re wrong. While “Rabbit Run” is meant to be written by Eminem’s 8 Mile character, B-Rabbit, it’s more about drawing the same actor-role analogy as in the much more famous 8 Mile track “Lose Yourself” – lyrics like “I’ma tell you who I be, I’ma make you hate me” and “I found my niche, you gon’ hear my voice ’till you’re sick of it, you ain’t gonna have a choice” describe the free-speech supervillain, not the struggling nobody of the movie. But the libretto’s of secondary concern – this is a bravura aria, designed to show off a vocalist at his most obsessed with crafting steady, efficient upward ramps of tension. The song is a spiral staircase, nonchalantly balancing on its sing-song internal rhymes to climb higher and higher until a sudden thunderclap ending. For many of his fans and critics, this is the best his rapping ever got. Personally, I’m glad he found other places to go after this. But what a moment.

PATIENTLY WAITING
50 Cent feat. Eminem
Get Rich Or Die Tryin’
YouTube Spotify

When scouting talent, Eminem tends to prioritise a certain kind of quality musicianship, with star power a lesser concern. But with the famously shot-up 50 Cent, he was bang on the money – his controlled, swaggering flow and drawled witticisms fulfilling Eminem’s rap-geek requirements, but with his fascinating backstory and action-figure good looks captivating the twelve-year-olds.

Eminem launches his feature singing over foley of 50’s beeping ventilator, a comic-booky detail only Slim could get away with, but that also analogises his mentorship to the medicine that brought 50 back from his injuries. Eminem’s innate goofiness gives most of his compositions the adolescent melodicism of video game soundtracks, and here he leans into it – he escalates the tension with an arcade synth that Pongs back and forth across his off-footed flow, like a drunken man staggering unscathed past every arrow in a booby-trapped Tomb Raider temple.

More importantly, the chemistry between Em and 50 is off the charts. Both rappers round themselves out by matching each other’s energy – 50’s invulnerable calm gives Slim room to express a toughness he’s usually too kiddish to access, while Eminem’s neurotic intensity punctures 50’s bulletproof coating and lets him play a little. Also, ooh, in the live performance video, Fif is stripped to the waist. Blonde or brunette? Pretty or hunky? Gothic or gangsta? 2003’s locker-room pinups are here. And, oh yeah, Slim’s boast that the 9/11 terrorists were trying to hit Shady Records might be the single best bad-taste brag in a career full of them.

GO TO SLEEP
DMX feat. Eminem and Obie Trice
Cradle 2 The Grave
YouTube Spotify

Digging a grave, turning the rhythm of his panting into an elegant spiral of ee-vowels that escalates over his Final-Fantasy-final-boss-music beat, Slim uses a slot on the soundtrack of an action movie to threaten to murder a real person. In his sights here is The Source‘s editor Benzino, his self-declared archnemesis and the unfortunate muse of most of Eminem’s 2003 material. Even in retrospect, Eminem’s gangsta phase feels worrying – Eminem’s rockstar ego and Slim’s vicious tongue seem destined to get him killed – and as a producer he’s coasting in the sunset of his imperial phase in a vehicle of Queen stomp-stomp-clap drums and plastic-goth Korg TRITON keyboards. But “Go To Sleep” hits the sweet spot, balancing genuine threat, Slim’s playfulness and the Perfect Pop Song formula hit on by a post-“Lose Yourself” Eminem – a fakey-classical keyboard intro, a tense quaver riff, a hypnotic escalation of emotion in his voice, semiquaver bassline from bar 9, stadium rock drums kicking in on bar 17… and a monstrous hook, even more integral to proceedings than the one on “Forgot About Dre”. Slim’s deliciously boingy shriek of ‘go to sleep, bitch! die! Motherfucker! Die!‘ is somehow made even more perfect when DMX barks “what?!” in the most exacting pocket imaginable. At once a psycho gangster and a brat in a gaming headset, Slim still undercuts the volley of gunfire at the end with his signature chuckle. “DIE NAMELESS!!” he screams, then laughs – making Benzino the immortal subject of several of his greatest songs, and knowing it.

2003-2009: Strong To De Finish Wid Mi Valium Spinach

THE CONSPIRACY FREESTYLE
DJ Green Lantern, Eminem
Invasion Pt. II/Conspiracy Theory
YouTube Spotify

Eminem’s Invasion freestyles, done with G-Unit’s DJ Green Lantern, are some of his best work regarding his beef with Benzino, using mixtapes (gobbled up by his fans over Napster) to attack his enemies, examine his own issues and brag charmingly about the empire he was building. He also uses them to trial the molten, “inside-the-beat” rapping style he’d go on to use on Encore; note the way he draws out the emphasis on “destroooy the inDUSStree“, aah, that’s the good stuff. (And note the burp. That’s Encore too.) Benzino’s accusations that Eminem was an industry plant to whiten hip-hop are mocked here, but as witty as Slim sounds baiting him, the decision would not be wise; Benzino’s magazine The Source would leak some old, racist raps Eminem made in his teens, and lead in part to the collapse of his Imperial Phase.

MY BAND
D12
D12 World
YouTube Spotify

Andrew Ridgely. Salieri. Big Syke. Sure, Proof and Swift are great, Kuniva’s solid, Kon Artis a superb music producer and Bizarre a vivid character. But they’re sharing the spotlight with one of the all-time popular music geniuses at the height of his powers; Slim’s not just the best vocalist and writer, but the funniest, the scariest, the most musical one, and he’s the pretty one, and – I don’t know if you noticed – he’s white. So here’s D12 World‘s lead single – a goof (Weird Al Yankovich was cited as an influence), but also a satire of the group’s behind-the-scenes fallouts, and of a white teen pop market that embraced Shady’s poppiness rather than anything, or anyone, too Black. Bleaching every last freckle of melanin from his accent, Slim’s transformed by fame into the disgustingly white boyband dipshit he once said he was sent to destroy, prostituting himself to his groupies as ‘his’ ‘band’ plot to backstab him. Proof gets his own back by ripping out Slim’s mic, Kuniva and Kon Artis squabble between each other while too scared to stand up to the tyrant their old friend has become, and Bizarre reveals he’s the group’s real sex symbol. But what takes the song over the top is its ending, when the sketch spirals out of its own conceit into a racially insensitive ad jingle for salsa, the most blatant example yet of Eminem’s fandom for Monty Python.

PUKE
Eminem
Encore
YouTube Spotify

Encore‘s negative reception has been exaggerated in fan lore, but hip tastemakers were repulsed by the childish toilet humour, missing the point that it showed maturity – Slim trading disgust at the vulnerable for the equal-opportunity nausea of body functions, a valid mode of shock-rock a la Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “Constipation Blues”. One of the funniest songs on his arguably funniest album, and one of the most personal on his arguably most personal album, Slim chucks up gallons of bile over a fizzing goth-pop beat from Dre, displaying skills from his recent singing coaching and acting experience – and pushing himself to freestyle rather than write. Both decidedly adult (he’s furious at his ex-wife for abandoning the kids) and a playground taunt (“I hope you go to Hell and Satan sticks a needle in your eye“), and with a middle eight of photorealistic vomiting sounds over a smirky blues harmonica solo, emetophobes should probably skip this one.

LIKE TOY SOLDIERS
Eminem
Encore
YouTube Spotify

Eminem looks at Kanye West’s homework, realises it wouldn’t make sense for him to chipmunk up some soul samples, and instead pumps helium into the Eighties white-trash pop he grew up on to make a trailer-rattling anthem, using the language of whiteness to make his statement of love for the hip-hop culture he does not question his position within. This is the point of no return for detractors of Eminem’s rather sentimental middle period, but it’s that obvious keyboard that makes “I can’t think of a perfecter way to word it than to just say that I love y’all too much” land earnest and weighty. All he’s articulating here is the empathetic spirit his work has always had, even at its nastiest; dropping the gimmick-rapping and silly voices to walk a sensitive path around the track’s perfect marching snare – and don’t say it, shh, but perhaps the Valium that slackens his voice is what’s allowing him to find those satisfying behind-the-beat pockets. The retroactively unwatchable video, which uses a murder of Proof that will later happen for real as a pretext for Eminem to give 13-year-old girls butterflies with his big arms and Disney-princess eyes, will not convince doubters this isn’t camp, but it does feature rappers called “Mad Thugz” and “Lil Q Tango” performing diss records called things like “Shady A Busta”, which suggests he’s in on the joke.

MY DARLING
Eminem
Relapse
YouTube Spotify

This bonus track from Relapse, written very early in the album’s development, was intended as an intro to his post-overdose concept album but was scrapped as the tone got darker. One of Eminem’s musical theatre songs, built out of a revving chainsaw sample, the slurry and self-regarding rapper extends an olive branch to the other white rappers who can’t touch him even if he’s not making any good records before a supernatural visitor in his mirror appears to make him an irresistible offer. There’s so many great jokes – the use of Eminem’s signature double-tracking effect on his trivial dialogue, the argument that degenerates into infantile contradiction, “but Slim is just a bottle of hair bleach and vodka!” – but at the end the allegory articulates the nihilistic, why-the-hell-not logic of drug addiction, while its imagery of posters and toxic influence and “you and I were meant to be together” evokes a man who has become a Stan for himself, a fanboy too in awe of the creative power generated by his own misery to choose happiness.

BAGPIPES FROM BAGHDAD
Eminem
Relapse
YouTube Spotify

Eminem’s shock-rock cult classic Relapse regenerated Slim Shady into a skinny-ripped, brunette, buzzcutted, preposterously-accented serial killer consumed with homicidal lust for the famous – something he began to cringe at even as he recorded music videos for the album. Letting you know what you’re in for by flicking between terrible Scottish and Iraqi accents in the intro, and building hooks around the indefensibly racist joke of “blowin’ up like bagpipes from Baghdad… alhamdulillah“, Slim drinks through Mariah Carey’s wine cellar and starts shit with her new husband Nick Cannon like a drunk best man at a wedding, with the pungi loop the kilted piper celebrating the newlyweds. It’s not intended to be anything other than slasher horror rhyme salad – Relapse‘s surreal language use pushes parts of the song into a kind of free-floating improvisational abstraction – but Slim’s confused feelings of ownership towards “the fucking whore” is human, the feeling of using Facebook to look up who your high school exes went on to marry. Putrid, offensive, banal, nonsensical, misogynistic, homophobic, lesbophobic, ableist and racist, it’s pure shock and awe only redeemed by the fact that it doesn’t even seek to shock – it’s the green bile you vomit when you’ve emptied the rest of your stomach, Shady being flushed from his system at a time when his alter-ego had poisoned him nearly to death.

DEJA VU
Eminem
Relapse
YouTube Spotify

Marshall begins the lyric in opposite directions – falling into a manic state while his blood pressure is climbing, pulling himself apart so his real self can breach the bloody body-bag of the rest of the album to talk to us in words rather than allegory. With ruthless precision – getting triggered by NyQuil, disappointing his children, junk food binges, drugs hidden inside his porn DVDs, and every lie and unfortunate truth sending him skittering back into hiding under the hockey mask of his serial killer accent. His delivery is blunt, and harsh, as if he won’t be able to find his words again if he can’t say them now – the Elvis shout-out turns the lineage he once rejoiced in into a curse, and the bitterness in his voice makes a gimmick rhyme of ‘pneumonia’ with ‘bologna’ and ‘methadone, ya (think?)’ into one of the most powerful moments in his discography. These words float over an interpolation of Naughty By Nature’s “Yoke The Joker”, a song so good it made the young Eminem quit rapping for some months, his creative near-death experience soundtracking the near-death of his physical body. Accompanied by a percussion made of sharpening knives and a footstep kick, with a beautiful hook sung as if into a pillow, the track represents Em’s addiction as the implacable slasher villain of the rest of Relapse, dismembering more and more blondes, chasing after a hit of thrill or even reason that was long extinguished by the thirty-whatever’th direct-to-video sequel.

2010-2015: Morphin’ Into An Immortal

ON FIRE
Eminem
Recovery
YouTube Spotify

Cornered in a recording studio in Honolulu with producer and D12 member Denaun Porter encouraging Eminem to imagine he’s a young emcee at an open mic and stop doing those stupid fucking accents, Eminem found his new voice recording “On Fire”, loving it so much he scrapped the Relapse sequel he’d been making, instead making the more optimistic – and poptimistic – Recovery. It’s not that he’s making more sense – this is by a long way the least coherent track across both albums, and his discography in general – but he picks back up where Infinite left off, a cocky battle-rhymer filled with awe for the beauty of words for their own sake. So welcome back, Eminem!

But as Shady, his lyrics were about stinging directness, the musicality of horrible imagery, the joke being in part that that gift could be squandered on words that stupid – a life that unworthy. In his new life as Eminem, his lyrics will be about dizzying athleticism – syllables and semantics, cypher wordplays, and puns, applied to even the radio-ready beats his pool of industry go-to producers give him, as if emptying a bottle of challenging hot sauce over a white bread mayonnaise sandwich. The bravura goes from the medium to the message; Eminem is now an ambassador for his sport, bringing it to the mainstream in the hope that a new generation of rappers will be inspired to top his gymnastic feats – exactly the kind of rhyming and role-modelling his Shady side once cast off as beneath him.

But this lean, clean, Messianic rap athlete has been sullied by his time as Shady; white flesh scrawled with suicide instructions, piercing holes turned to folds in his earlobes, parts of his brain and body rotted away by the drugs. Unlike the open-mic emcee of Infinite, the reborn Eminem works with Slim’s palette – misogyny, scatology, controversy, and Christopher Reeve. In “On Fire”, he loads his brush and squiggles marks all over the canvas, old enough to no longer fuss about appearing cool, and inventing a form of abstract shock-rap that makes even the wackiest Encore cuts look like they care too much about making sense. You can almost hear, in the way Eminem’s endearingly lame hook adlibs make the choir chops in the beat sound like canned laughter, the closeness between these two old friends with so many years of injokes.

NO LOVE
Eminem feat. Lil Wayne
Recovery
YouTube Spotify

There are two moments in “No Love” that you could call the most beautiful moment in Eminem’s whole discography. One is the evil giggle when Lil Wayne reacts to Eminem’s disgusting brag about cunnilingus, a moment that feels like the whole core of the project – for both men. The other is Eminem’s sung hook, where his delivery undermines his loveless words with a compassion so unconditional and angelic as to make a lump swell in the throat. The sane Eminem, at times, feels like a Kryptonite shadow of the superpowered demon-bombshell he once was, licking long-emptied pill bottles to pick up a trace of fairy dust, but here he turns sobriety – and the liberation of dropping his suffocating character – into the most glorious thrill in the world.

Oh, yeah, and Haddaway turns out to be the kitschcore sample of his entire fucking career. Eat shit, Martika.

THE REUNION
Bad Meets Evil
Hell: The Sequel
YouTube Spotify

Reuniting with his 90s associate Royce da 5’9 after a decade of uninteresting beef, their supergroup Bad Meets Evil delivers a masterful shock-comedy song, flipping between a scene of Royce trying to pick up girls in a club and Slim driving around with his unfortunate punchbag of a girlfriend. Despite superb lines about slut-powder and spreading AIDS rumours about his last girl, it’s all about his old persona-play: “Marshall, you ain’t really like that,” she pleads to Slim, in the dancehall-influenced singing voice he used for his hooks on Relapse, as he forces her to listen to the whole album, and appreciate the accents – “you’re puttin’ on a show, where’s your mic at? You’re breaking my heart.” But Marshall’s not really like that. He quit drugs and got therapy. He helped get Ryan clean, too. He can’t unwrite “Beautiful”, let alone the sickly Hell: The Sequel single “Lighters” that was a transparent attempt to earn Royce some Recovery money, and we can’t unhear them. It’s just a couple of nerds playing word games and trying to gross each other out. But “Scary Movies” in 1999 was the exact same – does it change it that much that they were popping vikes while doing it?

I NEED A DOCTOR
Dr. Dre feat. Eminem
Detox
YouTube Spotify

This unfortunately hilarious Grammy-nominated camp classic was the first single put out for Dr. Dre’s Detox, announced in 2002, scrapped in 2015. (Maybe.) Borrowing the vibe and structure of “Stan”, Slim tries to screech Dre into getting over his son’s death and making a pop album, taking the role of the fanboy who feels his favourite rapper has left him to die – and the we-should-be-together-too imagery persists as well. “You picked me up and breathed new life in me,” he says, invoking the imagery of an embrace and kiss. Dre allows Eminem to write him lyrics owning the criticisms – “you can kiss my indecisive ass crack, maggots, and the cracker’s ass“. You can probably guess what rhymes with ‘maggots’: As disturbing as it is to see the middle-period Eminem recreating the internalised homophobia of The Marshall Mathers LP, it comes with an attendant sizzle of discomfort/catharsis, creating the kind of macho-camp emotional palette I associate with Hideo Kojima games.

On the hook is Skylar Grey, who wrote the hook on “Love The Way You Lie”; Eminem, very taken with her, insisted her vocal be used (Interscope wanted Lady Gaga), and the reedy emo-pop tone she uses reflects her nasal collaborator. Skylar became one of Eminem’s most frequent co-writers and best friends, and despite her inarguable talent and versatility, is often resented by Eminem’s fans as a domesticating influence. Though are we still acting like “The Real Slim Shady” is somehow ‘less’ pop than “Love The Way You Lie”? Really?

STRONGER THAN I WAS
Eminem
The Marshall Mathers LP 2
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A (mostly) unironic pop ballad and the most divisive track on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Eminem is out of his comfort zone here – the hilarious “nngh!” adlibs in the background show he knows it. But the understated, intimate beauty and humour of the lyric – written from the perspective of his eternal Kim, elevated from murder victim to Adele narrator – makes me wonder what kind of career he’d have had writing straight pop songs. The hip-hop audience don’t get what they came for, the pop people hate the fact he can’t hit the high notes, the rock audience will be turned off by the sentimentality, and the critics that once compared him to Dylan, Shakespeare and Robert Browning are still mad that Eminem didn’t have the decency of dropping dead while he still looked like a stoner cherub who got punched out of Heaven for pissing on the wheel of God’s trailer. But few other songs in Eminem’s discography better display what a musical misfit he is – a sad, divorced, battered ageing punk, pouring every inch of his overwrought and insane emotions into a torch song that rattles into a hypertechnical rap verse with an intriguing line about “November 31st”.

RAP GOD
Eminem
The Marshall Mathers LP 2
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Many of the faithless wrote off The Marshall Mathers LP 2 after its two 80s poodle-perm singles made them think the album was Recovery 2. And then Eminem put out possibly his barmiest song to ever be a major, enduring pop hit, casting out the nonbelievers. He’s speaking in tongues – the writing is what Eminem called “a stream of consciousness”, zigzagging between portent, bitchy celebrity anecdotes and nonsense-words – yet the command of his powers is total, building every section into a satisfying piece of rhythm music with a build, a crescendo, a breather, and then whipping into something else extraordinary. The fairy dust may have worn off from the “The Way I Am” days, but his voice is an even more delicate instrument, switching deftly between catty half-whispers, backpacker proclamations, and a growl that trickles through his eternal smirk. And like all his best braggadocio, it’s modest, faithfully namechecking his inspirations, and undercutting his brags in ways both overt (“the alco-hall of fame on the wall of SHAME!“) and subtle (the song’s climax is a winking oldest-one-in-the-book – “I don’t need to go overseas and take a vacation to trip a broad“). Despite its swelling EDM production and dubstep drums, the quaver piano chords recall his 2003 songwriting formula, making it eccentric enough that it hasn’t aged that much. He tells us repeatedly that he’s only a Rap God, only beginning to feel like one, but the song is clearly staking a claim that he is the Rap God, an honorific that stuck. Like “Kim”, it is a masterpiece record and I want literally nobody on earth to make one like it again.

FINE LINE
Eminem
SHADYXV
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SHADYXV‘s Gilette-ad-campaign-and-The-Equalizer-licensed pop hit “Guts Over Fear” soaked up the attention, but Eminem used his label compilation to explore aspects of his act he’d held back on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, returning to producing with his longtime session instrumentalist Luis Resto and ramping up both the shock humour salads and the fame confessionals. This underrated deep cut is one of the latter. 

Eminem casts himself as a philosopher king, able to dedicate his life to art and to the God who sent him to piss off the world, but hurting so physically for human contact that when he complains about how they won’t let him crowdsurf you can feel the space where the hands should be on your own skin. Soothed by Luis Resto’s lullaby vocals and bittersweet Ian Dury piano-playing that provides just enough wry distance to remind you Em’s doing OK, he mourns old friendships he’d failed to nurture, hoping to undo the mistakes of his life by howling for the Outsidaz and Pace Won that he discarded after “Just Don’t Give A Fuck”. But the passage that made me throw my phone on the floor because I was so angry at him for being this clever is when he uses a chain of homophones to create the image of himself doing his stage makeup in front of his mirror, while using the lyrics on the page to excoriate his own self-obsessed thoughts (“[a martyr is how I paint myself, and through these harrowing ideals I’m so vain/a mirror is how I paint myself, and do my hair – oh in ideals, I’m so vain]“). 

And it’s a song where Eminem’s middle aged-ness adds poignancy, rather than embarrassment. His mature style makes what could otherwise have been a mawkish ballad into a physical rush, speed-glitching between so many vocal tones he sounds like he’s sampling himself, going so fast he has to use Mondegreens to say multiple things at once: “when it comes to this pen, I struggle with [coming to senses/commenting censors]”. The catastrophising rockstar songs on The Eminem Show might impress adolescents – the fading-vaudevillian poetry of “Fine Line” is for grownups, like drinking in moderation, or saying sorry and meaning it.

ALL I THINK ABOUT
Bad Meets Evil
Southpaw: Official Soundtrack
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Eminem’s clicky percussion was love-it-or-hate-it from way back in 2002 (Kanye West, for what his opinion is worth by this point, is in the “love” camp), but it’s on this odd self-produced cut buried on the Southpaw soundtrack that Eminem’s taste for plastic-toybox rhythm reaches its weirdest conclusion. Somewhere between a less slick Y2K-era Neptunes production and a smirky, masc SOPHIE, with the tinny organ stabs (and occasional piano) reminding us of Shady’s classic sound, Royce and Slim brag nimbly over a double-black-diamond-slope of a beat somewhere between a stalling car, an arcade cabinet and a dribbling basketball. Eminem’s palette of sentimentality, screaming, hypetechnicality and goofball comedy didn’t lend itself to cool that easily even before he turned 40, but “All I Think About” has a nonchalant hook and thrilling production that would look like the future if younger men had made it. And the gags and angst are there, too – after over a decade, Slim finally acknowledges he likes the Elvis comparisons, “because he died shitting“. Bars!!

2016-2020: An Old Fart, But You Don’t Want No Part

CAMPAIGN SPEECH
Eminem
Non-album single
YouTube Spotify

I put Eminem’s 2016 non-album single, released on the day of the Presidential debates, on the playlist to challenge you. I love you, and I know you can do this. I know you can find the music in it, the way he builds a melodic tension out of the repetition of eh-oore donkey-brays, then eee elephant trumpeting, the kinaesthetic sensation of his mouth and palette as percussion, the captured sound of him moving around his microphone. I know you can appreciate that this, often called the most unlistenable record he’s put out, and oh my god it’s like eight fucking minutes, was a single, and it charted, and it came out just after the period of Eminem’s career where he was singing entire songs and touring with Rihanna. The illbient instrumentation is wonderful, an accessory to the verbal shredding – the dark keyboard building Slim’s brooding evil, then bleeding it with irresistible aw-shucks pizzicato plucks like he’s turning to the camera and winking.

Oh, it doesn’t mean anything? It’s just empty words? Jimi Hendrix’s guitar doesn’t fucking say words when he plays it, does it? There’s profound and gross lines and images from moment to moment, but as a whole it is a scrolling Twitter feed meditation, a drivel-dribble of celebrity names and sexual perversions, political outrages, baffling sponcon (“one ball and half a dick – Apple watch“) and public self excoriation, often in the same breath. It’s “My Name Is” as a gong bath. Slim can growl about how he rapes women so much his dick is torn and bloody and yet it’s ambience, mocking the empty and omnipresent rhetoric of the man Eminem knew would win, the villainous blond shock-comedian who poisoned the minds of America in 2016.

BELIEVE
Eminem
Revival
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While Eminem’s attempts to incorporate new-school flows into his rapping would prove on Kamikaze to be a good idea, on Revival, his signature percussive rhythmic pockets resulted in a pointillist anti-flow that was not sympathetic to the nauseating and desperate pop instrumentals that dominated too much of the album usually considered to be Eminem’s worst. But the diced, dismembered rapping is what makes “Believe” a masterpiece. Eminem’s fractured syllables are the gasps of a dying man, describing his meaningless winnings – gated communities full of painfully white neighbors who he had to teach to fist-bump, friends dead, youth gone, stories told, threat defused. For all its religious portent – the Rap God laying down the gospel to his true believers – it might be the bleakest braggadocio track ever recorded by someone in relative safety, recapturing the sense of doom that made “Lose Yourself” such an incredible moment, but that his early-2010s inspirationals didn’t dare to acknowledge.

The chorus is handled by Slim in his traditional octave-stacked scream, threatening that he’ll make us regret moving on like a boyfriend screaming at his girl that if she leaves, he’ll murder her – but his rage is blurred-out with a swell of radio static, like a signal from 2000 picked up on a distant planet, setting up an album that, at its best, intelligently connects Slim’s misogyny, America’s inequality and Eminem’s obsolescence. If he didn’t sound pathetic enough already, he’s framed by ghostly backing vocals breathing “love me, love me“, his own lack of faith projected onto his audience. So what’s left? Music itself – which here is the light, the thing that makes it worth speaking when there’s nothing left to talk about any more. As the song progresses into poetic origami constructions about the beaten-up cars in which his audience listen to his CDs, the words become less those of a rapper, and more the embodiment of your own playlist whispering in your ears – “I am your fuck-it switch, nothin’ else can compare.” Not “no-one”. “Nothing”.

HEAT
Eminem
Revival
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Neo-Beastie pop-rock became one of Eminem’s signature sounds, starting from his nostalgia kick on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, which sent the then-40-year-old rapper digging back through his old record collection. On Revival, Eminem and Rick Rubin, binging on Frank Zappa records, started exaggerating “classic-rock-acid-rap” into cacophonic Americana, boiling the sound palette of a trashy 80s stoner movie to its stickiest residue. “Heat” takes the most stupid sample available – fellow white rapper Mark Wahlberg’s delusionally atonal rock demo from Boogie Nights – and transforms it into a playful rubber-band confection.

Even those with a stomach for Encore‘s toiletbowl playground and Relapse‘s pill-popping lesbian rape might struggle with the lyrics – a tee-hee-misogyny pun-party that channels Pepe Le Pew so strongly he gets a namecheck, as Slim floats on the fishy stink trail coming from his victim’s skirt. Revival is themed around abuse of women, as Eminem finds the connection between his exploitation of his daughter and wife to Donald Trump’s pussy-grabbing hands, and therefore to the racism he abhors. But the album’s messages come out confusing, muddled by Eminem’s wealth, his compulsion to chase after rhymes, and his difficulty adjusting his ambiguous sincerity to a fashion for overtly unproblematic declarations. When Shady trumpets that sexual assault is the only thing he agrees with Donald on, it’s difficult to find a clear satirical point – you might be permitted to wonder if the fear in “Believe” is right, and the dagger of insight with which Slim once stabbed the world in the head has gone blunt. But you might also find some redemption in Eminem’s middle-aged unwillingness to be cool – even in his own discography, never before has bitch-bullying been this unaspirational and gross. And the puns are pretty clever.

CHLORASEPTIC (REMIX)
Eminem feat. 2Chainz, Phresher
Non-album single
Remixed from Revival “Chloraseptic”
YouTube Spotify

Revival‘s original “Chloraseptic” was an underrated battle rhyme cut in which Eminem tripletted over a glittering, steam-powered beat provided by D12’s Denaun Porter that, fitting Eminem’s usual cartoon-pop style, came out more Billie Eilish than Tay Keith. Critics missed the joke and responded with the same derisive laughter they’d had for David Bowie’s drum-and-bass album, saying it sounded like nothing else on the radio (one baffling commentator called Eminem’s tremendously mainstream, industry-veteran music “outsider art”) at the same time as a desperate rip-off of the youth’s music.

The Eminem on “Chloraseptic (Remix)” is a different character entirely. After making up for cutting 2 Chainz from the original “Chloraseptic” by letting him spit, and allowing Phresher (put on hook duty in the original) to actually rap, Eminem builds a summoning circle for Slim with 9/11 and Jack Kevorkian jokes, and other assorted turn-of-the-Millennium-era offensive cracks. His initial speedrap is the glossolalia of a medium being possessed by that old “ghost trapped in a beat”, his voice progressively pitching up in both pitch and rage – then bouncing back to a conversational flow, with occasional spasming cadenzas as the demon thrashes within him. He rhymes ‘Macklemore‘ with ‘smack a whore‘, teases us by chopping up a variation of his iconic “Forgot About Dre” hook (“nowa… days, every flow, every CAAdence – sound the – same -“) into a benign Migos salad, and defends his eccentric beats as coming from an eccentric man: “If I look strange and outta place, it’s ’cause I’m an alien – that’s why I write ’til the page is outta space”.

NOT ALIKE
Eminem feat. Royce da 5’9″
Kamikaze
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Kamikaze is often seen as a reactionary project of an old man whining about music nowadays, but it’s a more nuanced and affectionate album than it’s caricatured as – Slim, consigned for a while to comic relief, now taking his old place as the vent for the spite Eminem feels, even as his sane head knows the kids have it right. Nothing expresses that tension better than the fact that the track on the album where Em seems most fired up by the kids is the one which is the most of an old-man finger-wagging session. “That’s how much we have in common!” Slim says, his voice just on the edge of corpsing like a schoolboy poking you with his pencil, but even his attempts at word dissociation have more in common than it first seems– a kind of Zoomer influencer pontillism of pharmaceutical haze, discount sneakers and unboxing videos, born out of the KFed-iPod moment just after Eminem relaxed his grip.

NICE GUY
Eminem, Jessie Reyez
Kamikaze
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Kamikaze‘s known as a diss track album, with the love songs usually written off by a masculine music crit aesthetic as pop filler. But the three love songs on it, two with singer-songwriter-rapper Jessie Reyez, are allegories for his critical disfavour, and all are terrific. “Nice Guy” is his most audacious – a pop-guest domestic of the kind he was blasted for on Revival, gone septic and harsh. Jessie supersedes previous rent-a-Kims by foregoing Skylar Grey’s Stepfordian woundedness for a screech as affected and abrasive as a mid-20s Shady – her scream of “psy-yai-yiche!!” is no less punishing than “bleed, bitch, bleed!“. She reverses the gender role, rapping about her cars and guns, and bellows for Slim to suck her dick in a masculine voice recalling XXXTentacion, and by extension the anguished, bleached punk boys who displaced their creaking father. Slim’s clicky-clack rhymes are overpowered by a beat that slows progressively as he raps, leaving him teetering uncomfortably on groaner puns, laid bare as the words of a complacent misogynist in love with his own empty wit – his verse starting “I’m an emotional wreck” is possibly my favourite passage of his late career, and the assault threat of the final lyric lands as abruptly as Grady’s bullets pierced his cheating wife. The fact that Eminem, a pop-lyrical-miracle dino in his mid-40s, could make a song this good allows me to forgive him for the time he wasted digging worthless soil out of the walls in the “Love The Way You Lie” mines.

KILLSHOT
Eminem
Non-album single
YouTube Spotify

The most significant record of Eminem’s late career, Eminem’s most acclaimed project since The Eminem Show and the biggest selling diss track of all time, “Killshot” showed Slim finally figuring out how to use social media like it was his old MTV habitat. Inflamed with the fury of someone who isn’t even mad, he casts Machine Gun Kelly as the pitiful Stan checking himself out in the mirror, deploying insults with extra insults buried in them in wordplay cluster bombs. The tinny gothic beat – wildly, a UK Rap beat from Giggs’ discards, built on a piano loop from a $30 Trap sample pack – recalls a worn-out tape of “The Real Slim Shady”, as he excoriates his clone with flows ranging from conversational and Stanny (“I’m really sorry you want me to have a heart attack“) to late-imperial singsong bounce like “Go To Sleep” (“die, motherfucker, like the last motherfucker saying ‘Hailie’ in vain!“) to his caricature trap (“how, yaGUNNA, NAME yourself…“). But he also, finally, discovers a middle-aged Slim that feels like a progression from 2000 rather than a pastiche or rejection, blossoming into an impish, irresponsible wacky uncle embarrassing his nephews in front of their cool friends. “The game’s mine again, and ain’t nothing changed but the locks!“, he brags, in one line 1) declaring himself the greatest rapper alive, 2) bolting Kells out of the house, 3) setting up a Jadakiss pun (The Lox) that swipes at MGK’s boss Diddy and 4) casting MGK as the relic who still thinks it’s about having bleached hair. A masterpiece vocal performance and a career all-timer record. Better than “Nail In The Coffin”? I’d take it over “Lose Yourself”.

DARKNESS
Eminem
Music To Be Murdered By
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As far as Eminem journeyed following his overdose, there was always a sense he only went that far out of his way trying to forge a route back – reenacting his most stoned schtick while sober on Relapse and retreating into a fantasy of his pre-drugs open-mic days on Recovery; imagining himself on The Marshall Mathers LP 2 and Kamikaze as a legendary gunslinger dealing with his obsolesence; and watching his life flash before his eyes on his Revival deathbed. “Darkness”, from 2020’s Music To Be Murdered By, isn’t quite a return to former glory, but it’s the first time, arguably since 2001, that he can see the path.

For the first time since 2010, Eminem’s able to trust himself to make the radio single for the album the cleverest, bloodiest and most controversial bit. It’s built out of old craft – the morphologically ambiguous narrator of “Lose Yourself”, the rapper/psycho enmeshment of “Stan”, and the call-to-action of “Mosh”. But the crucial ingredient missing from his previous attempts to rework his old ideas is irresponsibility, the willingness to bait kids who don’t understand he was kidding. “Darkness”, in addition to capturing the old irreverence with his bathetic, rapperish word choices – “overreact/totally wack” – seems aware that busybodies would expect to find it on the playlist of a mass shooter psyching himself up, and dares them to understand the horror of what that means.

Reviewers taking it at its word as a protest song were irritated by its morbid inconclusion and risible, drunken narrator – doesn’t the old man know how to make a political statement without making it about himself? But like his best old horror stories, it’s able to root unthinkable depravity to mundane emotion. Unlike in “Stan”, where the rapper is dull compared to the radicalised fanboy, “Darkness” never lets the psycho be as compelling as the rapper, binging on depressants and hotel room service while fondling his gun.

Eminem even got flak for things that don’t appear in “Darkness” – reheated charges of misogyny and homophobia, plus accusations of blaming mass shootings on mental illness (specifically rejected in the lyrics, by the way). YouTube were spooked enough to pull the music video from its Trending chart, a shameful echo of the old moral panic. If you’d asked a particularly stygian satirist in the year 2001 to imagine a song by a middle-aged Eminem, they would have come up with something like this. What a pity we live in a world so dark that Eminem had to do it instead.

ALFRED’S THEME
Eminem
Music To Be Murdered By: Side B
YouTube Spotify

We end up back where we begun with “My Name Is” – armed with a gimmick sample of all gimmick samples and the same thumpy disc scratches from 1999, Eminem unleashes a bunch of free-associating gags, makes violent sound effects with his mouth and even does some chikka-chikka noises for old time’s sake. Sure, time has turned Slim Shady’s delivery from bratty and conversational to gutteral and pedantic, his personality from self-loathing to cuddly, and heavy lyrical working pads out his puns and similes until they have less impact than that of the fat bitch who sat down too fast. But forgive him for getting old and the innovations in lyrical hip-hop over the last twenty years, and enjoy getting to hear a great musician, in love with words as a musical device, casually plate-spinning domestic abuse imagery, graphic descriptions of suicide (with cartoon sound effects), COVID jokes, toy misogyny, a dig at Billie Eilish, Slim’s midcentury-gothic “Alfred” incarnation, and dizzying multibar wordplay – a grown-up spending lockdown in his childhood house and realising how small his old bed looks. Other than the pushbutton mutes to get out of the way of tricky punchlines, Em pauses the beat twice – once to allow Slim to wash his hands after brushing his pants, and once to check his notes after unexpectedly coming out as Diddy’s boytoy. It’s not just “My Name Is”, it’s “Rain Man” – an intense showcase of clever-stupid bravura that is only not completely exhausting because of how much fun it is. Listen to “My Name Is” after this and it moves like molasses.