Huh. The new video for Eminem and Rihanna's "Love The Way You Lie" (which, man is that chorus jarringly disjointed from the verse) is almost like a stay-at-home-version of the video for Cee-Lo's "No One's Gonna Love You More Than I Do." And it starts out just like the video for Cee-Lo's "What Part of Forever." The only difference, really, is that Dominic Monaghan and Megan Fox burst into flames into flames in the Eminem and Rihanna video. Remember when MTV wouldn't let rappers show fire in their videos? Weird.

The video for Eminem's new song came out over the weekend. The song is good. The rat-a-tat marching band snare seems to be a natural fit, and Em's rapping sounds more honestly engaged than it has for a long time. The singing? I... don't know. The melody is catchy, I find myself humming it a lot. But I'm not completely sold on his voice. Like, maybe he should have asked Dido or Stephen Tyler or Martika to hit the high notes for him. Also: he seems so very, very serious right now. His face is so tight. The song is about his recovery from drug addiction, so it makes sense; and, again, it's good to hear him sounding focused. But here's hoping his future material finds some room for levity, too.

The first thing that's noticeable about "Not Afraid," the first single off Eminem's forthcoming album Recovery, is the singing. He's not going singer-songwriter, mind you; the chorus is constructed from an army of Ems, not unlike the ones he's gathered at awards shows past, raising their voices in a style that brings to mind ragged glam-rock anthems from 40 years ago, defiantly uniting to say that they're going to overcome their fears. Eminem has thankfully dropped the accent that plagued so much of Relapse, as well as the stale pop-culture references of his previous "comeback single" effort "We Made You"; perhaps those were just more plagues that he needed to detoxify from his system, since he sounds absolutely on fire as he gets both angry at the world and his own recent on-record shortcomings ("In fact, let's be honest, that last Relapse CD was eh / Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground"). The standard disclaimers about pop stars having a tougher go at world domination in the fractured universe of 2010 still apply with this track, but it's nice to hear a new track that is the aural equivalent of completely going for it, and I suspect that because of that quality — and the still-potent-to-many idea of Eminem rising up from the ashes to take on the world — "Not Afraid" will be pretty unavoidable by this time next month.