But the cringe comes hard when you hear Eminem tune his voice to a goofy shriek so he can ridicule Moby or launch sustained, unnecessary attacks on artists such as Britney Spears and Lauryn Hill.
Sometimes “Get it on, bang a gong, get it on” is all you need. Music doesn’t always have to be about something, of course. Partially powered by the success of Stan, her first album No Angel sold 21 million copies, about 62 per cent of which, I imagine, are now buried in landfill.) (Actually, if there’s one artist who has a body of work that has aged worse than Eminem’s, it’s Dido. Killer cuts: Eminem seems forever trapped in his own badly dated schlock-horror movie. Which, of course, it was, having been cut and pasted from Dido’s Thank You. Not helping him is the chorus, which is so irrelevant to the narrative that it sounded like it was beamed in from a completely different song. There are some impactful insights into self-harm, but the central plot is so overblown, so ham-fisted, that whatever message Em might have been trying to convey gets lost in the crush. And then there’s Stan, supposedly his insight into obsessive fans. His anti-Bush tracks barely landed a glove on the ex-US president. When Eminem tried to do deep-thinking, the results were mixed. Anna B Savage: ‘I lost all my self-confidence.Other Voices: From small beginnings to a must-play gig for musicians.The Music Quiz: Who will play Jerry Garcia in a Martin Scorsese movie?.He made sex jokes about celebrities and used his gift for turning a phrase to paint violent imagery, penning, for example, narrative-driven songs about killing his wife Kimberly Scott complete with sound effects. Photograph: Frank Micelotta/ImageDirectĮminem’s music plays like a schlocky horror movie, mixed with documents that spilled out of a family court, and extracts from a bratty teenager’s diary. Keeping it real: Eminem and his Slim Shady lookalikes rehearse for the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards in New York. But let’s be real: the emcee didn’t ascend the highest peaks of planet pop solely because of his rap skills. It’s a brawny, gripping piece of slam poetry. Analysing the way he puts clusters of syllables together is akin to glancing under the bonnet of the starship Enterprise.Īnd take a look at his recently released live a capella performance,which rinses Trump from every angle. His technical proficiency on the mic is, at times, truly stunning. That’s not to suggest Eminem – whose new album, Revival, is expected to be released this weekend, his first since 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 – never had any talent. Put it this way: Eminem’s vicious beef with Ja Rule might have smashed the Murder Inc Records juggernaut 14 years ago, but I know whose singles I still hear go off in the club. Even his biggest hits rarely seem to get aired in public these days.
Sonic evidence of his influence on the current generation of artists is extremely limited.
That doesn’t mean Eminem’s music hasn’t aged as badly as Donald Trump’s 2013 tweets. I’m sure there are people who kept their Anger Management tour T-shirt and still bump My Name Is weekly. Instead, his most dominant era – roughly 1999 to 2002 – has fossilised, with little lasting appeal or relevance. But you won’t feel the reverberations from the impact today. His shtick was built on shock value and kids were drawn in like Icarus to the sunĮm (Slim Shady to some of those who absorbed his alter-ego first) didn’t leave a footprint in the pop landscape – it was more like a meteor crater.
EMINEM 2015 LIVE MOVIE
The narrative of the white rapper who’d come up in the harsh arena of Detroit seduced the public so much that they made a semi-factual movie about it, 8 Mile, with the emcee himself in the lead role. His popularity was somewhere in the region of finding money you didn’t know you’d lost. It’s damn near impossible to describe the cultural currency Eminem had back then. At the turn of the century, Marshall Mathers was absolutely everywhere. But it also worked a microcosm for the wider pop climate. It was a clever performance, ribbing on the wacky single’s central theme: that when it came to the Detroit rapper, accept no imitators. Beginning his performance of The Real Slim Shady outside New York’s Radio City Music Hall, Em and his squad of lookalikes entered the arena and made a beeline for the stage like white blood cells rushing to a wound. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Eminem commanded an army of bleach-blonde soldiers.
0 kommentar(er)
