Emergency Rations is a concept album whose premise centers around Mr. Lif's fictional kidnapping presumably by government agents.

[2] He also raps about societal ills such as gender socialization, the vapid state of pop culture, and the dehumanizing effects of capitalism.

[3] Lif's thoughtful, confrontational lyrics are backed by Akrobatik and El-P's dissonant production, which evokes feelings of paranoia and alienation.

Club, Nathan Rabin highlighted the EP's "solid blast of social consciousness" and wrote that it possessed "a raw, unfinished quality that more than lives up to the urgency of its title".

According to him, Lif used the EP as both a set up for his subsequent concept album, I Phantom (2002), and as "an excuse to drop random science about the place of hip hop in the military-industrial complex.