Shady/Aftermath/Interscope Another surprise album drop finds the rapper on stylish form, even as he scatters scorn wide – at young rappers, #MeToo sensibilities – and identifies with deadly outsiders
The last time we encountered Marshall Mathers III – on 2018’s Kamikaze, an album that arrived, like its successor, entirely without warning – he seemed to be in the process of repositioning himself. Hip-hop’s former enfant terrible, a man who made a career out of saying things that even his most nihilistic peers would consider beyond the pale, had reinvented himself as rap’s grumpy dad, baffled and horrified at what the genre had become. He spent most of Kamikaze carrying on like rap’s answer to Bagpuss curmudgeon-in-chief Professor Yaffle, forever rolling his eyes and tutting and telling the mice on the mouse organ that they were doing it all wrong and their face tattoos looked stupid. Listening to a man in his late 40s complaining about the youngsters’ taste in
music is seldom terribly edifying, but he gave it his best shot, deploying all the technical skill he once used to make saying the worst things imaginable sound like the most exciting thing in the world on rubbishing Lil Pump and Charlamagne Tha God.