Even with a history of harsh reviews, Anthony Fantano placed Eminem in the highest spot on his new tier list.
Anthony Fantano, better known as “The Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd”, has dropped another tier list, this time ranking white rappers.
Working alphabetically, Fantano talked about MGK before Eminem. He wasn’t shy about calling out MGK’s pivot from rap to rock: “Sometimes I even question how much passion is in there to begin with, given that he so easily switched genres after taking such a massive L against Eminem”. Commenting, that “you could do a lot worse than MGK” (and an F tier proves this), Fantano put him in a D tier, and turned to Marshall Mathers himself.
“Eminem, Marshall Mathers, white rapper extraordinaire. There’s a whole generation of white rappers who sound exactly the way they do because of this guy. He pretty much gave white rappers the handbook on how to be a white rapper. There are a lot of people that hold that against him. Although he just has a sound and he has a style that got popular and influenced a lot of people who grew up listening to him, and it is what it is. His discography is not the most consistent either. Even the most hardcore Eminem fans know, the guy has put out some pretty mediocre stuff here and there. But with that being said, you can’t deny he has come out with some of the most game-changing and significant hip hop music of the past 20-30 years. And while you can chalk up at least some of Eminem’s popularity to the fact that he does appeal in a particular way because he’s white, even Eminem would tell you this, he has reached and displayed over the course of his career a certain level of technical proficiency, talent, and lyrical creativity that few artists have ever reached. Even if he does display a lot of that with an occasionally cringy sense of humour, which is not for everybody. And that’s the thing, many Eminem songs and records personally are not for me, but I can’t deny the guy’s incomparable impact, both commercially and culturally”.
For all that, Fantano gave Eminem the highest possible placement: S tier. Em joined Beastie Boys and Aesop Rock there.
That’s an example of how a music reviewer can weigh his own preferences while acknowledging the scale of an artist he does not even personally like that much. Fantano has never been particularly generous to Eminem in his album reviews, yet that did not stop him from ranking Em at the top, proving the placement was not based on preference alone.
Yelawolf, a former Shady Records artist, landed in the D tier alongside Post Malone and Macklemore. While Fantano acknowledged Yelawolf’s talent, he pointed to an uneven catalogue that, in his view, never lived up to the strength of Yela’s early mixtapes.
Love them or hate them, tier lists like this always get fans talking. How do you feel about this one?
