Eminem the Over-rated
As a Hip-Hop fan, outside of a select few, I am greeted with a confused curiosity when I deal with friends and “Joe Public” when I tell them of my love for the genre. This curiosity usually begins with a removed silence and then they ask: “Well who do you?” And I usually find myself replying: “You probably wouldn’t have heard of any of them.” This dialogue usually turns into me listing some mainstream names like Biggie, Nas, and Jay-Z, when I am finished their eyes light-up they point and ask me “And what about Eminem?” as if they have tripped me up on my knowledge of hip-hop. I typically answer: “He’s alright.” From this moment on my friends or new strangers become indignant like I have grievously offended them.
I have never called Eminem shit or attacked his skill as one of the smoothest MCs in the business, the problem I have with Eminem is three fold. Firstly the work that people have built their opinion of him on is by two albums released at the turn of the century, neither of which he has surpassed or built upon or even moved away from. Eminem found a system of marketing himself which is annoyingly formulaic: Release a song that insults half the general population of Hollywood (The Real Slim Shady, Without Me, and We Made You) then a controversial or angry song (Guilty Conscience, Stan, Cleanin’ Out my Closet) and finally his most irritating song is released on top of these songs “the uplifting/I made it” song (Sing for the Moment, Just Lose Yourself). While this all mainstream marketing and understandable ploy to make himself a millionaire for me, it makes me lose a lot of respect for him as an artist.
Secondly Eminem’s early stuff has dated terribly due to their endless pop-culture references. Here’s a list of the most dated lyrics from Eminem’s backlist:
1. My brain’s dead weight, I’m trying to get my head straight
But I can’t figure out which Spice Girl I want to impregnate (Ummmm..)2. “Oh, now he’s raping his own mother, abusing a whore,
snorting coke, and we gave him the Rolling Stone cover?”3. My morals went thhbbpp when the president got oral
Sex in his Oval Office on top of his desk
Off of his own employee4. White America, Erica loves my shit,
I go to TRL, look how many hugs I get.5. Give me my ventolin inhaler and 2 Xenadrine
And I’ll invite Sarah Palin out to dinner then
Nail her, ‘Baby say hello to my little friend’
Now if a great can be judged by how he ages, so in 50 years do you think Eminem will be held in the same regard as The Beatles are now? I think not, there id a large proportion of his lyrics that will be tossed aside as noughties clichés and as nothing more as pop notes.
Finally Eminem’s collaborations can be thrown out the window as it is well known that people such as Royce Da 5’9 has written them as ghost-writers. Even though this is a common practice in the rap game, and the songs certainly shouldn’t be brushed aside as being anything short of great (Dre’s The Chronic anyone?). This however does diminish Eminem’s reputation as a great, and it certainly puts a question mark to those who champion him as the greatest rapper alive.
