You can just hear the chatter in the back kitchen at all the snottiest pop parties: ‘Ooo I love Marshall, but I do wish he wouldn’t insist on bringing that nasty D12 crew along.’ Well, tough. Eminem seems intent on breaking the productivity rule that binds artists to the album/press junket/world tour/recovery phase three-year cycle, and the level of sheer detail on D12 records keeps the enterprise from deteriorating into jobs-for-the-boyz.
If anything D12 World revels in the kind of sonic sophistication that kept Mathers’ last album a hair off transcendence – even the title tune, a stopgap by this mob’s standards, is a smoky snake charmer with Mediterranean violin.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The posse’s second album opens with the straight-left/right cross combo of ‘Git Up’, replete with whipcrack skip-rope beat, and Obie Trice’s showcase ‘Loyalty’, all Axel F cheesy synths and a rhythm track that puts the repercussion in percussion. Thereafter it becomes apparent that even the throwaway trash carries weight: ‘I’ll Be Damned’ gobs off a litany of PC (pussy-crazed) obscenities (“From day one I knew you was a ho/I put a rubber on my toe and fucked you some mo’”), but is also studded with the kind of earwig chorus the dirty dozen seem to devise at leisure as a means of killing time between blunts and beers.
Later, ‘How Come’ is a three-way ‘Et tu’ meditation on broken honour codes sweetened with a nagging melody, ‘G In The Morning’ rolls caterpillar tracks over what sounds like a loop lifted from Elvin Jones and pumped up on studio steroids, while ‘Leave Dat Boy Alone’ packs a loping beat, trumpet shrieks and gothicky textures one step from horrorcore.
They do humour too. ‘My Band’ you’ll know from the tube, a hymn to LV Syndrome that’ll have disgruntled rhythm sections the world over nodding their heads. Forget The Eminem Show – this is The Goons, The Pythons, Peter Cook and Peter Sellers in Doctor Strangelove. Likewise, ‘Just Like U’ is a version of Bukowski’s bad advice for minors that contrasts lines like, “I fuck two twins with a midget on top” with a faux kiddie chorus of: “I wanna be just like you/When I grow up”.
This is no stopgap; this is the main event. D12 World is the most addictive potty-mouthed hip-hop artefact since Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s Nigga Please.