Kamikaze

Revival, Eminem’s ninth album, came out in December 2017 with pop hooks and guests such as Beyoncé and Ed Sheeran, and it was widely panned. He did not let it go. On 31 August 2018, eight and a half months later, Kamikaze appeared on streaming services with no announcement beyond a tweet saying he had tried not to overthink it. That September he told Sway Calloway that the reaction had gone past constructive criticism, that people had written Revival off as soon as its tracklist appeared, and that releasing the new one without warning was “the best thing to do”.

Dr. Dre and Eminem are the executive producers, and Eminem has a production credit on 11 of the 13 tracks. The outside producers include Mike Will Made It, Boi-1da, Tay Keith, Ronny J, S1 and Illa da Producer. There are only three guests, Royce da 5′9″, Joyner Lucas and Jessie Reyez, and Eminem told Sway that Dre had a couple of songs cut, one of them because it went too far. Two skits set up the premise: his manager, Paul Rosenberg, leaves a message doubting the plan to answer every critic, and Eminem calls back to say he is going after an online commenter. The cover redraws the jet from the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill, with “FU-2” painted on its side.

The opener, “The Ringer”, lays out the targets: critics, a roll call of younger rappers and Donald Trump, plus a line about the Secret Service questioning him over his lyrics on the president. “Lucky You”, with Joyner Lucas, is the track the Guardian and PopMatters singled out, the Guardian for an Eminem verse that keeps gathering speed. On “Not Alike”, Royce da 5′9″ joins him over a Tay Keith beat that gives way halfway to one by Ronny J, while Eminem mimics the Migos flow and goes after Machine Gun Kelly. Kelly answered within days with “Rap Devil”, with Ronny J again among the producers. Eminem’s reply, “Killshot”, came out on 14 September as a separate single and is not on the album.

Mike Will Made It produced “Fall”, which turns on the people who disliked Revival and carries the album’s most criticised line, an anti-gay slur aimed at Tyler, the Creator. Justin Vernon of Bon Iver sings on the chorus without a billing. On the day of release he wrote that he had not been in the studio, that his part came from a session with Mike Will and BJ Burton, and that he disliked the message and had asked for the track to be changed, without success. Two weeks later Eminem told Sway the word might have gone too far: in trying to hurt Tyler, “I was hurting a lot of other people by saying it”. “Stepping Stone” looks back at the collapse of D12 after Proof’s death in 2006, Jessie Reyez sings on the relationship songs “Nice Guy” and “Good Guy”, and the closer, “Venom”, was written for Sony’s Venom film.

Punknews heard one of his most technically accomplished records, PopMatters a partial return to form and Consequence his best album since 2010. The Guardian and NME gave it three stars: the Guardian praised the speed and the wordplay, NME found flashes of his old greatness, and both heard a record mostly about the reception of Revival. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Kearse found it “joyless”, Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan called his career “an exhausting feedback loop” and faulted the homophobia and misogyny, and AllMusic found him able to grow up and unwilling to. Kamikaze still opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 434,000 units, his ninth chart-topper. Three weeks after the release, Eminem bought a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter that quoted negative reviews, the magazine’s own included, with those numbers at the bottom.

Most reviews granted him the technique. The trouble is what it is put to. Most of the record is aimed at someone who doubted him, and even “Stepping Stone”, the one song that looks inward, makes room for his fear that the audience has moved on to younger rappers. It is grim going: the anger never lifts, and when it stops for a joke, as on “Normal”, the joke is a man beating his partner. By 2018, what Eminem wanted to say came down to one claim, that the people who disliked his last record were mistaken, and that is not enough to keep anyone listening. On that evidence, the strongest argument for him stepping back from the microphone is Kamikaze itself. The ad sums it up in one page: other people’s bad reviews, a sales figure and an insult where a signature would go.