Eminem is insane and this makes me laugh. His latest album just dropped about three weeks ago and I am still enggged in it, trying to absorb it. There’s a song “Discombobulated”, and it’s all about how he doesn’t know what’s Up or Down and how he gets all confused and anxious. At one point in the middle of some rat-a-tat verse, he stops himself and says, “What was I saying again?” He raps in Pig Latin at one point.
Then at the end comes this:
“So I act like I’m on a kayak with my back to Niagara
No life jacket, man, I had like six psychiatrists, scientists
Misdiagnose me with plaque psoriasis ’cause I asked ’em, “Why is it
My eye itches?” so they gave me some diet tips
And Viagra with side effects, I might end up growing spiderwebs
In my head and dying a horrifying death, on my final breath”
This isn’t everyone’s cuppa. It’s too nuts and too fast and too … meaningless? and/or language-nerdy? Like, can’t you just say “I’m feeling anxious”? Why all this other stuff? It doesn’t exactly reach a mass audience like, say, “Till I Collapse” or “Not Afraid” did. But Eminem has many modes. If you’re into this mode it is so much fun. He uses 40 rhyming words to basically say “I’m all fucked up”. But he’s not going to just say “I’m fucked up” and leave it at that. No. He has to be in a kayak headed for Niagara backwards after being misdiagnosed with psoriasis, all as he pops Viagra and diet pills, feeling like he’s going to die. He is such a DRAMA QUEEN.
The number of rhymes he crams in here … to what purpose?? And, I’m sorry, but it puts in my head a visual of him in a kayak with his back to Niagara, and it’s so ridiculous and melodramatic I laugh every time I hear him do it!
“How are you feeling, Marshall?”
“I feel like I’m in a kayak with my back to Niagara, man.”
And then, he’s misdiagnosed because his eye itches What are you TALKING about. And they give him “diet tips” and “Viagra”? This is him showing off and goofing off: the rhymes are obvious: “Niagara” “Viagra” – but the real rhymes are internal. Listen to the verse and don’t worry about what he’s actually saying. Just sit there and listen to it, and all you hear is the sound “ay-ah-sis” over and over again. So it’s not words he’s rhyming at all, but a syllable-series.
I don’t know what the POINT of all this is. The song has no resonance EMOTIONALLY (which is fine. not every song is “Sing for the Moment”). The real point seems to be “See what I can do? I can rhyme ‘psoriasis’ with ‘eye itches.'”
I am here for it.
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