Covering Rap God is one of those ideas that sounds brave until you remember exactly what you’re dealing with. Eminem’s 2013 original is less a song and more an aggressive display of linguistic parkour; a six-minute speedrun where the man shoves so many syllables into a single breath you half expect his lungs to file for workers’ comp. It’s a high-wire act of technical skill, occasionally brilliant wordplay and… some punchlines that feel like they were beamed in from a different decade.
Most people, confronted with the prospect of covering this thing, would wisely choose to either leave it alone or commit the full “Weird Al” and turn it into a polka about breadsticks. MalinMakesAMess, a name that frankly undersells how considered this whole project is… she takes a third option: gutting the original’s production entirely and rebuilding it with nothing but acoustic piano and a voice that clearly knows it doesn’t have to imitate Eminem to command your attention.
The first shock is the emptiness. There’s no bombastic beat trying to prove its dominance over your cochlea, no digital hi-hat blizzard. Just the resonance of piano chords, lingering in the air like cigarette smoke in a 2AM dive bar. This shift doesn’t just slow the track down; it reframes Rap God from a breakneck boast into a kind of theatrical monologue, where every word has space to breathe and glare at you from across the stage.
Crucially, Malin doesn’t try to match the original’s absurd syllable count. The flow is stripped back, but the ferocity remains. By focusing on precision over speed, she turns bars into weapons of emphasis rather than endurance. A phrase lands, you feel it, and then there’s this deliberate pause, almost daring you to fill the silence with your own nervous laughter.
And yes, the lyrics get… pruned. Stuff like that line about how unfortunate it is Em can’t bake women a cake if he’s not allowed to batter them? Gone. Instead of mining chuckles from misogyny masquerading as cheeky wordplay, the humor here emerges from delivery with sly shifts in tone, breaths that feel like punchlines. It’s less “edgy” and more “witty character actor in a black-box theatre.”
Vocally, Malin threads the needle between spoken word and percussive flow. Her voice can be calm and conversational one moment, then snap sharp enough to draw blood the next. The piano responds in kind; sparse and moody in one verse, pounding like an approaching thunderstorm in another.
The result is a Rap God you could imagine being performed live to an audience sipping overpriced whiskey, not shotgunning Monster Energy. The hooks are there, but they’re declarations rather than victory laps.
Ultimately, Malin’s cover of Rap God isn’t trying to out-Eminem Eminem. It’s about transformation; taking a monument to speed and making it about weight. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the most radical way to reinterpret a “fast rap” flex is to slow it down, strip it bare, and let the silences do some of the talking. Because when you leave the gaps open, the words you do choose hit that much harder.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
