Eminem’s new single, “Rap God,” is six minutes of more or less continuous rapping. (A brief hook appears three times, but even that varies lyrically each time.) There’s plenty of impressive rhymesmithery—over rather so-so production—and several uses of “gay” as an insult (not to mention multiple appearances of Eminem’s favorite f-word.)
But the lines getting most of the attention today start around the 4:25 mark and last about 20 seconds.
Got all that? The devoted hip-hop fans at Rap Genius have been working on it, and while editing continues—someone there just added the word “devastating” in the fifth line within the past hour or so—I think they’ve pretty much got them down at this point. Here’s where their transcription stands, with one tiny change by me in the fourth line:
Uh, sama lamaa duma lamaa, you assuming I’m a human
What I gotta do to get it through to you I’m superhuman
Innovative and I’m made of rubber
So that anything you say is ricocheting off of me and it’ll glue to you
I’m devastating, more than ever demonstrating
How to give a motherfuckin’ audience a feeling like it’s levitating
Never fading, and I know that the haters are forever waiting
For the day that they can say I fell off, they’d be celebrating
’Cause I know the way to get ’em motivated
I make elevating music, you make elevator music
You’ll want to head over to the Rap Genius page for “Rap God” to check out the annotations (e.g., “sama lamaa duma lamaa” alludes to the remix of a JJ Fad song, “Supersonic,” mentioned by Eminem one line earlier).
Some are taking the tour de force performance as a response to Kendrick Lamar’s much discussed appearance on the Big Sean track “Control,” widely hailed as the “verse of the year.” Make all the Micro Machines jokes you want, but I’d say that, at the very least, there’s another contender.
