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Nicki Minaj featuring Eminem “Roman’s Revenge”

It makes sense to pair Nicki Minaj and Eminem. Most obviously, he’s still a commercial juggernaut, and she could use the boost. Beyond that crass consideration, Nicki and Em have a lot in common. They share a talent for radical shifts in delivery and slipping into cartoonish voices. They’re both from outside the dominant black male paradigm in rap, and compensate for that social disadvantage with impressive technical prowess and over the top personality. They’ve made themselves into characters so fierce that they cannot be ignored. So yeah, this team-up was pretty much inevitable.

The problem with “Roman’s Revenge” is that while Nicki and Eminem are quite similar, they are at very different points in their career arcs. Nicki is still new to the scene, and she’s hungry. Like most any rapper, she’s thriving in the moment where she has a bit of recognition, but still needs to prove herself. That mixture of earned confidence and underdog status amplifies a competitive quality that can bring out the best in artists. I hope she can keep this up for a while, because right now she is as colorful, refreshing, and listenable as it gets in hip hop.

Eminem, on the other hand, is a guy with nothing to prove, other than perhaps a continued relevance as he ages in a genre that has never been kind to elder statesmen. His craft is still remarkable, but it hasn’t progressed much since the early ’00s. He’s still telling the same mean-spirited jokes, but he’s no longer funny. He used to say awful shit and get by on playfulness and charm, but he’s so serious and angry now that he just sounds like a full-on creep. His verses on this song are joyless and hateful, a sad contrast with Nicki’s gleeful arrogance and camp absurdity. It says a lot about how much I enjoy listening to Nicki that I’m willing to put up with his parts at all. But really, I just wish I could get a version of this track with all his vocals removed and replaced with someone who isn’t a pointlessly bitter asshole.

Buy it from Amazon.