Review
Since 1999, rap’s tightest whitey has waged a fierce rhyme battle against the only opponents on Earth that are skilled enough to take him: the voices in his head. He calls two of the most prominent ones Eminem and Slim Shady, but it doesn’t stop with them. There are also Stan, Rabbit and the needle-voiced mariachi from D12’s “My Band” who makes one hell of a salsa. For Marshall Mathers, rap is therapeutic theater; a place to wrestle with mischievous impulses and lifelong traumas — including, but not limited to, those caused by Debbie, his neglectful-mother-turned-litigant and Kim, his off-and-on-girlfriend-turned-wife-turned-ex-wife-turned-murder-fantasy.
Mathers has long toyed with the idea of identity crisis. For him, “Lose yourself in the music” isn’t just an inspirational “Eye of the Tiger” slogan. To paraphrase his 2000 hit “The Way I Am,” when he rhymes, Mathers is whoever he says he is. That’s true more than ever on his fourth album, as he culture-munches his way through a cast that includes R. Kelly, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christopher Reeve (who tells us, via droning talk-box, “See you in hell, fuckers”), a listener sick of Em’s whining and a Southern yokel pontificating on homosexuality.
You can trace Eminem’s shape-shifting back to his wonder years in Detroit, explored here on “Yellow Brick Road.” Black kids jumped him and moneyed whites shunned him, marooning him somewhere in between with a fractured sense of identity. “How can I be white? I don’t even exist,” he rapped in 1999. Here, that existential dilemma becomes a delirious expression of freedom: If he’s no one, then he can be anyone. While 2000’s Marshall Mathers LP and 2002’s Eminem Showwere frequently solemn, rage-torn affairs, with Encore, Eminem rediscovers his sense of play and lets it run naked and screaming across the stage.
Why? Well, for starters, he’s bored. “What else could I possibly do to make noise?” he asks on the plinky dance-pop single “Just Lose It,” which sounds goofier than anything he’s ever recorded. “I done touched on everything but little boys.” Em knows the first rule of controversy: Once people come to expect shock from you, it’s hard to get even Lynne Cheney worked up by your provocations. He opens the Dr. Dre–produced “Rain Man” on a familiar note, rapping “I find you offensive for finding me offensive” — but he’s done the censorship thing to death, so he lapses into dizzying wordplay, spits nonsense and sings about how he’s got no legs. Throughout Encore, psychobabble edges out psychodrama. At one point, he actually rhymes “Yoo-Hoo” with “dippity-ga-ga-boo-boo.”
Eminem has clearly been hanging out with an 8-year-old kid named Hailie. How else to explain the flood of bathroom noises, riffs on nursery rhymes and repeated use of the words weenie, puke and pee-pee? For some men, fatherhood means a newfound sense of maturity. For Eminem, it means finding your inner child and giving him a wedgie.
But Eminem isn’t all Captain Underpants here. On “Ass Like That,” a sitar-laced, pedophile-obsessed booty ode, he adopts Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s Russian cackle, rolling every r: “Do not treat me like a murderer, I just like to pee/Pee, pee, yes, I make R&B!” It’s a goofy moment, but a richly layered one, too & Eminem pretending to be comic Robert Smigel pretending to be Triumph pretending to be R. Kelly — and it ingeniously dramatizes Em’s longtime obsession with artistic responsibility. If some guy can don a plastic pooch and get away with obscene, politically incorrect rants, Mathers asks, why can’t I speak through my own puppets without getting blamed for the downfall of Western culture?
On “Mosh,” a lurching Bush-bash that makes Bruce Springsteen look like Toby Keith, levity disappears altogether. The Heart-sampling “Crazy in Love” bitterly retreads Eminem’s love/hate relationship with Kim, while “Like Toy Soldiers” cleverly taps Martika’s teary 1989 breakup anthem for a rebuff against The Source magazine (which attempted to label him a racist last year). These moments offer depth or drama, downplaying Eminem’s acrobatic flow and Google-fast wit. Irony is a rare gift in hip-hop, so it’s to Em’s credit that he knows when to deep-six his.
Encore takes a sharp nosedive into rote ho’-hate (“Spend Some Time”) and gun-talk (“One Shot 2 Shot”) towards the end, but these songs are skippably minor. The real story here is of a man losing himself and having a hell of a time at it. As the Pee-Wee–sampling “Just Lose It” suggests, this is Em’s Playhouse: Chairy has 'shrooms stuck in her cushions, the King of Cartoons screens Jenna Jameson flicks and the secret word is always fart.
DOWNLOAD: “Rain Man,” “Ass Like That,” “Never Enough”
Mathers has long toyed with the idea of identity crisis. For him, “Lose yourself in the music” isn’t just an inspirational “Eye of the Tiger” slogan. To paraphrase his 2000 hit “The Way I Am,” when he rhymes, Mathers is whoever he says he is. That’s true more than ever on his fourth album, as he culture-munches his way through a cast that includes R. Kelly, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Christopher Reeve (who tells us, via droning talk-box, “See you in hell, fuckers”), a listener sick of Em’s whining and a Southern yokel pontificating on homosexuality.
You can trace Eminem’s shape-shifting back to his wonder years in Detroit, explored here on “Yellow Brick Road.” Black kids jumped him and moneyed whites shunned him, marooning him somewhere in between with a fractured sense of identity. “How can I be white? I don’t even exist,” he rapped in 1999. Here, that existential dilemma becomes a delirious expression of freedom: If he’s no one, then he can be anyone. While 2000’s Marshall Mathers LP and 2002’s Eminem Showwere frequently solemn, rage-torn affairs, with Encore, Eminem rediscovers his sense of play and lets it run naked and screaming across the stage.
Why? Well, for starters, he’s bored. “What else could I possibly do to make noise?” he asks on the plinky dance-pop single “Just Lose It,” which sounds goofier than anything he’s ever recorded. “I done touched on everything but little boys.” Em knows the first rule of controversy: Once people come to expect shock from you, it’s hard to get even Lynne Cheney worked up by your provocations. He opens the Dr. Dre–produced “Rain Man” on a familiar note, rapping “I find you offensive for finding me offensive” — but he’s done the censorship thing to death, so he lapses into dizzying wordplay, spits nonsense and sings about how he’s got no legs. Throughout Encore, psychobabble edges out psychodrama. At one point, he actually rhymes “Yoo-Hoo” with “dippity-ga-ga-boo-boo.”
Eminem has clearly been hanging out with an 8-year-old kid named Hailie. How else to explain the flood of bathroom noises, riffs on nursery rhymes and repeated use of the words weenie, puke and pee-pee? For some men, fatherhood means a newfound sense of maturity. For Eminem, it means finding your inner child and giving him a wedgie.
But Eminem isn’t all Captain Underpants here. On “Ass Like That,” a sitar-laced, pedophile-obsessed booty ode, he adopts Triumph the Insult Comic Dog’s Russian cackle, rolling every r: “Do not treat me like a murderer, I just like to pee/Pee, pee, yes, I make R&B!” It’s a goofy moment, but a richly layered one, too & Eminem pretending to be comic Robert Smigel pretending to be Triumph pretending to be R. Kelly — and it ingeniously dramatizes Em’s longtime obsession with artistic responsibility. If some guy can don a plastic pooch and get away with obscene, politically incorrect rants, Mathers asks, why can’t I speak through my own puppets without getting blamed for the downfall of Western culture?
On “Mosh,” a lurching Bush-bash that makes Bruce Springsteen look like Toby Keith, levity disappears altogether. The Heart-sampling “Crazy in Love” bitterly retreads Eminem’s love/hate relationship with Kim, while “Like Toy Soldiers” cleverly taps Martika’s teary 1989 breakup anthem for a rebuff against The Source magazine (which attempted to label him a racist last year). These moments offer depth or drama, downplaying Eminem’s acrobatic flow and Google-fast wit. Irony is a rare gift in hip-hop, so it’s to Em’s credit that he knows when to deep-six his.
Encore takes a sharp nosedive into rote ho’-hate (“Spend Some Time”) and gun-talk (“One Shot 2 Shot”) towards the end, but these songs are skippably minor. The real story here is of a man losing himself and having a hell of a time at it. As the Pee-Wee–sampling “Just Lose It” suggests, this is Em’s Playhouse: Chairy has 'shrooms stuck in her cushions, the King of Cartoons screens Jenna Jameson flicks and the secret word is always fart.
DOWNLOAD: “Rain Man,” “Ass Like That,” “Never Enough”
