Color-Coded Rhyme Scheme

TRIGGER WARNING: very graphic and disturbing lyrics. VERY. TRIGGER WARNING for mentions of rape and murder and stalking. If you watch/listen and are shocked by it and turned off … 1. I don’t blame you but also 2. don’t say I didn’t warn you and 3. I’m not going to debate whether or not this song should be allowed to exist or that these topics shouldn’t be used in songs or that he’s glorifying violence blah blah. I’m just setting the terms, based on long experience writing about him.

“Stay Wide Awake” is one of Eminem’s serial killer/murderer songs. He’s got a bunch. He’s obsessed with murderers. I mean, he references Stephen McDaniel in one song and that’s a DEEP murderer cut. You will notice that I know who Stephen McDaniel is. (Google him, and then find the interview he gave to the local news before the body was found. If you’re into this stuff, it’s fascinating to watch.) “Stay Wide Awake” is off of Relapse, back in 2009, when he was just coming out of many years away, when he almost died from addiction to pills. He said he had writers block for a couple of years and just couldn’t rhyme anymore. It took him a long time to be able to write when sober. Relapse was him going WACKO, and while there are times when you can tell he’s not at full capacity yet – “Stay Wide Awake” shows what he can do, even when he’s coming out of a fog.

This lyric video was made by some obsessive maniac, breaking down Eminem’s rhyme scheme, with different colors showcasing each rhyme scheme – internal and otherwise – as the song unfolds. There were vestiges of this kind of thing from Eminem from the beginning. He would be embarrassed to just rhyme the end of lines. By this point in his career, meaning now, he really attempts to rhyme every syllable of every word with some other syllable, sometimes a three-syllable word will then find its echo in three separate words, etc. Or he’ll pick a vowel sound, and use it over and over, punching it up so you can hear it. (You can hear this early on, as I said. Go listen to “Til I Collapse” off The Eminem Show. He punches up syllables – the hard “a” sound of “Collapse” echoed throughout.)

The second verse of “Stay Wide Awake” is beloved among Eminem fans – and what’s funny is the lyrics are so fucked up but nobody cares because they’re too busy counting the rhymes and pointing out schemes. I get it, it’s not for everybody. Scroll on by. In the other two verses, there’s a loose A-A-A B-B-B and etc. format, each separate thought ending with the same sound – this gives it a very creepy chant-y vibe. But the second verse is different and radically so. First of all, every single line ends with an “ee” sound, an identical rhyme sustained throughout – which makes it sound … terrifying. Like you’re trapped with some wild animal. Or like it’s the sound of your own screams, if you were the victim, and the rapist/killer is mocking you. Sorry, I know it’s gnarly, just telling you what I hear.

But beyond that (and the color scheme really shows this visually): the first and third verse do contain some similar sounds and schemes, the “o” sound connected with another word (“sO dark and cOld”, etc.) In the second verse, though, almost every syllable or sound rhymes with another sound, creating a really wild effect. Obsessive maniacs like this color-coder serve a purpose. When you see the color scheme of the second verse laid out, a different color for each separate rhyme scheme – red, purple, yellow, blue – these separate colors line up vertically, so the song looks like columns of colors.

Eminem fans don’t even care what he’s saying, which … I realize … is not to everyone’s taste and may make us seem like callous heartless assholes. I understand. I do. But we dig his creativity. Form over content. Can’t help it. That’s just how we are.

What I sense here – beyond his horrorcore imagination unleashed – is Eminem coming out of an anguished period of writers’ block – sober for the first time since he was a teenager – scared – under pressure – and challenging himself to hear the rhymes again, to hear more rhymes, to discover more sounds, to break down words into tinier parts and rhyme those parts, to find more patterns, because you can bet that he, too, saw those vertical shapes, the rhymes stacked up on top of each other, making beautiful symmetrical columns of words. He’s finding his way back and also forward.