Story by Jacob O’Gara
Hell: The Sequel is an acrid blast of hot air, reeking of old-school bravado and fury. The EP—at nine tracks it’s about half as long as most rap albums—marks the reunion and return of Bad Meets Evil, the demonic duo of Eminem and Royce da 5’9”. The last time the two Michiganders recorded together was in the late 1990s—ancient history, in other words. A dozen years ago, Eminem and his Slim Shady alter ego shook to life an enervated hip-hop scene by butchering America’s sacred cows and then recounting the slaughter in bloody, Stygian detail. Now, he and his partner in rhyme are back when we need them most.
Eminem, the greatest living rapper by any honest measure, built his career on gross-out sexual violence and sadism, on dragging us to the smoldering edges of his personal Hell, trailer-park America. He revolutionized the genre, and, I would argue, music and culture as a whole, by being harrowingly personal and transforming what we saw as ordinary—white underclass life—into a bizarre nightmare. Now that he’s sold millions of albums, has won thirteen Grammys and an Oscar, and lives “in a house with a fucking elevator,” how does Eminem the diarist prevent himself from slipping into obsolescence?
By faking it, of course, like any good artist (let alone hip-hop artist) does. More than any other genre besides country, hip-hop is populated by whining chauvinists who wring their hands over questions of “authenticity” and “realness.” This “just the facts, ma’am” approach to cultural gatekeeping serves only to drain energy out of hip-hop; it almost destroyed Rick Ross’s career and it could destroy Tyler, the Creator’s before it really even gets started. Who do we shower with accolades: the person who wrote the novel or the person who wrote the book report? Midway through his career, Eminem grasped that he had mostly exhausted reality of its storytelling potential, and decided to explore his imagination. Unsurprisingly, his is a dark one.
The result was Relapse, which everyone apparently hated—it was way too dark and Eminem used too many dumb accents. Yeah, maybe, but compare it to Recovery, his next album, which was a return to reality and had a number of references to how lame its predecessor was. (Eminem dissing himself; that’s new!) Listen to that album and hear how dull it sounds, how empty and uninteresting the songs are. It’s not that Eminem doesn’t do contrite or sober well. He just doesn’t do reality well anymore. Relapse has some major flaws (it’s way too dark, with too many dumb accents, namely) but it’s an aural Hieronymus Bosch painting: twisted, spooky, and genius.
His collaboration with Royce da 5’9” (who has been criminally left out of this review thus far) continues to plumb the grimy depths of his imagination. In Hell: The Sequel, Bad Meets Evil play jester in Satan’s court, grinning while trading barbed verses over dungeon beats. As the first track, “Welcome 2 Hell,” suggests, Eminem and Royce da 5’9” are our hosts, and they invite us to come in, relax, and stay a while.
However, the album has one flaw—Eminem—who is, as usual, both its biggest asset and liability. He thinks he’s the funniest guy to ever touch a microphone and occasionally ruins his naturally witty lyrics with some horrendous jokes, and his tendency to instantly date songs by riffing on the pop culture of the moment is on full display here. Thankfully, there’s Royce to balance out the record, and in a way, he’s the quiet hero of Hell: The Sequel: he’s just as skilled as Eminem at verbal pyrotechnics, but he’s less flashy about it. Eminem the showman, Royce the workman.
Neither are preacher men, however. This is horrorcore after all. Sometimes called “death rap,” which sort of sums it up right there, horrorcore is a nightmare-crusted subgenre of hip-hop, dedicated to the macabre. Representative tracks are “Diary Of A Madman” by Gravediggaz, “Mind Playing Tricks On Me” by the Geto Boys, and “Earl” by Earl Sweatshirt. Like these songs, Hell: The Sequel by Bad Meets Evil takes to us the dark, unexplainable underbelly of the human experience and renders darkness visible.