Golden Garbage

What do you do when some of the best art you've ever experienced comes swathed in shit? Personally, I choose to love it anyway. If I didn't I couldn't possibly be the conisseur of rap that I have become.

But the difficult thing about being a rap fan is squaring the love of the art form with the contempt most decent people would feel for most of the content. It's a constant intellectual and cultural and moral and racial battle. But great art always emerges.

And Eminem has emerged from this turmoil. There are several ways to gague a rapper's strengths, but if the standard were rhyming, Eminem would be in a league of his own, with Lil' Wayne an extremely respectable 2nd place.

There is rhyming. There is content. There is flow. There is production. There is wit. There is voice. And so on. But in terms of rhyming, Eminem bends the English language to its most improbable limits.

The content is usually utterly worthless. But the genius is undeniable. How do we square that circle?

All that said, consider the ferocious precision of this rhyme:

I'm just a hooligan who's used to usin halucenogens
CAUsin illusions again, BRAin contusions again
CUttin and bruisin the skin
RAzors, scissors and pins
JEsus when does it end?
PHAses that I go through
DAzed and I'm so confused
DAys that I don't know who
GAve these molecules to
ME what am I gonna do?
Pay the prodigal son, The Diabolical one
Very methodical when I slaughter them