Liberals are just so happy that the woke “Slim Shady” has finally decided to stand up. Last night at the BET Hip Hop Awards, Eminem wasted his lyrical genius in a four-and-a-half-minute freestyle roast of the president. The Left loved it and it was the worst.
The problem isn’t that the Detroit rapper has joined the #resistance. The problem is that Eminem started rhyming with copied-and-pasted liberal talking points and now he’s just like everyone else.
Cribbing old material from the DNC, Eminem slammed President Trump as a “racist grandpa” who tweets too much, an uncaring old man who doesn’t pay enough attention to hurricane victims, and “a kamikaze” who “will probably cause a nuclear holocaust.” And that’s a shame.
With the biggest vocabulary in the entire rap game, Eminem normally drops withering burns and offers criticism as crude as it is lyrically complex. The best the foul-mouthed Marshall Mathers could do last night was compare Trump to the orange rock guy from the Fantastic Four (honestly, his feud with Nelly was better).
This isn’t the first time Eminem has courted presidential controversy though. A bootleg recording triggered a legitimate Secret Service investigation in 2003 when he rapped about how he didn’t care for “dead presidents” on dollar bills because he’d “rather see the president dead.” But while that threat wasn’t credible, Eminem’s crude political commentary is pretty prolific.
More firebrand than philosopher, the self-proclaimed “Rap God” has scorched everyone from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Caitlyn Jenner. Always counter the culture, Eminem wore out the parental advisory on album’s going after everyone in power. Blind hatred toward authority has always been his brand. Last night’s screed against Trump though, that was just a lame set up for his next album.
Still old white liberals ate it up. Keith Olbermann called it the “best political writing of the year, period” (never mind that he published a book this year). Ana Navarro heralded it as a triumph of the freedom of speech. We’re all glad Mathers is free to say what he has to say, but what he said was a flop and their reaction is complete hypocrisy.
One anti-Trump track can’t discount an entire discography of misogyny. The Left doesn’t get to lecture about the president’s “locker room talk” then turn around and praise a rapper who wants to punch out Lana Del Rey, rape Iggy Azalea, and rip Pamela Anderson’s “t–s off.” They can’t clutch their pearls at Trump then praise a man who raps about stuffing dead hookers into car trunks. It doesn’t work that way.
While most of Eminem’s music is probably worth skipping, the transformation of the artist from counterculture rebel to mainstream social justice warrior is worth noting. Crowned “the king of hip-hop” by Rolling Stone, he was bipartisan in his criticism. He was interesting. Now he’s as boring as the Left is hypocritical.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
