:MUSIC
Dilbir Atwal gets lyrical on the news from his favourite artist
The Marshall Mathers LP2
During a baseball game nearly
two years ago now, Eminem
announced his huge return usin
the subtle method of a baseball
cap! The name wasn’t obvious,
and as far as hints went, apart
from a nicely stitched ‘2013’, we
saw nothing.
Eminem made 4 total
appearances in 2012, from the very average ‘Numb’ a song by
Rihanna which really didn’t need his appearance on (it was, in all
honesty, a song made just so that Interscope didn’t have to pay
Rihanna as much for her spot on The Monster) to actually looking
like he was having fun on a record, in ‘C’mon Let Me Ride’. While
that song was awful lyrically, his flow seemed better than the near
screaming ‘Recovery’ and there were small signs he was coming
out of his angry state and into a sober, new Slim Shady.
Eminem marked his return to the music world with ‘Berzerk’ a
song that strikes as a slightly worse ‘Without Me’, but for any diehard fan it was a good first single when compared to ‘We Made
You’, and ‘Not Afraid’, with the first being easily his worst single,
from what was a heavily underrated album, his 2009 return album
cleverly titled ‘Relapse’.
This was the first
moment in over a
decade that we
thought we were going
to meet Slim Shady.
Eminem had huge
boots to fill; he was trying to respond to his second album, an
album that has easily marked its place as a top 5 hip hop album of
all time. It was widely believed around the release of ‘Survival’
that he ‘fell off’. He couldn’t make songs with the same punch as
‘Til I Collapse’, and while ‘Berzerk’ had a great feel, it was pulled
down by the fact that it couldn’t stand up to the wit or originality
of ‘The Real Slim Shady’. He had some extremely high
expectations, and as of then, it wasn’t cutting it.
The he released ‘Rap God’, a 6 minute slaughterhouse of words
that really put every other song he has made in the past half a
decade, technically, to shame. People were astonished at the
rhymes he could somehow put together, and that was before he
went into ‘supersonic’ speed - which in itself is another nod to old
school hip hop JJ Fad. This song just put Eminem back on top of
the world, he got worldwide fame and as of then, all he had to do
was release one more hit of a single and the hype was complete,
people were anticipating the angry, mom hating, misogynistic and
apparent homophobe that Slim Shady was.
If he hadn’t been the same world beater that he was when he
released Stan, he became it with his release of The Monster, a
poppy dance track with Rihanna that had some serious subliminal
messages laced through it, but it still somehow followed the
formula that we need for a hit: three strong verses, a mega-star
on the chorus in Rihanna, and a beat that wouldn’t sound out of
place in a Rick Ross or Nicki Minaj track.
After all this hype, he finally released the album, The Marshall
Mathers LP2. It made shockwaves in the music industry because
of the name, and it clearly did not disappoint. The music was high
class, and the first song titled ‘Bad Guy’ is easily his best “sober
era” track. It was a sequel to Stan, but since Stan died with his
pregnant girlfriend after driving off a bridge, we had Matthew
Mitchell instead. The song cleverly throws back to his 1999 days,
with Matthew Mitchell (or as he puts it, M+M) tracking down
Eminem and murdering him in an amazingly dark and at the same
time seriously comedic fashion. If that isn’t enough to make you
realize how good Eminem was, the second half of the song
changes beat, then Eminem figuratively flips out. His flow, anger
and lyrics all merge together to bring together a beautiful
nightmare of a track, the anger of Eminem as he realises he is
losing time, the pain he gets as he admits his failures, his
admission that his time is over: all make this one song easily the
headline of the album. In my eyes, it could have made it onto The
Eminem Show, The Marshall Mathers LP or The Slim Shady LP, the
three albums that made Eminem.
As the album carries on, we see Eminem’s life and his comedic
appeal are still as potent as ever, with songs like ‘Legacy’ showing
off his dark and haunted background. We see his hatred for
women come back, stronger than ever in the track ‘So Much
Better’, where he goes into detail about his views on every
woman alive, saying “my life would be so much better, if you’d
just drop dead!”
Even then, if you don’t like his comedy or his hindsight tracks, he
has the most important track of possibly his whole career,
‘Headlights’. It is a dark, sad and emotionally honest track where
he apologises to his mother; nobody saw the track coming, not
even his mom. It shows that even if Slim Shady returns, Eminem
and Marshall Mathers have 3 daughters and they need to see
their grandmother. This is a timeless track that I’m sure will go
down in history.
After all this, after all the high quality tracks from the selfproclaimed white trashy ‘So Far’ to the joke that is ‘Love Game’,
featuring world class youngster Kendrick Lamar, Eminem has
made his return. If he leaves or stays for another album, we can
be sure it will be great. He seems to have finally got rid of the
demons that plagued him throughout ‘Recovery’, and for the first
time since ‘Relapse’, he finally stopped apologising for his previous
albums!
Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll release ‘The Eminem
Show 2’ or ‘The Slim Shady LP2’, but whatever he does he has
some major expectations to live up to!