Eminem’s long-awaited ninth studio album was released on Friday, and boy has it been severely criticised.

Seemingly turning on his middle class white boy fans (who clearly overlap with Trump supporters), Eminem continued with the theme of his four-minute “freestyle” we heard back in October at the BET Hip Hop Awards, reports the LA Times:

And here, indeed, he doubles down on his critique of Trump in “Like Home,” describing him as a chump who parrots Fox News and who won’t denounce members of the KKK because he plays golf with them.

There’s more politically minded stuff, such as “Untouchable,” a dense, word-jammed track Eminem delivers in alternating guises: a white police officer and a black man the cop has pulled over.

But Eminem also used the album to apologise to his ex wife and daughter. I mean, finally.

However, critics were not impressed. These gems from the rest of that LA Times piece:

On the surface, this proudly grown-up vibe conjures (or perhaps was meant to conjure) thoughts of Jay-Z’s “4:44,” another album by a fortysomething MC struggling to figure how out he fits into hip-hop in middle age.

But where Jay-Z raps with style and elegance to spare, Eminem hits clunker after clunker on “Revival,” his clumsiest record to date. It’s not just the corny jokes and goofy puns, either, although those are plenty bad: “This type of pickle we’re in is hard to deal,” he says in “Like Home,” pronouncing “deal” — yep, it’s true — like “dill.”

In “Walk on Water,” a hymn-like tune with vocals from Beyoncé, Eminem airs his anxieties about being past his prime but never digs deep to explore why he’s still compelled to compete.

And how is it that, on an album professing to be woke, he didn’t think better of repeatedly using the phrase “me too” in a sleazy outlier of a song, “Heat,” about pursuing a woman more or less against her will?

And these beauts from The Guardian:

Early fans have long since given up on Eminem, which is probably of zero importance to him, but if you played this album to them they’d be baffled.

We start off slow, he gets angrier, he explodes in incandescent rage, an anthemic vocal hook comes in. Repeat, for 77 minutes.

The album frequently sags, as any 19-track album is wont to do, though two introspective moments at the end save the concept somewhat. He writes letters to his daughter on Castle, then atones for his life’s mistakes on Arose as he imagines his deathbed – and then delivers a rewritten take on Castle’s closing verse, seizing life anew.

But this maturity comes too late – we’re already past the point where you can no longer take Eminem seriously. Revival is littered with tracks where he apologises to various people for his behaviour, before he flips into a track about killing someone and does a knob joke.

Is he for real when he raps on Castle: “I’ll put out this last album, then I’m done with it / One hundred percent finished, fed up with it / I’m hanging it up, fuck it”? Much of this album makes you hope he is.

Oh dear, but there is a little hope!

Rolling Stone, which is in its last stages of being auctioned off by founder Jann Wenner, had this to say:

Another politically motivated Rust Belt blond, Paul Newman, once said “a man with no enemies is a man with no character.” And few musicians could boast more of either than Eminem, the poison-tongued, potty-mouthed scourge of Lynn Cheney, boy bands, clown posses and eventually – on a string of self-auditing post-rehab albums – himself.

The majority of Revival is, well, a revival: a collection of labyrinthine raps without much of a narrative arc. Lyrically, Eminem mainly falls back on old tricks. But what tricks they are: part Big Daddy Kane, part Eddie Van Halen, part Marquis de Sade.

Can that be the last we hear of Eminem as he attempts to figure out where he fits in the world of rap as an ageing white male?

Many thanks.

[source:latimes&theguardian&therollingstone]