【搬运】【译】滚石Rolling Stone评Eminem 2020年专辑《Music to Be Murdered By》

搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整） 

翻译：June Hess

审译：Lynn Liu

排版：Lynn Liu

Eminem has been one of music’s hugest stars for more than two decades, yet over the years he’s increasingly taken on the tendencies of the cult artist — the deepening sense of embattled insularity, the hapless angst, the lack of interest in the genre he once transformed. On his 11th album, all the old enemies are present: the women who do him wrong, the family members who messed him up, the rappers you may or may not remember he has beefs with, the annoying fans, the haters, and, most important, the self-immolating man in the mirror. He savages them all with a virtuosity that now feels more like a cudgel than a gift, as if he’s leaning into the shredding-for-shredding’s-sake, Yngwie-Malmsteen-of-hip-hop accusations that have dogged his recent albums, particularly 2018’s confrontationally dreary Kamikaze. “Similes and idioms/Giddy up!” he demands on “Little Engine.” And they definitely do, at times to stunning effect, though the dervish humor and gremlin bounce that made his original Silly Putty-psycho shtick an American classic remain in relatively short supply.

二十多年来，Eminem一直是音乐界超级巨星之一，但这些年来，他渐渐接受了这个受人崇拜的艺术家的人设，四面楚歌的孤立感与不幸的焦虑日益加深，这使他对他曾经改变的音乐流派缺乏兴趣。在他第11张专辑中,以前所有的敌人都出现了:冤枉他的女人，把他搞得一团糟的家人,那些你可能记得或者不记得的和他有过冲突的说唱歌手,恼人的歌迷，那些他讨厌的人，还有最重要的，那个镜子里自焚的男人。他用他的精湛才艺对所有人进行了猛烈的抨击，在这张专辑中，他的才华比起天赋来，更像是一件武器，仿佛这是为粉碎这些东西而生的。人们曾评价他就像是嘻哈界的Yngwie-Malmstee，这一直影响着他最近的几张专辑，尤其是2018年那张对抗式沉闷的《Kamikaze》。“比喻和习语早就准备好了/马上让你眼花缭乱”他在“Little Engine”中唱到。这些歌词确实达到了目的，而且有时效果惊人，不过他反讽的幽默和无可比拟的说唱技巧让他从默默无闻的说唱歌手成为了美国经典，并且现在依旧很少有人能实现这种效果。

He does seem to have thrown a little more intellectual, thematic, and emotional elbow grease into this record. The title of Music to Be Murdered By alludes to a 1958 collaboration between Alfred Hitchcock and film composer Jeffrey Alexander, and Hitchcock’s voice appears in segues throughout. Eminem piles on movie references, calling on everything from Reservoir Dogs to Rocky to 8 Mile. But no real concept, cinematic or otherwise, develops — unless “fuck me and fuck you too” is a concept, in which case this is a veritable Tommy. “Such a wide range of emotions/Migraines, but why the fuck am I takin’ these Motrins?/Ibuprofens, like a drop of rain in the ocean/And you’re my fix on the days when I’m broken/But the shit’s about to go sideways, I just know it,” he raps on the dispirited “Never Lose Again,” one of many examples of his still-unimpeachable genius for dazzlingly ornamented lyrical decadence — the emotional pain cave as Sistine Chapel.

他似乎确实在这张唱片上投入了更多的内容和情感。《Music to Be Murdered By》这个名字暗指1958年Alfred Hitchcock与电影作曲家Jeffrey Alexander的合作，Hitchcock的声音贯穿始终。Eminem参考了大量的电影资料，从《Reservoir Dogs（落水狗）》到《 Rocky（洛奇）》再到《8 Mile（八英里）》，应有尽有。但没有什么电影或其他东西得到实质性发展，除非说“fxxk me and fxxk you too”是一个概念，在这种情况下，这才有了真正的《冲破黑暗谷》。“各种各样的的情感/偏头痛，但他妈的我为什么要吃这些药/布洛芬，就像大海里的一滴水/你定格在我破碎的日子里/但我知道，只会越来越糟”。他在伤感的“Never Love Again”里唱到，这首作品是体现他才华的众多例子之一，他的才华镶嵌在歌词的颓废之中，大放光彩，这种情感上的痛苦就好比西斯廷教堂。

Eminem has plenty of dragons to slay on this 20-song, 64-minute set. First up: us. The Dr. Dre-produced album-opening “Premonition” lashes out at the critics who haven’t liked his last two albums: “Rolling Stone stars, I get two and a half outta five, and I’ll laugh out loud/’Cause that’s what they gave B.A.D. back in the day.” The 2.5-star review of LL Cool J’s 1987 album, Bigger And Deffer, that he’s evidently referencing comes from the 2004 print edition of The Rolling Stone Album Guide, which isn’t online. But when it comes to airing out his grudges, no amount of having to drive around Michigan looking for a Barnes & Noble will hold Eminem back. It’s the kind of monkish attention to detail that bespeaks a true craftsman.

Eminem的新专辑这包含20首歌曲，长达64分钟，其中有很多让人印象深刻的地方。首先，由Dr. Dre制作的专辑首单“Premonition”，这首歌对那些不喜欢他上两张专辑的评论家们进行了猛烈的抨击。“滚石的明星们，我拿了两颗半星我会笑出声来/因为过去他们说很糟糕。”LL Cool J 1987年的专辑《Bigger And Deffer》得到了2.5星的评价，显然他指的是滚石2004年的印刷版专辑指南，该指南没有在网上发布。但说到发泄他的怨气，在密歇根开着车到处找Barnes & Noble也消不了Eminem的气。这首歌是一种对细节的关注，同时显示出他真正的才华。

Musically, he gestures toward the current hip-hop world a little more intentionally than his hermetic-sounding albums have tended to in the recent past. The buoyant “Godzilla” features leftover verses from the recently departed emo-rap icon Juice WRLD, serviceably sutured into Eminem rhyme clusters delivered in a rapid-fire blur that’s almost microtonal. Anderson .Paak lends his light Cali-soul growl over Dr. Dre’s springy beat on “Lock It Up”; the brutally mean-spirited breakup song “Farewell” has a lithe, reggae-tinged beat from Southern rap producer Ricky Racks. The best production moment is “Yah Yah,” a frenetically grinding, Busta Rhymes-sampling posse cut with Black Thought of the Roots, Em’s Detroit buddies Royce da 5’9″ and Denaun of D12, and Q-Tip soulfully singing the hook.

在音乐方面，比起之前那些听起来很神秘的专辑，《Music to Be Murdered By》更刻意地朝着现今流行的嘻哈音乐靠拢。轻快的“Godzilla”融入了最近去世的emo-rap偶像Juice WRLD的遗作，Eminem用近乎微分音的调子快速说唱着，这与Juice WRLD的元素配合得近乎完美。Anderson .Paak在“Lock It Up”在Dr.Dre创作的有力节奏中融入了其加州灵魂式咆哮；残酷刻薄的分手歌曲“Farewell”加入了南方说唱制作人Ricky Racks轻快、雷鬼风格的节奏。“Yah Yah”可谓是全专最佳，这首歌非常疯狂，它采样了Busta Rhymes的歌曲，然后the Roots的Black Thought、 姆爷底特律的伙伴Royce da 5’9″和D12乐队的Denaun在这首歌中同姆爷合作，当然，还有Q-Tip在歌曲中深情地唱着副歌。

In a new lyrical wrinkle, Em steps into the role of political commentator and protest voice, with mixed results. On the grueling, six-minute “Darkness,” the album’s most ambitious performance, he attempts to inhabit the mind of the gunman responsible for the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival that took 58 lives. His impulses are in the right place (the song’s intense video ends by imploring “When will it end?” and then asks people to register to vote). But the song itself doesn’t stretch much outside Eminem’s lyrical comfort zone: “If I bet you I’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, who would the odds favor?” he raps, placing the person responsible for the worst mass murder in U.S. history within the same needy-lonely-white-guy emotional valence as “Stan.”

在一个新的情境中，姆爷扮演了政治评论员和抗议者的角色，结果说不上好坏。在专辑中最具野心的歌曲“Darkness”中，他试图让人想起2017年拉斯维加斯音乐节大规模枪杀事件的凶手，他杀死了58个人。他的冲动是正确的(这首歌的视频带来紧张感，以恳求“什么时候结束?”，然后要求人们登记投票)，但这首歌本身对于Eminem自身而言没有什么突破。他在歌曲“Stan”里唱到“我敢打赌，我准会出现在明天的报纸上，你觉得谁的胜算更大?”，同时他把美国历史上最严重的大规模枪杀案的罪犯和魔鬼放在同样孤寂的白人情感之中。

Such a moment of moral urgency, however muddled, also has the knock-on effect of rendering other bits of expected shock-rap offensiveness more glaringly uncomfortable. In the requisite evil-ex screed “Farewell,” he plays loftily with the love-as-murder theme, comparing toxic romance to being “tethered together like felons,” but makes sure not to leave out the stomach-churning venom, calling his errant paramour a “little cunt.” And what’s with the lazily assholic endorsement of strip club sexual harassment in “Those Kinda Nights,” an icky-horny collaboration with Ed Sheeran? Psychotic mass killers: You get a voice. Women working in strip clubs: Not so much.

The most egregious self-owning oversight on Music to Be Murdered By, especially in the context of “Darkness,” is “Unaccommodating,” featuring fire-breathing Brooklyn rapper Young M.A. Eminem undercuts an impressively manic spree of rhymes by tossing in a half-assed allusion to another concert tragedy: “I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game/Like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting.” Within hours of its release, the song prompted a statement of condemnation from the mayor of Manchester. For Eminem, acknowledgements of our shared humanity may occasionally happen in the abstract, but specific instances in his music are still hard to come by.

像是这种道义迫切性的时刻，无论多么混乱，也会产生连锁反应，使得其他意料之中的令人震惊且冒犯人的说唱变得更加让人不适。在“Farewell”中，他把爱情比作谋杀，把有毒的浪漫比作“像重罪犯一样被拴在一起”，但他没有忘记令人反胃的毒液，称他的出轨情人是“小婊子”。在与Ed Sheeran合作的“Those kind Nights”中，脱衣舞俱乐部对性骚扰的那些懒散赞同是怎么回事?精神病性杀人狂:你发出声音了。脱衣舞女:并非如此。

《Music to Be Murdered By》专辑中最自私过分的疏忽，尤其是在“Darkness”的背景之下，就是和布鲁克林说唱歌手Young M.A合作的“Unaccommodating”这首歌。Eminem通过暗讽另一场演唱会的悲剧，来削弱令人印象深刻的狂欢:“我考虑在演唱中大喊‘有炸弹’/就像我在Ariana Grande的演出场会外等待一样。”这首歌发布几小时后，就受到了曼彻斯特市长的谴责。对Eminem而言，他或许偶尔会有共情的时候，但这在他的音乐中仍然很难找到。