The grim reason why Manchester mayor Andy Burnham condemned Eminem
May 22, 2017, was a terrible day for the United Kingdom. At the Manchester Arena that night, where Ariana Grande was headlining a show, a terrorist attack was carried out. Twenty-two people were killed and more than a thousand were injured.
It was a shocking event that left the country reeling, and it sparked an outpouring of sympathy and support from around the world. In the immediate wake of the attacks, several prominent celebrities reached out to their followers online and urged them to donate money to help the victims.
Among them, encouraging his Twitter followers to give money to a crowdfunding page set up by Manchester City Council and the British Red Cross, was Eminem. He also reportedly contributed an undisclosed amount himself.
But while Em’s actions in the immediate aftermath of the attacks were laudable, he later generated a great deal of controversy by referring to the incident in one of his songs. His lyrics proved so offensive that he even attracted harsh criticism from Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester who, today, is at the centre of a political storm threatening to unseat Keir Starmer as Britain’s prime minister.
The lyrics in question cropped up in the song ‘Unaccommodating,’ which featured on his 2020 album Music To Be Murdered By. “I’m contemplating yelling ‘bombs away’ on the game,” he raps. “Like I’m outside of an Ariana Grande concert waiting.” These words were followed by an explosion sound effect.
Eminem had been generating controversy with his music for more than two decades by this stage, but this one still seemed to shock people. Many on Twitter began criticising him under the hashtag #EminemIsOverParty.
The mother of one of the victims of the attacks especially received a lot of coverage, after she responded to Eminem’s lyrics. Writing on Twitter, she suggested that Eminem was “piggybacking on the fame of Ariana Grande” by saying “distasteful things.” It was “not clever” and “totally pointless,” she said.
But the controversy even spread into the realm of politics, with Burnham, who had only been elected mayor of Manchester a couple of weeks before the attacks took place, feeling compelled to offer a response. He characterised the lyrics as “unnecessarily hurtful and deeply disrespectful to the families and all those affected.”
The bitter criticism of Eminem’s lyrics did little to dampen the success of Music To Be Murdered By. The album reached number one in the UK charts, and it stayed in the top 100 for the better part of a year.