In 2017, music was still coming to terms with a Donald Trump presidency. It was a year to reflect on the state of America, to step back and understand what the republic is facing. Artists like Kendrick Lamar and Hurray for the Riff Raff and Vince Staples analysed what this means for their communities. And some of our most vocal musicians were quiet, shellshocked. Not Eminem—even between albums he was loud. He got thousands of fans chanting "fuck Donald Trump" this summer, then, during the BET Awards, he set the internet on fire with a four minute freestyle that was an open vent of pent up frustration. "Any fan of mine who's a supporter of his / I'm drawing in the sand a line / you're either for or against / and if you can't decide who you like more and you're split on who you should stand beside / I'll do it for it for you with this / Fuck you," Eminem rapped.
"It needed to be said," Elton John tells Eminem in a new conversation between the two in Interview magazine. People should be mad, and Eminem has always been the performer to channel anger. As Eminem told John:
It was about having the right to stand up to oppression. I mean, that's exactly what the people in the military and the people who have given their lives for this country have fought for—for everybody to have a voice and to protest injustices and speak out against shit that's wrong. We're not trying to disrespect the military, we're not trying to disrespect the flag, we're not trying to disrespect our country. But shit is going on that we want to make you aware of. We have a president who does not care about everybody in our country; he is not the president for all of us, he is the president for some of us. He knows what he's doing.
Those are ideas that America was built upon. It's a nation of protest—one that was created to give a voice to everyone.
As long as he's got his base, he does not give a fuck about anybody else in America. But guess what? There's more of us than there are of them. I still feel like America is the greatest country to live in. This is my opinion. But we have issues that we need to work on and we need to do better.
