Marshall Mathers Takes the Elevator Down

The video for The Monster is basically a tour of Eminem’s head, which has always looked both overfurnished and structurally unsound. He descends through it in an elevator, past the wreckage and the noise—the tabloid years, the feuds, the grief, the addiction—while Rihanna’s hook loops overhead like something you hear through a wall at three in the morning.

The collaboration makes a kind of sense the press release didn’t need to explain. Both of them had spent significant parts of their careers being the subject of conversations they hadn’t asked for. The song is Eminem processing the monster that fame builds in your skull—the crowd that never turns the lights off, the version of yourself that starts making its own decisions. Rihanna had lived a version of that story too, publicly and painfully, and her presence in the track gives it a weight that a different hook singer simply wouldn’t have.

It’s not the best song on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, but it’s the one that stays with you after the album stops. The elevator keeps going down. There’s always another floor.