Eminem made his inauspicious return to rap this month, announcing the release of the forthcoming MMLP2 in a short ad during MTV’s Video Music Awards on Sunday and immediately following up with “Berzerk”, the album’s lead single. “Berzerk” features production by Rick Rubin (in a year where he’s played couchside consultant for both Jay-Z and Kanye West without ever crafting a beat) that rolls Billy Squier’s hokey masturbation anthem “The Stroke” and Beastie Boys samples into a low-brow love letter to old-school rap. “Berzerk” does what nearly every Eminem lead single before it has done: bat around insults at celebrities and remind the listener that Eminem is extremely good at rhyming words without ever turning those adept lyrical gymnastics into a relatable narrative. Your taste for it will hinge on how well you can weather bloodless, sometimes wordless rhyme wizardry, cornball pop culture references (“I done did enough codeine to knock Future into tomorrow”; probably true), and the gratingly nasal singing on the chorus.
The initial reactions to “Berzerk” have been withering– a peculiar response to a record full of adroit wordplay released in the same month as Kendrick Lamar’s hotly debated “Control” verse, which called out a gaggle of rappers by name in an effort to resurrect mainstream rap’s atrophying spirit of competition. Em’s nothing if not a master level lyrical technician; you’d figure that a hip-hop-consuming public newly enamored with lyrical dexterity would give it a shot.
No such luck. In the hours since “Berzerk”’s release it has been summarily marked for trash, and Eminem accused of crotchety pining for days of old thanks to a line about bringing rap back to its essence (“Let’s take it back to straight hip-hop and start it from scratch”) that’s more about the song’s retro-classicist production than some nefarious desire to pull the whole of rap through a wormhole back to the shell-toe Adidas era. But two weeks earlier Kendrick took it upon himself to proclaim that he’s raising the bar for mainstream rap to uproarious praise. What’s different here?
Obviously the operative distinction between “Control” and “Berzerk” is qualitative; the Eminem single is goofy juvenalia while the Kendrick verse is self-serious self-mythologizing. Also worth mention is the gap between Em and Kendrick’s stations in their respective careers. One’s a forty-something veteran still rhyming like an elementary school class clown killing it in homeroom; the other, a twentysomething whiz-kid newcomer whose austere left-field hit of a breakthrough major label debut is hardly a year old. We’re intrigued by Kendrick but burned out on Em. Even though “Berzerk” is ostensibly the kind of pop-rap curio that people who hailed “Control” as a sea change for mainstream rap should at least find conceptually acceptable, it sounds like they’re just sick of Em’s shit.
