This weekend, Eminem dropped his latest surprise release — an 11-minute freestyle rap that covers a long list of topics ranging from terrorism, societal attitudes and even Justin Bieber. He has interspersed the lyrics with a rather brilliant wordplay, sometimes juvenile and often times as direct insults.
Just like a lot of the tracks on his hit Kamikaze album, there is a lot to take in and this one is an epic 11 minutes long. According to a report by Variety, there are several references in the song, but a lot of his song lyrics, and intentionally so, are laced with indirect jabs at people, celebrities, and society on the whole.
Shot at Detroit's St. Andrews Hall, the video follows a disclaimer from Em. The setting is quite nostalgic for his longtime fans, as it is the place where many of his early rap battles believed to have taken place.
"I've always looked at battle rap as competition or war, and the main objective is to destroy, completely f****ng obliterate your opponent by saying anything and everything, whatever the f*** you can, to get a reaction from the crowd. So nothing's off limits..." he says before the video starts.
The first section of the video, called "Kick Off" starts relatively calm, considering what's to follow: "Positive clean thoughts intervene, But they're all either altered and mean, Assault and demean, tossed and they're being lost in the scheme, Squashed in-between a brainwashing machine, Like an Islamic regime, a jihadist extreme radical, Suicide bomber that's seeing, Ariana Grande sing her last song of the evening, And as the audience from the damn concert is leaving, Detonates the device strapped to his abdominal region, I'm not gonna finish that, for obvious reasons..."
Before going into a harder verse that seems to delve into a fever-dream of drugged raping, women chained and too scared to leave him. Whether it was done for shock value, or just to see how far he could take violence, sex, and brutality, or if it is a satirical take on how he sees society today, is up to the listener to decide.
It gets darker as the song goes on, and he once again seems to border homophobia. On using such language in his music, in a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone, he defended himself saying: "I don't know how to say this without saying it how I've said it a million times. But that word, those kinds of words, when I came up battle-rapping' or whatever, I never really equated those words," he said at the time.
"It was more like calling someone a bitch or a punk or asshole."
He signs off the video with a simple, "Oh, and I'm just playin' ladies, you know I love you."
