Marshall Comes Home

The first time I heard Eminem rap I stopped whatever I was doing. That’s a specific kind of attention—not the passive drift of background music but a full-body lock, someone grabbing you by the collar and refusing to let go until the track ends. Rap God, the lead single from the upcoming The Marshall Mathers LP 2, does exactly that for six minutes straight: Marshall Bruce Mathers III dismantling everything that’s called itself rap for the past several years, at a velocity that sounds medically inadvisable.

There’s an argument that Eminem is the single greatest thing the genre ever produced. Not the most important, not the most influential in terms of what came after—but the best at the pure athletic act of it: syllable density, internal rhyme schemes stacked four and five deep, a tonal range that moves from genuine menace to self-aware comedy to something that occasionally resembles grief. Nobody’s ever done the mechanics of it like this.

I’ll stop gushing and let the track do its thing. Will the real Slim Shady please stand up.