Easy to forget Eminem is 45-years old while walking around in the world thinking about Eminem as often as I do anymore, but "Walk on Water" is a great reminder of his age. If Jay-Z found a way to make 47 sound cool earlier this year, Eminem found a way to make 45 sound boring as hell. "Walk on Water" is mostly the sound of a man complaining about how talented he is, how famous he was, and how technically sound and financially successful his post-rehab material is because, and he's right, anybody with a platform is quick to point out how boring it all is to listen to. So here he gets Beyoncé to sing a completely pointless, exhausting hook that Eminem would never sound appropriate next to anyway and then asks Rick Rubin to make one of the least inspired tributes to the most boring aspects of artists like Carole King.

The experience of listening to this song for the first time is about as perplexing as it possibly could be, and none of it feels particularly revelatory or exciting. Eminem works in a very strange space - after this song finished, Youtube moved to a video with 160,000,000+ views called "Guts Over Fear" that Eminem apparently created in 2014 with Sia. I'd never heard of it before. Eminem learned with "Fack" and Encore that there are a lot of people out in the world who've made up their minds on Eminem in the following way: he's perfect and there's not another rapper out there worth listening to as feverishly. So here's a song that doesn't really seem like it's for those people, or the BET Cypher people, or his old fans, or his new fans, or Beyoncé fans, or Rick Rubin fans, or fans of music in general.

It'll probably be a huge success.


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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
Hip Hop Handbook: http://tinyurl.com/ll4kzz