#101, "Renegade," Jay-Z (featuring Eminem) (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #101, "Renegade," Jay-Z (featuring Eminem) (2001)

Let's get this out of the way first: Nas was right, in 2001, when he said that Eminem killed Jay on his own shit.

You can say what you will about the ways Eminem chose to direct his talent—and I have, as have numerous others—but you also can't really deny its existence. In 2000-2002, it's hard to argue that Eminem wasn't the best at rapping. In terms of using language as an instrument, he didn't even really have any competition. Certainly not from Jay-Z, who got utterly dismantled here as a rapper. Jay sounds about 75 years old and very sleepy, while Eminem sounds like he's determined to unburden his shoulder of the world's largest chip. 

(You can question whether that's the point of a collaboration—to make your collaborator sound old and slow—but most rappers do it. Bun B once outlined how to destroy a rapper who invites you on for a guest verse in an interview with The Believer.)

This period of Eminem's career always fascinated me, because he had the entire world's attention for a couple of years. And he was determined to make the world see just how good he was at what he did in that time. On "Quitter," he preserves Tupac's cadence and like eighty percent of the rhyme scheme to "Hit 'Em Up,' while changing all of the words so they're specific to his feud with Everlast; on "Business," he comes up with a rhyme for "orange," a word that famously rhymes with nothing (Em does “door hinge”); on "Criminal," he raps in the voices and accents of seven different characters in a single verse; and in "Renegade," he drops 16 lines in a row full of rich assonance and internal rhymes that use the same complex five-syllable scheme for an entire verse, while outpacing Jay-Z in both the speed of his delivery and the number of syllables per line he delivers. It's ridiculous. He had the attention of the entire world at that moment, and he was committed to being absolutely incredible at what he did. 

But also: so what?

You can't write about the brilliance of Eminem's talent, and the effort he obviously put into developing and demonstrating that gift, without also writing about the ways he squandered it, and used it to hurt people in the world. It's the immensely frustrating contradiction of his career. He was so impossibly skilled at structuring rhymes and rapping in ways that were both more complex than anybody else at the time, but also incredibly musical. And he chose to use that talent to verbally abuse his ex-wife with the complicit help of a global fanbase; to bully people who were already bullied by society; and to use his capacity for introspection to navel-gaze and pity himself, rather than accomplish anything constructive.

It's such a waste, and it's immensely disappointing. It's something that it's hard not to hear every time you turn on “Renegade,” and you hear Jay sounds slow and lifeless, and realize that he’s been infinitely more relevant in most of the years since than Eminem has. For all the talent that Em possessed, most of what he raps about in this song, which may be his finest hour as a lyricist, is a lie. The hook that he wrote—"I'm a renegade / never been afraid to talk about anything"—is only true if you think that being unafraid to reinforce the status quo is somehow genuinely transgressive. Glamorizing homophobia and gendered violence aren't exactly the actions of someone on the cutting edge.

And then when you listen to Jay's verses again, they stand out a little bit more. No one was the rapper that Eminem was from 2000-2002. That's a run of unmatched brilliance up there with Hunter S. Thompson from '71-'74, or Devin Hester in 2007-2008, or Beyoncé from 2013-2016. But Jay's a better writer. Eminem raps like no one else could have about the way it feels to be Eminem; Jay-Z raps about the difficulty of growing up poor and chasing a dream, and of making decisions that risk everything in order to give yourself the chance to succeed. Which one sounds more relevant to the rest of the world to you?

For a long time, the technical proficiency of Eminem's lyrics—here, and in "Quitter," and "Criminal," and "Business," and elsewhere—were utterly dazzling to me. And there is something inspiring, as strange as it is to use that word in connection with Eminem, in hearing someone who knew that they had to do their absolute best possible work because having the ear of the entire world is something that so few people are ever granted. There's a lesson to that, in those moments where you have a chance to say something that people will hear: Make sure that what you say is the best thing that you're able to. 

Eminem did that, but what he was actually able to do isn't as impressive to me now as what Jay-Z did. In 2001, Eminem killed Jay-Z on his own shit. But the song lives on past that, and now, decades later, when you listen to irrelevant Eminem rap irrelevantly about how irrelevant people hate him and he doesn't care, it all sounds a lot different. Nobody wants to ban Eminem now. They barely remember him. Jay still sounds older and less urgent here, but he's also saying things that are true, and important. Maybe those are things that are best communicated a little more slowly.