![]() ![]() And no one loves a homophone like Eminem, making for a woeful number of double entendres on this album. His verses run to unusual lengths, and lack the familiar buildup and release of tension that ordinarily shape pop. He’s still prone to using extreme voices to get his feelings across, and he puts rhyme scheme above all else, interrupting thoughts, lines and even words in the process.īut what has long felt like extreme facility with language is beginning to feel like an uncontrolled fire hose. ![]() This is a foundational Eminem struggle: how he sounds often steers what he says. Or maybe he just liked the way that rhyme sounded more than he disliked what it implied. But his giggling promise on “Heat” to “Grab you by the (meow!), hope it’s not a problem, in fact/About the only thing I agree on with Donald is that” suggests the two men may not be as far apart as he’d like to think. The anti-Trump sentiment continues here on the well-intentioned and outlandishly corny “Like Home,” in which Alicia Keys sings a toothlessly uplifting chorus while Eminem likens the president to Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan. He’s so beholden to his own aesthetic, and so uninterested in how the rest of hip-hop actually sounds (apart from the lo-fi “Chloraseptic”), that his music verges on outsider art. Consuming it in one sitting is triathlon-level exhausting. “Revival” is probably the best of his recent albums, but like much of his post-peak output, it is a mix of the entrancing and the mystifying, full of impressive rapping that’s also disorienting. ![]() ![]() Apart from some scathing commentary about President Trump, he is mostly interested in extending old narratives here - about his troubled relationships with his ex-wife and daughter, about imagining gruesome scenarios of sex and violence, about his own struggles to be something more than a wastoid. But the Eminem of “Revival” is only slightly attuned to the current moment. In this climate, Eminem - always a flashpoint, often a pariah - feels familiar. Four years after his last album, Eminem, 45, has returned at a time when the anger of white men is at the center of the country’s political discourse, and when, in response, efforts to prioritize decency and justice are louder than they have been in decades. The song is both excellent and reprehensible, a reminder of how sui generis Eminem felt at the beginning of his career, and how poorly he has aged. She’s unaware in no underwear, she’s completely bare Turns around and screams, I remember distinctly I said, “I’m here to do sink repairs.” Chop her up, put her body parts In front of Steven Avery’s trailer and leave ’em there Over a sinuous, unsteady beat, he raps with alacrity and, one presumes, eyes bugged: It’s one of the murder fantasias that used to be his stock in trade. There is a vivid, unnerving glimpse of the polarizing dynamo Eminem once was on “Framed,” one of the best songs on his new album, “Revival.” ![]()
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