title Music to be Murdered By comes from a 1958

album by English filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock,

Hollywood’s “Master of Suspense.” The LP pairs
quirky orchestral pieces by conductor Jeff Alexander
with darkly funny spoken-word passages by
Hitchcock—things like, “I trust that everyone is
enjoying the music. As the title of the album
suggests, this was meant for your listening pleasure
—while you are being done in.”
At some point, Em’s mentor and fr
2There was actually some stuff that didn’t make it on
there that I was trying to get on there,” Eminem said
in an interview with Crook’s Corner. “We couldn’t
really work it out with the sample clearing. But I had
it even more intertwined [with the Hitchcock album]
than it was, and we had to pick and choose the best
pieces to put on there just for sampling.”
Indeed, Eminem’s Music to be Murdered By isn’t full
of songs about homicide—not any more than a
typical Eminem album. Sure, he raps from the POV
of the Route 91 concert shooter on the
controversial “Darkness,” and he fantasizes about
beating his stepfather to death with a baseball bat
on “Stepdad.” But throughout the album, Em mostly
does what he always does and claps back at critics,
says outrageous things about pop-culture figures
and major news events, and backs up his rap-god
boasting with breathless rhyme sprints and
homophone