In honor of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary year, we’re looking back at the top artists, songs, albums, and producers of “The Genius Era,” 2009 to the present.
Even before the pandemic, Eminem was a self-professed “lab rat” who spent much of this time writing and recording music. But when the world went into lockdown in March 2020, the Detroit legend suddenly found himself with literally nothing to do except work on new songs. He couldn’t even distract himself by watching sports.
By December, Em had buckled down and finished Music to be Murdered By: Side B, a so-called “deluxe version” of his 11th studio album, which he’d dropped at the start of the year, just before everything went crazy. The Side B collection—which stands as the top hip-hop album of 2020 on Genius according to pageviews—added a staggering 16 new songs to the existing 20, and it built on the macabre theme that loosely defines the original.
The title Music to be Murdered By comes from a 1958 album by English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, Hollywood’s “Master of Suspense.” The LP pairs quirky orchestral pieces by conductor Jeff Alexander with darkly funny spoken-word passages by Hitchcock—things like, “I trust that everyone is enjoying the music. As the title of the album suggests, this was meant for your listening pleasure—while you are being done in.”
At some point, Em’s mentor and frequent collaborator Dr. Dre heard this long-forgotten slab of midcentury vinyl, and he created a beat based on one of the tracks. Eminem heard that beat, and years later, it popped back into his head for some reason. Dre wound up sending Eminem the full Hitchcock album, and Eminem realized he could base a whole song cycle around that concept. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to take this idea quite as far as he would’ve liked.
“There was actually some stuff that didn’t make it on there that I was trying to get on there,” Eminem said in an interview with Crook’s Corner. “We couldn’t really work it out with the sample clearing. But I had it even more intertwined [with the Hitchcock album] than it was, and we had to pick and choose the best pieces to put on there just for sampling.”
Indeed, Eminem’s Music to be Murdered By isn’t full of songs about homicide—not any more than a typical Eminem album. Sure, he raps from the POV of the Route 91 concert shooter on the controversial “Darkness,” and he fantasizes about beating his stepfather to death with a baseball bat on “Stepdad.” But throughout the album, Em mostly does what he always does and claps back at critics, says outrageous things about pop-culture figures and major news events, and backs up his rap-god boasting with breathless rhyme sprints and homophone-heavy wordplay.
Like most latter-day Eminem albums, Music to Be Murdered By received mixed reviews, but it nevertheless debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, giving Em his 10th consecutive chart-topper. From there, Eminem just kept on recording—again, it was 2020, and there was nothing else going on—and pretty soon, it became clear he was making a whole new album, one that picked up more or less where the last one left off.
The first song Eminem recorded for Music to Be Murdered By: Side B was “Alfred’s Theme,” a self-produced number built around a sample of French composer Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette,” better known as the theme song from the ’60s horror-mystery anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. “Alfred’s Theme” is a quintessential Eminem song. There are irreverent quips about current events—“Before I check the mic (Check, check, one, two) / I give it a extra swipe with a Lysol disinfectant wipe (Good evening) / Coronavirus in effect tonight”—cartoonish threats of violence (“Overkill like a pipe bomb in your pinebox”), celebrity disses (“I’m giving nightmares to Billie Eilish, I’m Diddy’s side bitch”), and jokes that don’t register in your brain until he’s already moved onto the next line (“And I won’t buy her designer, ’cause I don’t pander”). In one memorable passage, Em even name-checks a serial killer, a classic trope in his songwriting.
Yeah, and I’m buddies with Alfred, we about to
Disembowel them, gut ’em and scalp ’em, yeah
This is ’bout to be the bloodiest outcome
’Cause we gon' make you bleed with every cut from this album
So I’m choppin’ ’em up like Dahmer
The nut job with the nuts that are bigger than Jabba the Hutt
In keeping with the “buddies with Alfred” thing, Eminem ultimately decided to open Music to Be Murdered By: Side B with “Alfred (Intro),” in which the director says, “Thus far, this album has provided musical accompaniment to make your passing pleasant.” That leads nicely into track two, “Black Magic,” a gothy murder fantasy featuring Eminem’s frequent collaborator Skylar Grey. It’s yet another of Eminem’s songs about harming women, and this one’s pretty graphic.
As I say farewell to the love of my life, I cut and I slice
I give her one last hug goodbye
Wipe the blood off my butterfly knife
Watch her fuckin’ die right in front of my eyes
But in hindsight
Think I just wanted to see what her insides look like
If Side B sticks slightly closer to the Hitchcock theme than its predecessor, it doesn’t only feature gratuitous murder raps. The album contains two moments of contrition that garnered quite a bit of media attention. The first comes on “Favorite Bitch,” where Eminem kinda-sorta apologies for joking about the 2017 Manchester bombings on the Music to Be Murdered By song “Unaccommodating.” Except in doing so, he makes light of another deadly terror attack, undercutting his apology.
And I know nothing is funny ’bout the Manchester bombing
But we got something in common (What?), both of us are alarming
Foul, disgusting, and awful (Yeah), so repugnant and ugly (Yup)
I could give the Boston Marathon a run for its money, yeah
Later, on “Zeus,” he says he’s sorry to Rihanna, whom he references in an lost version of B.o.B.’s 2011 song “Things Get Worse” that had recently leaked online. On that leaked track, Em grotesquely justifies Chris Brown’s vicious 2009 assault against Rihanna and says he’d “beat a bitch down, too.” Em claims he has no recollection of recording that verse, which likely dates back to 2009, before he worked with Ri on the 2010 smash “Love the Way You Lie,” the first of their three collaborations. Regardless, “Zeus” is Em’s attempt to make things right.
But, me, long as I breathe, promise to be honest
And wholeheartedly, apologies, Rihanna
For that song that leaked, I’m sorry, Ri
It wasn’t meant to cause you grief
Regardless, it was wrong of me, but
Eminem remains serious on the third verse of that song, where he voices his support for the widespread social justice protests that took place in the summer of 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.
And all that we want is racial equality
R.I.P. Laquan McDonald, Trayvon, and Breonna
Atatiana, Rayshard, and Dominique
Eric Garner and Rodney King
No, we can’t get along ‘til these white motherfuckin’ cops
Who keep murderin’ Blacks are off the streets (Off the streets)
Music to Be Murdered By: Side B ends with “Discombobulated,” an apt finale given the various divergent threads Eminem runs with at different spots on the album. Instead of tying things back to the Hitchcock conceit, Em does a bit of everything: self-mythologizing, shit talking, and of course, pun slinging. As he does throughout the entire Music to be Murdered By two-album project, he acknowledges the fact that critics are going to slag him off no matter what he does. He’s salty about it, but one thing is clear by now: He’s never going to change.
I’m at my best when I’m at my worst
And for that I’m blessed, so every time I rap I curse
And that’s why press, I usually get attacked by first
They’re at my neck like motherfucking vampires
