Eminem — Kamikaze ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 09/07/2018
The word that best describes this album to me is “unfortunate”. It’s unfortunate that a musical work primarily meant to bully others exists in the first place, it’s unfortunate that ego was the driving factor behind literally everything heard, and it was unfortunate that strong musical talent was wasted on such an unnecessary, unworthy premise. Typically, lyrical messages don’t play a huge role in my listening experience, at least the for the first few listens. As I’ve said before, lyrical meaning only comes through in a major way to me if it’s either at one of the extremes of quality, or if the rest of the musical substance is obviously out of the way and only a secondary aspect. This album was the latter, and therefore the lyrical content is certainly worth discussing.
The musician in me found a good amount of enjoyment in the passages of incredibly intricate wordplay, rhyme schemes, and varying metric accents depending on specific word stress in the sentence. That aspect was quite spectacular to my ears. Music doesn’t exist only for musicians, though. What this album failed to do was make this talent mean anything truly worthwhile; in fact, the messages paired with this music had a reverse effect in negating whatever was worked towards musically. The rest of my critical ear was simply hearing a man who thinks he’s God; while he’s surely talented, he isn’t God. He may have seemed like it for 5 minutes back in 2013, but for reasons I will point out, that is nowhere near being recaptured here. This self-righteousness simply isn’t fun to witness. Eminem’s need to respond to everyone who talks badly about him, regardless of if he’s right or not, shows a true weakness in character. I believe that anything can be done with subtlety, yet there was no subtlety or tastefulness found here whatsoever. It was something that permeated the album so profusely that it overshadowed the musical medium in quite a negative way, and makes the innocent public easily lose interest.
Back to the talent, though, as that cannot be overlooked. Despite a very immature tone in trying to start fights and push people down, this album still has more worthiness to it than plenty of other works of similar style. I cannot deny that Enimem is one of the most skilled and interesting songwriters to ever live in the rap world. His ability to construct a single line that snowballs into a phrase and an entire verse through pure use of syntax is absolutely prolific, even borderline Shakespearean. Even with these whiny lyrics, I was always left wanting to hear the next moment. Most evident here in the songs “The Ringer”, “Greatest” and “Fall”, these verses are a whirlwind of excitement that give you the true musical weight, focus of the track, and reason to enjoy the experience. Structurally, everything revolves around this ability, and when present, it certainly doesn’t disappoint.
However, another big problem with this album is that the one strength isn’t always present, and it really needed to be if this God-like persona was to actually be convincing. After spitting hot verses and murdering beats through sheer rhythmic intricacy, he throws it straight out the window and follows much less stellar patterns when employing slow tempos due to an attempted change in emotion in songs like “Normal” and “Stepping Stones”, reverts to annoying triplet repetitions in “Not Alike”, and sings a lazy three note chorus motive with no sense of direction or harmonic togetherness in just about every track. If he wanted to show that he was on top of the world, he shouldn’t have stopped momentum in any way, including trying to sound versatile with multiple emotional angles. He should’ve just kept getting faster, running right off the tracks of our expectations, and maybe he could have salvaged something greater.
While one weakness was the melodic inconsistency, another one was the lack of vitality in the background structure. Nothing was able to match or pair with the vocal intensity, too often being a hollow shape of directionless three chord patterns and unsurprising drum machine. No matter what is at the forefront, the background needs to at least sound like it belongs, and hopefully supporting of the general atmosphere. No instrumental part ever felt like it was pushing the envelope or driving a mood home as much as the vocals were, leaving the melodic layer very isolated and failing to capture well rounded listener engagement. Sound quality-wise, nothing was ever overly obnoxious, and as a whole it could keep the rhythmic drive afloat. Beats were appropriate in density and drive, and at times there was good consolation from a driving synth bass, like in the final track “Venom”. Nothing irritating, yet nothing inspiring. The use of harmony especially could have felt more purposeful and engaging, as many of the underlying chords were seemingly plopped on as placeholders rather than something actually involved with the rest of the track.
All of this talk on the musical substance is unfortunately overshadowed by the music’s purpose, which throughout all of history has never been a good sign if one is looking for quality. The main reason behind this album’s existence is based on individual insecurity, and no matter how talented you are, that’s pretty pathetic. Those phone conversation interludes are case and point for me; Paul sounds like he’s thinking straight, and Marshall sound delusional and insane. Explicitly trying to belittle other musicians for 45 minutes is simply not what music is about; not even rap. Now, I honestly can’t say that Eminem is wrong about anything he said; yes, he’s miles better than every other rap artist he dissed, and he should have been shown much more respect in the past. But using the art of music as a weapon for those thoughts of revenge or cultural place is stupid. That’s what the untalented folks do these days, and Eminem stooped to their level. Fighting fire with fire through music on something so childish and inconsequential to the rest of the world is just poor taste. The heavy feeling of this existing for self-assurance and bragging rights seeped right into the music and was responsible for hindering every layer’s composition just enough for me to find it difficult to recommend to anyone. It’s sad, because he’s a strong musician, but he let the outside world completely get in the way.
