“I am to rap what blue jeans mean to Bruce Springsteen,” declares Eminem on his 10th album. It is a typically audacious internal rhyme (the triple beat of “blue jeans mean” with “Bruce Springsteen”) with an amusing pop-cultural metaphor encompassing a boast that delights in its own silliness.

It is also arguably true. Just as Springsteen is an iconic standard bearer for American rock, Eminem has been the dominant figure of his hip-hop generation. He is not just the biggest-selling artist of the genre, but the most provocatively gifted – a brilliant wordsmith with an astonishing command of narrative, metaphor, rhyme and rhythm. The Springsteen gag is just one throwaway line on an album where ideas come at the listener like a torrent, a verbal avalanche from a man who describes himself as “the Simon Cowell / of rhyming foul”.

And it can be pretty foul. “Man I know these thoughts can be harsh and cold as ice,” he admits of his instinct for controversy. “To me they’re just ink blots / I just fling ‘em like sling shots.”

Revival represents Eminem on top form, which is to say unstoppable, unbeatable yet often indefensible. One person who won’t be impressed is Donald Trump, who has become the 45-year-old rapper’s enemy in chief. “Someone get this Aryan a sheet / Time to bury him, so tell him to prepare to get impeached,” he snaps on Like Home. With an anthemic chorus from Alicia Keys, it posits Eminem as an unlikely patriot, waving a flag for the freedoms that allow him to speak out with such frank fierceness.