The resurgence of hip hop story telling

Thank God, Hip Hop is not dead, it was just on I.C.U. for a stint. Last week I finally got the chance to step away from the grind and purchase the new Eminem CD. I had heard through the tabloids he was sober and wanted to see what this new found sobriety had given him. 70 days ago, I decided to quit the bottle after waking up in the alley way behind my house and have found the lack of those types of experiences can take a toll on a person when they are so used to that being what they considered normal...It is what I call Sober Aggression. 

Call it what you want, but I wanted to see if he still had the ability to shock us with the syllables he adds together and the visuals he paints as he bends words to rhyme as if they were pieces of sheet metal he was forming to create a trailer park mansion.

The verdict; Guilty. This album was harder and more heartfelt than anything he has previously released as he cracked on everyone from Lindsay Lohan to himself and back to Lindsay again. Not omnipresent on this album was the blind rage that he used on his other albums, instead he seemed to explain himself in songs that almost made you root for him even though he purposely makes himself into the villain, yet again. "Now everybody looks at me like it's my fault his name rhymes with so many different words, jeez, so one last time Mr. Christopher Reeves, won't you break it down for me and just spit the verse please?"

Long gone are the days of the real story tellers and lyricists, like Slick Rick, Run DMC, and Beasty Boys, Tu Pac, Biggie and Wu Tang Clan to name a few. Left to pick up the pieceswith Eminem, are rappers like Outkast, Atmosphere, Nas, Snoop and a select group that has chosen to ignore the Soulja Boy step show.

So thank you Em, for being as you so eloquently put it, "such a relentless prick" and for bringing back memories of rappers that were more interested in telling a story than wearing an over-sized t-shirt and platinum chain that hung down to their cubic zirconium encrusted belt buckles while they obnoxiously shout the same six words over and over again.