In 2009, I was fourteen and going through those weird motions as you do at those early teenage years. That year saw Eminem return to music with Relapse. My friend and I thought that Eminem was the greatest rapper of all time. Thought all of his music was great. I hadn’t actually listened to any of his albums in full though, only his singles. So I decided to download The Marshall Mathers LP one day to up my game when it came to Eminem knowledge.

‘Kill You’ is the second track on the album, following the opening intro. Can’t say I had too many strong feelings about it 11 years ago. I thought the hook was good, the beat too, but I wasn’t really taking in what he was actually talking about. For that reason, I didn’t listen to it for a very long time. Gave the album a replay many years later…. and it became very clear that Eminem was saying some very fucked up shit on here.

It actually starts off quite normally. Eminem tells the listener about his less than pleasant relationship with his mother before voicing his acknowledgment of those who wondered what he would rap about now that he was rich from the success of The Slim Shady LP. And then he suddenly starts exclaiming about choking women until they can’t breathe. And then from then on it’s just one outrageous lyric after another with imagery of him raping his mother, dismemberment with a chainsaw, and basically being a psychopath and having no regard for any human life. He describes it so vividly and with such energy in his voice though, that it’s just enjoyable to listen to. Everything in here is so off the wall that you obviously shouldn’t take anything he says in it seriously. 20 years ago people didn’t understand this, and so protested and demonstrated against Eminem for his awful, hateful messages. Actually, he probably wouldn’t get away with releasing this in this age if he tried to.

This track is fantastic. It’s got all the clever wordplay, assonance, internal rhyming, metaphors, similes, imagery that you want from a hip-hop song and were the usual standard for an every Eminem song back in those days. He does the same thing now…. the songs just don’t sound as good. I’ll leave it at that.