“Eminem Coded”

I have been called Eminem coded. More than once, by people who meant it kindly.

It is a strange compliment to receive, because it is doing about four things at once and only two of them are about music.

What people usually mean

When someone says a rapper is Eminem coded, they are almost never saying "this sounds like a Marshall Mathers record." They mean a cluster of traits that got welded together in the public imagination around one artist:

• Dense internal rhyme. Multisyllabic, technical, obviously constructed. You can hear the work.
• Funny and bleak in the same bar. A joke that turns out to be about something awful.
• Uncomfortable honesty. Saying the thing most people would edit out.
• White guy who raps. Which is the part nobody says out loud, and is doing more of the work in that phrase than people realise.

The part that is fair

The first three I will take.

I write dense. I like a rhyme scheme you can feel locking into place. I am visceral and sometimes cryptic and always truthful, and that combination does produce lines that make people shift slightly in their seat. Eminem was a formative influence on me, like he was on most people who started writing after 1999, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

So if "Eminem coded" means technical, funny, and willing to say the ugly thing, that is a reasonable read and I am not going to argue with it.

The part that flattens things

Here is my gentle objection.

Eminem became the default comparison for an entire category of artist, and once a comparison becomes default it stops carrying information. A dense technical white rapper gets filed there regardless of what else is going on, which means the other twelve things in the music get skipped.

My influence list runs from Modest Mouse to The Mars Volta to Westside Gunn to Tyler, The Creator. There is indie rock structure in these songs and prog chaos in the arrangements and a lot of Texas in the subject matter. "Eminem coded" gets none of that, because it was never built to.

Why I do not mind it

Because it means somebody heard craft.

Nobody says Eminem coded about lazy writing. Whatever else the phrase smuggles in, the core of it is "this person is actually trying," and after ten years of actually trying, I will take being heard over being categorised precisely.

Besides, I also get compared to Lil Dicky and Weird Al, which is a very different set of expectations, and holding both at once is more interesting than either.