At the end of 2005, Eminem seemed to have completely wiped his hands of the business that had, whether he liked it or not, given him fame and fortune. In this year the Detroit rapper released his ominously titled greatest hits collection, Curtain Call and the equally ominous single When I’m Gone. Most of the lyrics of this flagship single all but told the world that Mr. Mathers was giving up his alter ego, Slim Shady, as well as his pen name, Eminem, so that he could get back to just being Marshall and more importantly to being ‘Dad’.
Lyrics like, ‘I turn around, find a gun on the ground, cock it, put it to my brain, scream “Die Shady” and pop it’ are not really the words of a person who is happy pretending to be someone else, but then again The Way I Am told us early on that Eminem was not happy being Slim Shady all of the time. But, in When I’m Gone, Eminem also said ‘Slim Shady’s crazy, Shady made me but tonight Shady’s rock a by baby’, the inclusion of the lullaby suggesting that this persona was not being killed off, but merely being put to sleep for a while.
And so he was.
On Monday 18th May 2009 Relapse was released, thereby reintroducing Eminem into the industry he seemed to have turned his back on, an industry that had become ridden with talentless and tacky pop rappers in his absence. Fans of Eminem will surely be somewhat unsure of what to make of this new album being as though the first release from it was Crack A Bottle – a collaboration between Eminem, his mentor and producer Dr. Dre, and his own (not so) little protégé 50 Cent. The beat on the song was great (when is a Dre beat not great?) but the effort stank of the commercial rap that 50 Cent has made a habit of firing out; the type that will be catchy, sell loads and get played in clubs but is not what Eminem has been, or ever will be loved for – Ass Like That or Smack That anyone? No? Didn’t think so.
The second single was We Made You, one of Eminem’s celebrity-observational-comedy tunes that, although funny, was not offering the Eminem fans what they really wanted. The beat was again produced by Dre, as all but one of the 20 songs on the album are, but this still failed to convince that Slim Shady was really back.
Patience was wearing thin and the album release date was approaching. Was Eminem’s new album going to be a shameless effort to make up the money he lost due to his messy second divorce from Kim?
Thankfully, 3am said, in a blood curdling scream, “No!”. It was the release of this fantastical, autobiographical horror tale of having a relapse in rehab and killing everyone in the hospital which confirmed that not only had Slim Shady returned, but he was stepping into places darker than those he had previously strayed into, after all, even though there are definitely darker songs in Eminem’s discography, most obviously Kim, none of these have been released. So Slim Shady was starting to show a broader audience just how disturbed a life lived with an alleged drug abusing mother, suicidal ex-wife, and Bizarre, can leave you. On the album, 3am is introduced effectively by a skit featuring British actor Dominic West, a.k.a. McNulty from The Wire, a.k.a. the best cop ever, but in this instance known as the pretty scary shrink, Dr. West.
Dr. West and 3am are promptly backed up by My Mom. In this last track Eminem experiences a beautiful piece of the-apple-doesn’t-fall-far-from-the-tree realisation and accepts that his past abuse of all things drug-ish has made him just as bad as the woman he has slated for over 10 years, although his being like this may still be her fault. It is funny and fresh and Eminem does not ignore the criticism that he tends to talk about his mum a lot, instead acknowledging it but going about his business anyway.
Insane is the fourth track on the new album and is about as sick as Eminem’s lyrics have ever been and that isn’t ‘sick’ in the modern complimentary sense. The track describes (what we can only hope to be) fake, incestuous gay rape from his step-father in disturbing graphic detail and includes other lyrics like: ‘Don’t you know what ‘felch’ means? (Yeah) Well then tell me, would you rather get felched or do the felching? Fuck ‘em in the ass suck the come out while you’re belching’. Strong stuff. If Eminem somehow decided to release that song he would undoubtedly have to deal with more trouble from the media than ever before, and this is a man who was almost investigated by the United States Secret Service for saying ‘I don’t rap for dead presidents, I’d rather see the President dead’ in We As Americans, a bonus track on Encore.
Track eight is Same Song & Dance, another scary tale of murder inspired by Eminem’s obsession with serial killers, laid over a disturbingly mellow beat, resulting in memories of ’97 Bonnie & Clyde being woken from the depths of the fans’ minds – only ever a good thing. A similar effect is produced by Stay Wide Awake, but this is more about getting into the dark reaches of Eminem’s imagination and sounds almost like a more perverted version of The Watcher on Dr. Dre’s 2001.
Dre’s production on the album is typically flawless and Eminem has definitely benefitted from being able to let one of the best producers in the history of hip-hop do what his does best, allowing him to concentrate his own mind on the lyrical content. Highlights of Dre’s production include his and Eminem’s collaboration on Old Time's Sake, more of a Dre tune than an Eminem one, the jovially perverse Hello, and the explosive Underground which is preceded by a skit with Steve Berman.
The skits on Eminem’s albums have always proven to be humorous additions, thrown in to brake down unrelenting ear assaults into manageable chunks and simultaneously provide listeners with background information about songs, albums and other, usually fictional, parts of the rapper’s life. The skits on Relapse may not be as funny as the skits on previous albums (Em Calls Paul on Encore is still the firm favourite for me), but they provide essential contextual information for fans unaware of where Eminem has been hiding all these years. In addition to this, fans will be pleased to know that Ken Kaniff does make an appearance on Relapse, although they will definitely be disappointed to know, unlike on The Marshall Mathers LP, that this time he is not being given a blow job.
One skit is from Eminem’s ever-present manager, Paul Rosenberg, whose presence on any Eminem album usually summarises what kind of trouble his lyrics provide for his manager. This time around, Paul is faced with the challenge of dealing with the incest spoken about above, as well as an unprovoked, but nonetheless shamefully funny, attack on Eminem’s favourite whipping boy, Christopher Reeve, who is, of course, dead.
This is the Eminem we love and the Eminem that many love to hate, this is Slim Shady.
In promoting the new album to the UK public Eminem has recently crossed the pond to make appearances on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and Zane Lowe’s Radio 1 programme as well as doing an interview for The Observer with journalist Anthony Bozza (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/17/eminem-urban-music-relapse). Each interview has been dominated by the subject of Marshall Mathers’ addiction to prescription drugs and his subsequent rehabilitation. The only song produced by Eminem on the new album is Beautiful, the first verse of which was written by Eminem when he was in rehab, and it shows. Beautiful is a deep and sad tune that brings the album to a depressing halt for a moment. This is not a bad thing however; it merely makes all the other tracks seem all the more uplifting despite the sick content they may possess. Juxtaposing Beautiful with tracks like 3am, Same Song & Dance and Stay Wide Awake makes murder seem like Eminem’s prerogative or even his god-given right, since it becomes evident that the rapper has been to hell and back in the time between giving us an Encore and then having a Relapse.
Eminem also had to deal with the death of his best friend and fellow D12 member, Deshaun Dupree Holton, a.k.a. Proof in April 2006. This hit the man hard and only exacerbated his already terrible drug addiction. I personally thought that Eminem would have a lot to say on Relapse about the murder of such as good friend, but he merely nods his head towards it in Déjà Vu, perhaps choosing to keep such an emotional matter a bit closer to his chest, a tactic he has been forced to learn the hard way.
Relapse is obviously a suggestion that Eminem is going back to his old ways prior to his detox and year long sobriety, but, for Eminem, the album title was not about going back to drugs, but instead about going back to the days of The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP, the two most critically acclaimed albums he has produced. Despite The Eminem Show and Encore being excellent too, most fans know in their heart of hearts that Eminem’s first two studio albums are definitely his best to date, with the artist seeming to suffer from the law of diminishing returns as he tried to churn out new CDs. The first two albums will always be held in high esteem because of how ground-breakingly offensive the content in them was and, especially with The Slim Shady LP, how offensive it was for a white rapper to invade a genre reserved for black artists in such a Just Don’t Give A Fuck way.
Although it would be hasty to say that Relapse is Eminem back at his absolute best, he does come very close, and elements of the new album are better than anything he has done before. Also, it would be unfair to judge him negatively for not being able to capture that energy and raw talent that made the first two albums exceptional because of the adversity he has had to fight through, and because of the way that no one can stay energetic and raw forever.
Relapse is a complete violation of your hearing, a feat achieved by all of Eminem’s albums, just never before has it been achieved to the same degree. You are forced to deal with a barrage of abuse aimed not at you, but mainly at Eminem himself, along with many, many celebrities. His derision of the latter makes you think that maybe the boom in the celebrity culture could have happened because Eminem has not been around to keep the idiots that dominate it in check. Eminem’s piss-taking abilities are unsurpassed in music, he manages to ‘diss’ anyone with consummate ease and does so in many glorious and different ways, from the obvious – threatening to rape the Pussycat Dolls, piss on Rihanna and glue and fold Madonna into a La-Z-Boy and sit on it on Medicine Ball – to the not so obvious – mimicking the voice-modification technique that seems to be proliferating in urban music amongst many artists (e.g. Kanye West, Jamie Foxx and the Black Eyed Peas) on Bagpipes From Baghdad.
It is great to have Eminem back, and even better that he brought Slim Shady with him. They have both been sorely missed. Another piece of good news for fans is that Relapse II should be released towards the end of the year after Eminem wrote enough material for three albums during his hiatus, all of which has been refined to two albums’ worth on the Dr.’s orders. So we can definitely expect a lot more from Mr. Mathers in the future.
Eminem’s musical relapse has allowed him to get back to his ways of old and will affect the lovers of The Slim Shady LP in the same way. Listening to this album will allow you to forget about the horrific realities of the world around us in this tough time and allow you to escape into a much more horrific place created for you by Slim Shady. You can forget all that maturity and responsibility 10 years has forced upon you and sink into Eminem’s twisted little world again.
...Shady’s back...tell a friend.
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