Eminem’s Revival and Judging the Modern Rap Album, Part I
The clock struck midnight and no one stirred in my suburban home. No one? No. My eyes were now wide awake. My Christmas had finally arrived. Eminem's new album was now available on all streaming services. I looked for any friend who was nice enough to lend me their Spotify account so that I could stream the entire album. Lucky me, someone was nice enough to send me their account, at the condition that I no longer called them in a panic at two in the morning.
And it was then that my ears did just like Matthew Mitchell. They peaked.
I listened to the entire album in a single shot, very much trying to understand and capture as much of the experience as I could. I fell asleep soon after that. But morning came and I listened to the entire album all over again, this time critical of what I was listening to. I attempted to analyze every piece of wordplay as I continued to envelop myself musically and not trying to fall into Eminem's flow. It wasn't easy.
That being done, my eyes darted onto the internet and my excitement dwindled. The population was split: while some loved or even just liked the project, the loudest ones were those who lambasted the album without remorse. Mikael Wood, a pop music critic for The Los Angeles Times said:
"...It's not just the corny jokes and goofy puns, either, although those are plenty bad"
A reviewer from the 405 named Chris McMullen would continue by saying that
"None of these songs feel meant to appear next to each other in a collection [...] Revival is so uninspired and lost that picking it apart is a hopeless affair"
And let us not forget Twitter users and their own personal opinions.
As an Eminem fan since Recovery, which is a good album even when you compare it to the other projects made in his almost twenty year long career (that can be discussed at a later date), I was confused by the hate that the album was receiving. I started to doubt my own feelings, claiming my youth as the reason, but I snapped out of it when I realized that my favorite project by the Detroit rapper was the Marshall Mathers LP. So was I wrong? Had Eminem's Revival been that bad?
No. It's not as bad as people think. So stop running to your life rafts just yet because I've got some things to say.
Firstly, all of the students of the game called rap know the 1-to-10 rule: for every one great piece of wordplay, there are ten questionable ones. This has given us such classically bad bars such as:
"Young, black, and famous, with money hanging out the anus" from Mase on Can't Nobody Hold Me Down (Play, this was for you)
"I'll break it down for you now, baby it's simple If you be a nympho, I'll be a nympho." from 50 Cent on Candy Shop
"Thirty-eight revolve like the sun round the Earth." off of Jay Z's It's Hot
Just to finish my point, go online and type "Bad bars by Big Sean". You will see a sea of hatred for him and his punchlines. Eminem's worst bars on Revival are nowhere near as bad as what I've just showed you, so maybe let us lay off of Slim Shady's case for that.
Secondly, Marshall Mathers is one of the most calculating MC's in the history of Hip-Hop. Even when something seems to be random, it was already meticulously calculated. This can be seen in his BET Hip-Hop Award Cypher that drop not long before an album release (i.e: The Storm). So this album being not well put together is a stretch. It doesn't have the storytelling prowess of a concept album such as 4 Your Eyez Only by J. Cole or have the tightness of Lupe Fiasco's The Cool, but it does revolve and touch perfectly with the theme of, you guessed it, revival. May it be through the revival of the relationships he's destroyed (Bad Husband, Castle, Arose), of his past characters (Slim Shady on Heat, Offended) or even America (Untouchable, Like Home), Eminem makes sure that every song has this theme.
Finally, is Eminem uninspired? He's got nothing to lose and won everything he's ever wanted. Listen to Offended and let's have the discussion again. As a 45 year old man, him and Jay Z are trying to find their place in a rap game that doesn't respect lyrics as much, as our generation prefers a half decent drum beat and the repetition of the same twenty words. If proving he's still one of the best to ever do it isn't enough for you, maybe he isn't the problem.
I've heard the complaints of the Stan's who want the "old-Eminem" back, calling themselves real fans in the process. I say to you all that you are all fickle, because if he brought back Slim Shady of the early aughts, you'd say that this was already done and that he needs to grow up. Interesting fact: he's done the news-making-parent-shocking-woman-hating thing and I think he's OK with the current President of the United States doing that on a regular basis. He's grown up and is evolving as both an artist and as a man. I'm glad that he's sober and that he isn't being held back by neither the drugs nor the "fans" who would want him to revert him to his twenties so that they can fill their nostalgia craving. He's understood the first of three rules that I establish for analyzing a rap album in the modern era: Do not base yourself on the artists previous works - go in with a clean slate and judge it for what it is.