Shady and the Lady

Though M.I.A. and Eminem are stylistically worlds apart, they share a sincere desire to upend expectations. M.I.A.’s previous album, “MAYA,” from 2010, was thrilling and discordant, but seemed to baffle some of her core audience, as if she were going off some sort of aesthetic deep end. Without a hint of apology or anxiety, she has returned with a double-barrelled coup: “Matangi” is an entirely coherent pop album that makes no concessions to anything currently popular in North America. For Eminem, the challenge was simply to return to form and to prove his physical and artistic health. In the last decade, he engaged in a publicly reported battle with prescription drugs, after which he disavowed two albums, writing off an extended, commercially successful stretch of his career: “Encore” and “Relapse” “didn’t count,” he rapped on “Recovery,” from 2010. Eminem, born Marshall Mathers III, has said that with his new album, “The Marshall Mathers LP 2,” he is trying to recapture the spirit of the agile, loony rapper who, in 2000, released his biggest-selling album, “The Marshall Mathers LP.” In 2013, that mission may be doomed.

It’s not that he has lost any skill as a performer. His voice is as nimble as it’s ever been, but that, oddly, is part of the problem. Nobody doubts his prodigious talent. Few rappers have loved words and their physical properties more, the way that language can be split into musical bits and arranged in any order. But his desire to reëstablish his bona fides has introduced an uneasy tension into his music: he’s rapping well, technically, but he seems to have learned nothing from what has been, by any account, a difficult life. Whereas M.I.A. has eased herself into an alpha position of her own design, Eminem—the far bigger commercial force—can’t seem to find anything that eases his pain. . . .