The king of rude, ludicrous, lucrative lyrics…

[Video]
[3.70]

Will Rivitz: You ever hear a radio ad’s narrator motor through the fine print of whatever buying a used car from Randall’s Chevy Emporium entails and think, “This bangs, but what it could really use is some complaints about the Kids These Days and their face tattoos”? Yeah, me neither. Anyway, Joyner Lucas is the best part of this song, and if there’s a more damning sentence in hip-hop I haven’t heard it.
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Taylor Alatorre: In a perfect world this would have been a two-minute Joyner Lucas track, like how “Buried Alive Interlude” was billed as Drake ft. Kendrick Lamar but only featured the latter. That would have required Eminem to be more magnanimous than he’s been in his entire career, and Kamikaze is the opposite of magnanimity. Still, his verse here, in all its fidgety, crotchety paranoia, makes a better case for Eminem’s continued relevance than any Trump or MGK diss ever could. A baldfaced admission of his last album’s failure is followed immediately by the expected complaints about lean and face tats, all as a wiry Boi-1da trap beat rumbles below, letting us know this is taking place on away turf. A whirling mess of contradictions like that is just too interesting to discard.
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Thomas Inskeep: First off: Joyner Lucas, who I’ve not heard before, fuck you for following in Em’s footsteps and dropping the word “maricón” in your verse. Beyond that, Lucas has a flow, I’ll give him that. And I appreciate that Eminem gives him the entire first half of the song. Em’s verse, meanwhile, is a reminder of what made (past tense, intentional) him great in the first place: few rappers have ever had tongues as nimble as his, especially when he starts spitting double-time. In the early 2000s, listening to Marshall Mathers was a guaranteed rush, and “Lucky You,” by and large, provides that. And yeah, I’m in my 40s, and I appreciate and largely agree with his thoughts about today’s “face tat” rappers; I miss the sound of old school as much as he does. The beat here is old school (spare, with a booming bass), as is his delivery. It’s easy for me to hate Eminem in 2018, but I can’t hate “Lucky You,” because frankly, it’s kinda fire.
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Nortey Dowuona: Dribbling marimbas slide through while Hans Zimmer strings lie flat above, then get stepped on by Joyner as he repeatedly tries to outrun the thudding papier mâché and limestone drums, then Em jumps on his back and tries to ride him off into the sunset before the drums drop and trap them both behind gaping fangs.
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Micha Cavaseno: For the past few years, the internet has worked aggressively hard at the act of retconning themselves to be absolved of Eminem. That’s right, in the recorded history of music, nobody ever enjoyed “My Name Is” or “Without Me”; this was an Illuminati psy-op performed by Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, XXL magazine, Mountain Dew, the United States Army, Activision, and numerous other organizations seeking to hoodwink us all, as conspired by another misogynistic rap prodigy obsessed with hating his parents, abusing drugs and internal rhyme schemes, making unlistenable albums with terrible self-made beats, and screaming about his insecure masculinity named Earl Sweatshirt (a former fan). Unfortunately, one of the biggest victims of this dynamic is Eminem, a man who is constantly obsessed with fighting his perceptions and aggressively veering from album to album with new self-images that his audience do not recognize such as: rap virtuoso, political anti-hero and now scorned genius fighting against the unjust nature of critics/fans/time. “Lucky You” has Em and one of the most Em-like modern rappers in Joyner Lucas attacking the world around them, sounding deft and very showmanlike but mutually aggrandizing to unflattering degrees. A song like “Lucky You” isn’t bad because Eminem is inherently lame, but a reminder that ever since Relapse started the beginning of his “comeback” narratives, Eminem is incapable of doing anything but thrashing in a quicksand-like belief that he opted out of King of Rap status by retiring. To think that in his post-retirement he’s actually released two widely-panned albums within a year of each other and shows no signs of stopping, in spite of any last bits of well-regard his audience could find in an absence they sorely need.
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Jonathan Bradley: “Lucky You” gears up from a guest rapper who isn’t Eminem, to Eminem doing ad-libs and triplets that sound like the rappers Eminem does not want to sound like, to Eminem sounding exactly like what Eminem wants to sound like. It sketches with remarkable precision exactly how, in 2018, the more Eminem a song gets, the worse it becomes.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Two tedious motherfuckers join together to show that no matter your age you can still rap fast and say nothing.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: Little is as emblematic of Eminem’s juvenile rancor as the cover art for Kamikaze. It pays homage to Licensed to Ill but features a speeding jet emblazoned with the phrases “FU-2” and “Suck It.” It’s a reminder that he’s a living legend, but it’s also a warning to everyone that he’s about to respond to 1) a new generation of rappers, and 2) others’ criticisms of his recent work. Unsurprising — yet still completely embarrassing — is how the album opens up: “I feel like I wanna punch the world in the fucking face right now.” Anyone hoping that Eminem would pepper his acerbic language with the humor and capable storytelling of his earliest albums is quickly shot down. “Lucky You” is one of the better tracks on Kamikaze because it finds Eminem taking aim at these people while coming from a place of vulnerability. He concedes that he “took an L” with his last album, “sold his soul” to win Grammys, and wonders where the old Eminem is — the one that would “take that feedback and aim back.” He interpolates Kendrick when he says he has “spite inside [his] DNA,” and ends the couplet with an “ayy.” Eminem spends part of Kamikaze adopting newer rap trends whilst decrying them, ostensibly suggesting that he’s ready to embrace them: “I don’t hate trap,” he admits here. More realistically, he’s showing everyone else that he can do all this better than them. Those moments, however, mostly point to how he’s unable to adapt, and they pale in comparison to what Joyner Lucas offers here (It should be noted that Lucas’s contemporary-sounding delivery is done through a very Eminem-specific lens; Eminem devotees would never complain about Lucas’s presence). Eminem’s performance on “Lucky You” is more of the same shtick, and the moments that are technically impressive sound as tired as ever. More interesting is how it actually sounds sad in light of the lyrics. Eminem fans would laugh at such an accusation, but the double-time rapping he employs here really sounds like a crutch: a shield to hide behind as he becomes increasingly anxious about his irrelevancy. Seeing him dab in the music video and calling artists like Hopsin the “culture” on “Fall” is a reminder that this 45-year-old is just another man going through a midlife crisis. For a brief moment, the Rap God seems human, in a good way.
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Juan F. Carruyo: Eminem’s got some things to get off from his chest: one, he’s still hurt about losing to Steely Dan. Two, he very much hates trap and mumble rap despite claiming in song he doesn’t, and third, the ghost of his past addictions still carries a lot of emotional weight for him. So while it might seem he’s entering his crotchety-old-man phase — and he might be! — he actually talks a lot of sense and his performance, along with Joyner Lucas, is MVP caliber. 
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Alfred Soto: (1) Shut up, both of you, about the Grammys. (2) Eminem should not say “Lick my prick,” no matter the context. (3) Motormouthing in 2018 is the hip-hop equivalent of hair metal solos. (4) Watch them sweat the technique.
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