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. 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.
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