Tag Archives: kill

#696: Eminem – Kill You

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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.

#695: The Wombats – Kill the Director

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Haven’t written about The Wombats in a while. Last time I did was in 2014. ‘Backfire at the Disco’ was a track I did a blog on here too, talking about how much I like it, why that is and so on and so forth. Some time between then and now I grew tired of it and it is now off the phone. That was The Wombats’ first single, I believe, and I remember seeing its video on MTV2 most of the time. It was all right. But it was the next single that got me thinking ‘This band might be onto something here’. Or something to that equivalent when I was 12 years old.

‘Kill the Director’ is the first ‘proper’ song from the band’s debut album, apparently inspired by the rom-com film The Holiday from 2006. It’s basically about the feeling of futility that one can feel when it comes to dating, trying to put on an act to try and impress a girl and failing in the process. The message is all in the song’s main refrain – “If this is a rom-com, kill the director”, roughly bows down to – if this is what love is meant to be like then end it now because it’s not worth it.

It works great as the opener, coming through with these alternating bass and guitar chords alongside Dan Haggis’ busy drumming. It’s fast, fast, fast stuff, exploding into the song’s chorus each time with the ‘ooh-ooh’ backing vocals that are a staple throughout the album. The ‘This is no/Bridget Jones’ coda gets a bit stale after a while for me, it doesn’t have to be repeated that many times or the line could have started just a few measures later, but as a whole the track doesn’t disappoint in delivering a hook upon hook in just under three minutes.