Isabel Cole: Oh, fuck you: for being tacky enough to open a limp-pulsing track called “Darkness” with a phrase that’s been memed into meaninglessness and then marrying it to our particular American plague so that I feel irrationally bad about dismissing it with a flippant joke. When will his reign of terror end? When no one cares. That’s the worst part: No one outside of Eminem’s stanbase will be swayed by this, and very few within it will either. You can’t condemn gun violence at festivals and condemn festival-goers concerned about gun violence. And regardless of the subject matter, you cannot punctuate a belabored alcohol-as-gun metaphor by muttering “Double entendre” like a sadistic, self-satisfied SparkNotes. You can’t make a song about real life survivors and reference Saturday Night Fever. But what’s really frustrating is Eminem’s refusal to drop his gimmicks when it matters. I guess I’d rather hear him use his platform to wrestle with knotty issues than peddle stale punchlines about killing Honey Boo Boo or whatever.
Julian Axelrod: In theory, I’m not mad that Eminem is still trying to pivot to Social Commentary Anthems. But it’s a shame that something meant to be poignant from the guy comes out as weak shock humor. To write any more on this feels like losing a game that Eminem will win - a point he makes annoyingly often and remains true. Kylo Nocom: Em forces the audience to endure his balladry, only to reveal that they were, like, empathizing with the Las Vegas shooter the entire time! The set-up is… intriguing (to call it “well-executed” feels like making another lame pun he’d squeeze in) yet it still sucks in many ways that don’t even require public moral outcry: the sound effects spoil the twist way too early, his singing burps out remnants of emo rap, the beat samples fucking Simon & Garfunkel, and I still hate the sound of this guy’s voice doing anything. A fantastically bad idea that I will be thinking about for at least as long as the song’s excruciating runtime. The gunshots and screams are ghoulish enough without considering how the rest of his catalog uses them as cartoon gags. This is a megalomaniacal idea presented bashfully - I should be grateful he isn’t trying to do voice acting - and framed thoughtlessly.
(Has any song ever flattered Genius annotators more?) But the only ones that feel legit involve substance abuse. What do you do with something detailed so painstakingly and painfully? The parallels Em draws are clever enough linguistically. Turns out it’s a creative-writing assignment designed to keep the grader’s pen dangling forever. But I also knew he and Royce were making their own “Six Feet Deep,” and I was way off. With critics paying renewed attention to the complexity of his flow, it’s also worth stressing that ability tethered to self-pity deserves scorn.īrad Shoup: I swear to Christ I saw the title and knew he was gonna interpolate Simon and Garfunkel. Pharrell WilliamsĪlfred Soto: Good lord - an Eminem single called “Darkness,” surprised yet? The Simon and Garfunkel interpolation and sound effects come off as cheap contexualizing for the sake of a bait-and-switch in which Em unmasks himself as Stephen Paddock. Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment.Email (song suggestions/writer enquiries).