Rap God, and the Fading Obligation to Care

Fifty-seven words per second is the number everyone kept citing when Rap God dropped, as though raw syllabic velocity alone could answer whether Eminem still mattered. The Pokémon-bedsheets era is long over—the phase where you’d tape his face to your wall and think you’d found something important—and what replaced it is this relentless self-coronation. Rap God. Rap God. Rap God.

The video is exactly what you’d expect: frantic edits, multiple selves, full commitment to the persona of a man who cannot stop reminding you he’s a genius. It’s not bad. It’s not particularly interesting either. You can watch it and recognize the technical achievement the same way you recognize someone solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded—with genuine respect, and then with the quiet awareness that you feel absolutely nothing.

Maybe he’s earned the right to coast on mythology at this point. Maybe the mythology is all that’s left. I honestly can’t tell which possibility bothers me more.