Hey, buddy, did you hear the news? It's Track Reviews.

Hi, everyone. Anthony Fantano here, internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a track review. My thoughts on a brand new single. This one, "Houdini," Eminem.

Guess Who's Back? You already know. You don't need to guess. To say Eminem is at a weird point in his career right now is putting lightly because he's simultaneously one of the most objectively important and influential rappers of all time, but also one of the most polarizing, hated, and disrespected, too. To the point where I find myself sometimes defending him in conversations that try to completely erase every contribution he's made to rap music. By that same token, I can't really ignore the fact that artistically, he has fallen off really hard in recent years, something his own most hardcore fans try to ignore as much as possible, though the insecurities around that are still very much there in the tea leaves. Ask yourself, if current day Eminem is so good, then why can't he go a teaser single or an entire new album without living in the past or obsessing over the old him?

I mean, at the end of the day, there's no real knowing what exactly is driving this dichotomy within Eminem and his music, as clearly there's some internal struggle going on between a guy who clearly wants to keep being the boundary pusher that he was when he broke onto the scene, a button pusher as well. In concept, I think he wants to keep rattling cages, but doing that would mean breaking away from his past on some level. And his past work, his past successes, his past records are the only reason he continues to be relevant right now.

Which brings us to his latest artist track and single here, "Houdini," which I've spun several times over at this point, and it's pretty clear what Eminem is going for on this track. I mean, the song literally kicks off with a chorus that references past moments in his music when he's song us reminders that, 'Oh, he's back. Guess who's back?' Which makes you have to wonder, how many comebacks can a single artist even have?

Still, I will admit, flow-wise and musically, I think what Eminem is offering on this track is than pretty much anything on Revival and Kamikaze in terms of it just being generally listenable and pretty hooky. But I think the reason this track works to the extent that it does is Eminem is just essentially coloring in the lines on this song, painting by numbers, rehashing ideas that he knows have worked for him in the past and offering nothing else in addition to that point-blank period.

The question is, does it actually a candle to any of that past work? And does this shtick still work in 2024 in the same way that it did in 1999? And I think for anybody who's not living in the past, the answer is going to be no. The production and chorus on the track sound fine, but I would much rather just listen to a track from one of Eminem's first three albums if I wanted something on this spectrum.

Lyrically, of course, Eminem is trying to channel the old him once again, but I think he is doing a piss poor job of it. We have all these descriptions of Eminem being bad and devilish, and he's a big old misbehaving guy, a rapscallian. But the thing is, Eminem current day is not really the controversial figure that he used to be back in the early 2000s. And anybody who thinks so clearly does not remember vividly in the way that I and anyone my age does, just how much of an enemy number one type figure Eminem was in the music industry in terms of him just being an awful person, a bad influence, really a blight on the music industry at large.

Meanwhile, today, his shtick and status as an influential figure in popular music is more or less accepted even by people that don't really like his stuff. I mean, even the way the term Stan is used current day is proof that Eminem has massive impact on the popular music vernacular at large just across the board. So excuse me if in 2024, I feel like Eminem trying to sell himself as somebody who's this daring outsider type figure who nobody gets and just isn't really all that accepted. It's just not true. It's BS.

Eminem literally could say almost anything on a track today, and it's not going to her his bottom line in the long run, even with the headlines and head turns that were stirred as a result of the Megan Thee Stallion feet bar on this track, which is the first big controversial to do on this song, which, I mean, yes, again, has generated a lot of conversation. But as somebody who used to be a big Eminem fan when he first broke back in the day, my response is pretty much like, 'Is this all you got? This is you channeling the old Eminem and going back? This is it?' What is he really putting on the line by dropping a bar like this?

He actually would chance alienating a lot more people if he made the same joke but flipped it in a way where it was at Tory Lanez' expense, because likely, Eminem's audience has quite a bit of crossover with the Cro-Magnon knuckleheads that would make a very similar joke about Megan getting shot in the foot, or just questioning whether or not there's any validity to her claims against Tori in the first place, which he was convicted for, by the way.

The thing about old Eminem, though, is that he used to be perceived as an extreme cultural danger to white America and suburbanites, and he's just not really offering anything in his new material here to continue pushing on that front. He now more or less seems to be just enjoying the spoils of being accepted by that demographic of people. And this unspoken truth is something that keeps him in a very safe position culturally because it's exactly the same demo of people who he now appeals to with no question who would absolutely love to see him drop a bar about a female rapper getting shot, drop a bar about transgenders, where they can just go 'hee-hee, ha-ha' in response.

All I can really say is that it's unfortunate, it's truly unfortunate and sad, that we have a guy who is one of the most successful and widely selling artists on the planet who is decades and decades into one of the most lucrative music career years ever. And yet he is still stuck on a hamster wheel where he's chasing the ghosts of his past and just cannot stand to actually be his living, current-day self, which makes the transgender cat are hilariously ironic because if anybody's suffering from a crisis of identity, it's fucking Eminem.

This track is annoying. It's mid. It's boring. Eminem fans need to stop kidding themselves and stop pushing this guy to stop being his older self, too, because it's never going to be like it was 20 years ago, I promise you.

And I'm going to leave it there. You guys are the best.

Anthony Fantano, Eminem, Houdini, forever.