It was a bold gesture for a rapper with a lot of fans who seem to only dabble in rap when he’s selling them something new. December’s Revival was a risky gesture, a political line in the sand where the rapper made a public show of inviting the Trump supporters in his fan base to scram. In the twilight of the world-beating trilogy of Slim Shady LP, Marshall Mathers LP, and The Eminem Show, are two kinds of Eminem albums: the ones where he resists the formulaic insolence of his albums and tries something different, and the ones where he realizes the changes didn’t stick and returns to form. What he will eventually do is pick enough one-sided fights with enough young and unbothered stars to sour the case for himself, and from the title to the lyrics, his new album Kamikaze makes this its express purpose. You can’t unring a bell Eminem won’t un-“mumble” rap. He’s painting himself into a corner not because there isn’t ample space for lurid, technical raps in the garden of hip-hop microgenres presently coexisting in the culture ( there’s plenty!), or because he’s closer to 50 than to 40 now (consider the 47-year-old Jay-Z’s beloved 4:44, or the enduring appreciation of Diddy, Will Smith, and Missy Elliott), but because he has planted himself resolutely on the side of an age gap that always loses. As southern rap and SoundCloud rap get more established on the charts, Eminem gets more pedantic about why he believes those artists are doing their jobs wrong.
Rap fans who came of age during the crunk, snap, and trap eras that flourished during the Detroit MC’s five-year sobriety journey and musical hiatus post- Encore don’t subscribe to the idea that a rapper needs to be the sharpest rhymer to sell a song. Nearly 20 years after the Slim Shady LP, Eminem has come to embody the very Establishment he once worked to overthrow. The ascendant rap god, born Marshall Mathers, was destroying and rebuilding pop as we knew it. The records took like wildfires, an ecosystem’s natural act of destructive course correction. His craft was a fruit of a decade of practice, but on television, he never seemed very rehearsed. He made the machinery of celebrity look slipshod and silly. If you were a smart-ass, Em was your man on the inside. In the beginning, Eminem was defined as much by the irony of a scrawny midwestern latchkey kid’s unprecedented success in rap as he was by the row it created to have a razor-sharp battle rapper holding court with the pop elder statesmen and well-groomed, media-trained former child stars dominating the charts at the end of the century. Squeaky clean, cookie-cutter pop acts personified the homogenization of the American teenager, the logic went. For a time, as the cool-but-not- that-cool ’90s bucked to the culturally and politically conservative strictures of the Bush administration, the outlook felt vital. To a certain brand of existential crank, Eminem albums were once affirmations that it was okay to be angry and defiant.
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