Eminem, "Difficult" And (With Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Cashis And Stat Quo), "Syllables"

Wow. The hairs on my arm just stood up. Just now, while I was listening to this new Eminem song for the first time.

As you may know, Eminem has enjoyed a major comeback over the past year. Two huge singles, “I Love the Way You Lie” pushed his album Recovery to 3.4 million in sales, more than any other artist in 2010, and his 10 Grammy nominations lead the field for February’s awards show. This after a five-year hiatus and a 2009 album, Relapse, generally thought to be the worst of his career. So I was happy for him. Because he’s had a rough go of it, what with all the crazy drama with his mom and his wife and drugs and, especially, losing his best friend, Deshaun “Proof” Holton, to a tragic shooting four years ago.

But I found the music I heard from Recovery very disappointing. In the past, in his prime, Eminem’s rapping was terrifically playful and wacky. He always sounded barely-hinged. As if his tongue, quick as it was, couldn’t ever keep up with the rhymes coming to his mind like flashes of lightning. His emotional expressiveness, his woundedness, the extent to which he didn’t give a fuck — it all leapt out of him, all important to his appeal. On his more recent work, though, he’s sounded deadened. (His world-crushing guest verse on Drake’s “Forever” notwithstanding.) On Recovery most of all, he sounded so straight and serious. He was obviously giving it his all — which, you know, that’s good — even bravely, if unwisely, singing. But there was a joylessness to the music I associated with his recent sobriety. Apparently he was jogging like five hours a day while he was recording it. I mean, people should certainly do what’s healthiest for them, and I applaud him for it, but 12-step-program rap just isn’t that much fun to listen to. God, that stuff on “I’m Not Afraid” about how he felt so strong in his commitment to sobriety that he could go to the club and lift the whole liquor counter up — because he was “raising the bar.” (Groan.) It seemed like was rapping for the wrong reasons. To prove something to someone other than himself or something.

A new Eminem song came out last week, “Syllables,” featuring Jay-Z, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Cashis and Stat Quo. (Well, maybe not so new. It was recorded three years ago, apparently. And some people think it’s actually from Dre’s long-awaited Detox album.) It’s a tongue-in-cheek attack on the decline of lyricism in rap, and I like it. Em, on a short verse wherein he employs the kind of funny-style accent rapping he explicitly swore off on “Not Afraid,” sounds like he’s enjoying himself. And it’s exciting to hear this particular assemblage of heavyweight starpower on one track. (Jay is great: “So you want the chat room or the house in Malibu?/Em, your emphasis is on the wrong syllalable…”) But the song suffers from the same disconnect between verse and chorus that made this summer’s “I Love the Way You Lie” such a bummer to me. In fact, the chorus kind of sucks. (Maybe it sucks on purpose — a subversive statement about pop hooks? Maybe it was not supposed to come out this way? Maybe it’s not finished? It’s hard to tell these days.)

“Difficult” is much better. It avoids the verse-chorus agreement problem by avoiding a chorus altogether. Opting instead for a clipped, spoken, half-sentence: “Difficult as it sounds…”

And it sounds pretty difficult. The song is about Proof, a minor-key dirge that no one would describe as joyful. But there’s raw feeling in it that sounds different from the Recovery stuff. It finds a somber Eminem in mourning, referring to Proof as “Dudie,” a nickname they shared for each other (he doesn’t remember the origin, he says), and remembering anecdotes from their younger years together. Like when Proof, who was black, snapped at Em’s sunburned skin with a rolled-up t-shirt. So there is some joy here, actually — as subtle as it is, leaking through what sounds to have been a tearful time in the vocal booth. You can hear it, the slight curl of a smile, as Em says he still has to get back at his old friend for that.

Here’s how the third verse starts. This is the part that made the hair on my arm stand up:

“This may sound a little strange, but I’m a tell it/I found that jacket you left at my wedding/I picked it up to smell it/I wrapped it up in plastic until I put it in glass and/Hang it up in the hallway so I can always look at it…”

Wow, right?! He picked it up to smell it! Wow.