I was never a fan of Eminem

growing up. I didn’t listen to hip-hop much at all except stuff like Nelly and Puffy that was played on Z-100. I was a bit of a lame, if you would care to say. But I started actually listening to Eminem this past Spring I suppose, when I was living back in NB. And the thing that makes him so good, so much better than so many other rappers, is not his albums or his edginess or his public persona or the clothes he wears or the banners he puts up around NYC. It’s the fact that he has actual lyrical skill, that he approaches rap as a craft and works to perfect and improve it. Lil Wayne did this for a little while when he was still on the mixtape circuit, but even then he was highly prone to reusing verses and his rhymes were fairly simplistic and he didn’t really work at flow acceleration or internal rhyme schemes or anything like that. But Eminem does. What makes him so much better than so many people is not what he puts out, it’s the work he does that never reaches the public’s ears…