Eminem’s collaboration with Beyoncé on “Walk on Water” is a raw, introspective track where Eminem confronts his self-doubt and struggles with fame. Beyoncé’s powerful chorus adds emotional depth, making the song a poignant anthem about insecurity and redemption.
Eminem’s collaboration with Beyoncé on “Walk on Water” is a raw, introspective track where Eminem confronts his self-doubt and struggles with fame. Beyoncé’s powerful chorus adds emotional depth, making the song a poignant anthem about insecurity and redemption.
Eminem spends nearly every one of this song’s 304 seconds fretting aloud about his own obsolescence.
What was originally supposed to be Taylor Swift’s victory lap after unleashing her new album Reputation, was overshadowed by Marshall and Beyoncé’s monstrous collaboration, “Walk on Water.” Penciled in as the first single off Eminem’s forthcoming album, Revival, the 8 Mile lyricist openly delves into his struggles with fame, and wrestling with fans’ boulder-sized expectations of him.
“Always in search of the verse that I haven’t spit yet/ Will this step just be another misstep/ To tarnish whatever the legacy, love or respect I’ve garnered?/ The rhyme has to be perfect, the delivery flawless,” raps Em over the Rick Rubin-produced beat.
The big news this time around is that the crooned hook is offered by Beyoncé, a strangely regressive role for the biggest pop star on the planet. Nonetheless, she executes it with her typical feather-light touch and superhuman poise, her singing trembling expertly at the border between head and chest voice. The track, produced by Rick Rubin, sounds made for a commercial, a noncommittal gloop of grand piano and strings with no beat.
It’s an appropriately blank canvas for Mathers to scribble on, and he blots out every inch of white space with his chains of logorrhea. As usual, it sounds impressive on the surface, but a closer look reveals wording either leaden (“It’s the curse of the standard that the first of the Mathers discs set”) or nonsensical (“pressure increases like khakis”). Once, Eminem rhymed with such audible joy that it almost excused his puerility. Now, rapping sounds almost unendurable to him, even though he doesn’t know how to stop—in the last 10 seconds, after Beyoncé gracefully bows out, he can’t help butting back in to remind us: “Bitch, I wrote ‘Stan’!” Yeah, Marshall. We remember.
