My songs can make you cry
take you by surprise
at the same time, can make you dry your eyes
with the same rhyme
see what you’re seein’ is a genius at work
which to me isn’t work, so it’s easy to misinterpret it at first
‘cause when I speak, it’s tongue-in-cheek
I’d yank my fuckin’ teeth before I’d ever bite my tongue
I’d slice my gums
get struck by fuckin’ lightning twice at once
and die and come back as Vanilla Ice’s son
and walk around the rest of my life spit on, and kicked and hit with shit everytime I sung
like R. Kelly as soon as “Bump and Grind” comes on.
He ends the song with I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t let Hailie listen to me neither.
I like the self-awareness in his songs. I don’t want to listen to some nimrod bragging about how many cars he has and the size of his wheels and the drinks he likes, especially after I just spent eighteen bucks on his CD.
It’s all about what he’s doing with sounds and rhyme, as karomon pointed out. A lot of rappers are using poetic constructs that you don’t normally see in song lyrics - slant rhymes, enjambement - which I find exciting. Most of the people I know who appreciate this are former English major nerds or poets themselves. Which leads to the amusing scenario of me - mid-thirties, plump, greying at the temples, extremely Caucasian - blasting down the highway with the radio in my SUV* set to the local hip-hop station. I’m really skewing the demographic.
*It’s a very small SUV (a Honda CRV, in fact)… I just note it as part and parcel of the stereotype to which I seem to belong.
A lot of people mention The Way I Am as proof of Eminem’s skill (as seen here), but I’m not really fan. It comes off as too self-pitying and I think that whoever produced it came up with the echo on the words to hide the fact that he’s got no flow whatsoever in that song (unusual, because he’s normally got great flow); it’s not very good rapping at all without the echo.
One that I do like is from Who Knew:
Here he plays - with wonderful hyperbole - on his rebel image, painting himself as a perpetrator of domestic violence, his famed negative personal outlook (see songs like The Way I Am) and his well-know spat with his wife. To add to the humour, he uses a simile that makes little sense (how can his life be fucked up after he beat its fuckin ass every night?) and, to top it off, adds a nasty, but well-deserved and completely random insult to the end: turns out the wife-beater in question isn’t Eminem, but Ike Turner.
This subverts the “shocking” lyric even before he’s finished it, going from bragging about his violence to condemning someone else who actually did beat his wife.
And the whole thing is in his can’t-keep-me-down, sarcasm laden, me-against-the-world tone, adding to the humour. And all that from just two lines. When he’s good, he’s really good.
I really like these lyrics off his song 313, sorry if it’s already been mentioned. “You couldn’t make the fans throw up their hands if they swallowed their
fingers.”
I’d like to add to Onemanarmy’s suggestion, 313:
“Your ass forgot, so just in case you don’t remember me
I’ll run your brain around the block to jog your fucking memory”
“If he’s acting soft and he cowers
He better come cleaner then Jay Rue jacking off when he showers”
“You could date a stick of dynamite and wouldn’t go out with a bang
I showered the slang, simple as A,B,C’s
Skip over the D’s and rock the microphone with E’s”
and from “Tonight”
“I’ve got miracle lyrical capability all in me
With the agility to escape a killer bee colony
So get your cameras and capture how miraculous
I rap for all you Draculas and showed you all how whack you was”
I really like his word play. Most of his more meaningful lyrics have already been cited.
Exactly the reason I like him. And his skill in constructing complex rhyme and rhythmic schemes is highlighted by the fact that most of the competition is appallingly bad. Jay Z, R Kelly, Nelly – all have produced the most amazingly bad rap in recent times. The female rappers are doing somewhat better, but Eminem still puts out a better lyric overall.