Home » Entertainment » Eminem album “Music To Be Murdered By”: Greetings to Alfred Hitchcock

Eminem album “Music To Be Murdered By”: Greetings to Alfred Hitchcock

As in 2018 at Forerunner “Kamikaze” US rapper Eminem also released his eleventh studio album on Friday night without notice. The 47-year-old posted the album cover for “Music To Be Murdered By” on his Twitter account. The cover shows how Eminem holds an ax and a revolver to his head – a reminiscence of a motif with a director Alfred Hitchcock,

Crime master Hitchcock himself released an album with the same title in 1958. At several points on the album, Eminem sampled Hitchcock’s explanations, which the British had provided with his typical black humor. In the end, Hitchcock speaks of a “Danse Macabre” that has been carried out – an idea with which Eminem could clearly identify.

Because the rapper spreads a spectrum of violent fantasies on the album: In “Unaccomodating” the rapper refers to the bombing of Ariana Grande’s concert and lines up with Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. In “Stepdad” he tells of the beatings he suffered from his stepfather as a child and imagines a deadly revenge. And in the first single for the album, “Darkness”, Eminem imagines the thoughts of the mass murderer, who shot 58 people out of a hotel window at a 2017 country music festival in Las Vegas.

In the song as well as in the music video, “Darkness” also refers to numerous other attacks that have shaped the news situation in the USA in recent years – so the song can be read clearly as a statement against the violence in the country. Otherwise Eminem refrains from clear political statements. It is much more about your own positioning on the rap field.

In the intro to the album, Eminem immediately refers to critics who accuse him of his best days. He, who released his first album in 1996, complains that long-lasting careers should also be valued in hip-hop. And also and anyway: “Bitch, if I was as half as good as I was / I’m still twice as good as you’ll ever be”.

Dr. has a strong influence on the sound of the album Dre taken, Eminem’s foster father at the beginning, who operates here as an executive producer and was also involved in several tracks directly in the studio. There are matching tracks in which Eminem conjures up earlier times: “I Will” hosts the rappers of the group Slaughterhouse, which was once supported by Eminem. And with “Yah Yah” there is a direct, fan-like homage to the hip-hop sound of the early 1990s, without which – he raps himself – Eminem would not have become who he was. Ol ‘Dirty Bastard is cited, Q-Tip by A Tribe Called Quest is a guest at the chorus.

But “Music To Be Murdered By” cannot be qualified as a sentimental album – it’s too playful for that, the songs are too different. “In Too Deep”, a song about an unfortunate relationship, has an eighties pop sound, with guest Anderson .Paak it gets soulful on “Lock It Up”. And for the party song “Those Kinda Nights”, in which the lyrical self has high sex with a bisexual woman, Eminem made an extremely prominent feature guest with Ed Sheeran.

The fact that Eminem has an eye on the latest developments in hip-hop is shown by carefully used trap sounds and autotune gimmicks, but mostly Eminem is very much with himself, with stanzas that increase in top-speed raps, superhero metaphors and texts, in which he also addresses his psychological problems. One of them, “Godzilla”, has a particularly tragic sound, because the chorus (“I’m normal during the day, but at night turn to a monster”) was provided by Juice WRLD – the rapper from Chicago, who died in December at the age of 21.

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