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All great hip-hop beats are built off of the greatest samples in the world. For anyone who’s remotely interested in music production, it’s important to remember that every song sampled by your favourite artist tends to be a great track on its own before someone starts spitting over it. While Eminem did know how to flip Dido’s ‘Thank You’ into one of the best samples of all time on ‘Stan’, he was walking on thin ice before he had even started making ‘Houdini’ by sampling Steve Miller Band.

After all, rock and roll has always been fertile ground for hip-hop samples. The basic riffs of classic rock lend themselves fairly well to dark hip-hop tunes, and it’s hard to think of the genre’s golden age without hearing people using the iconic drum break from Led Zeppelin’s ‘When the Levee Breaks’ for their own records.

That’s not to say that obvious samples can’t work for a reason. The Fugees had spent their entire career making beats centred around the best choruses of all time, and even Em had a habit of putting timeless rock hooks into his songs like ‘Sing for the Moment’ and Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’ or interpolating Black Sabbath for the song ‘Going Through Changes’.

When looking at Steve Miller Band, they aren’t necessarily anyone’s first choice for a hip-hop sample. Sure, Miller can play the guitar like it’s second nature, but ‘Abracadabra’ has got to be one of the most straightforward songs he would ever write, including a chorus that practically sounds like he’s about to fall asleep.

That’s before you even get to the beat. For a genre that’s solely based around rhythm, the drum part behind ‘Abracadabra’ is so steady that it may as well be a drum machine with the most basic setting thrown on top of it. In the case of Eminem, that might not have actually been all that bad.

Since half of his appeal in his later years is about how he raps fast, this could have just been a way for him to reintroduce Slim Shady to the world by going crazy over the most minimal beat possible. Unfortunately, this is still post-2010 Eminem, and that means that fans were relying on a lot less cutthroat bars and more dad jokes.

Aside from lines that are designed to get people riled up, like him asking if he can get “a shot at a feat” with Megan Thee Stallion, many of the most memorable lines in the song come from him making dad-pun-level similies, like talking about how he is ahead of everyone else “like my noggin is”. Miller did end up giving his approval, telling Vulture that Eminem is “one of those timeless originators building something new on a long musical legacy of original artists.”

It’s completely natural for a lot of people to want the old Slim back for a little while, but listening to ‘Houdini’ isn’t really about the young and hungry kid who liked to make a lot of inappropriate jokes. This is a victory lap for Eminem as he closes out this portion of his career, and despite some truly unforgivable bars, it’s hard not to look at him as a weird dad now. An offensive, cringe-worthy dad at points, but still endearing nonetheless.