This isn’t #resistance music this is music for Trump’s America. Even when he’s trying to be woke by criticizing Trump, it falls flat, partly because he uses slurs like “retarded” on this record in the same way Trump weaponizes casual hate. Mathers’ style has always been somewhere in the blunted fog of horrorcore, where shock is valued above all, and Mathers dials the cartoonish and dark elements to different levels. The record opens with “The Ringer,” which finds Mathers venting like an adolescent, “I feel like I wanna punch the world in the fuckin’ face right now.” It only takes thirty seconds of this album before he raps, “I’m about to rape the alphabet.” This sort of lazy, edgelord attitude gets old real fast and pervades the album so much that Justin Vernon has disavowed “Fall,” his guest spot with Eminem, because Mathers takes shots at other rappers and throws out “f*ggot” on the track. And while his intentions in this song may be good, it runs counter to the violent, toxic, macho nonsense coursing through the rest of the record. “Stepping Stone” is a track in the middle of the record that feels like an addict taking inventory, reflecting on whom he may have trampled along the way and what happened with D12.
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Pills and booze accelerated the death of Elvis, of course, but Mathers got clean, showing that untimely death isn’t the only endgame of megafame. They both came from poverty and became the great white hopes appropriating a black cultural form. He has the musical skills to mature he's just refusing to let himself act his age.In many ways, he’s the bizarro Elvis. As sheer performance, Eminem's vocals remain a thing of wonder, which is why it's so dispiriting to hear him circling the drain, relying on old tricks instead of expanding his worldview. Its insularity suits the solipsistic worldview of Eminem, and its monochromatic pulse also puts his astonishing verbal facility in sharp relief.
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Apart from "Fall" - a spectral cut co-written by Bon Iver's Justin Vernon that's also home to a homophobic swipe at Tyler, The Creator (a lyric that made Vernon disown the track) - the music is direct, heavy, and claustrophobic.
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Maybe it's because the genesis of the album lies in "Venom," a song Em recorded for the anti-superhero film of the same name, but Kamikaze often feels like an extended exercise in Eminem hitting his marks. Coming after Revival, the 2017 album where he grappled with questions of mortality along with the moral rot of the Trump era, the retreat to spitting insults and reflexive anger is a bit of a disappointment, particularly because Kamikaze isn't quite the jolt it was intended to be. Where the Beasties questioned their past, Eminem finds comfort in it, relying on familiar themes while he celebrates the days that are gone. Eminem was 45 when he released Kamikaze, a record that positively seethes with slurs and is drowning in dick jokes. Inviting such comparisons to the Beastie Boys may not be the wisest move for Marshall Mathers. True heads know that the Beasties originally planned to call Licensed to Ill "Don't Be a Faggot," which the label wisely realized was too antagonistic and homophobic, yet the album was still filled with enough questionable material that the trio spent a good portion of the '90s atoning for their juvenilia - an understandable action from a group whose members were all entering their thirties.
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In case the title Kamikaze didn't provide a clear tell in regards to Eminem's state of mind, the cover art to this surprise 2018 album is an explicit parody of the Beastie Boys' 1986 debut, Licensed to Ill.