"Toy Soldiers," scheduled to be the next single, recycles the 1980's pop hit by Martika so that Eminem can rehash his beefs with Ja Rule and the Source. Dre lays some curlicued sitars atop a lazy bass line, while Eminem pays tribute to Hilary Duff and the Olsen Twins, delivering his rhymes in a thick accent that's supposed to be either Triumph the Insult Comic Dog or Arnold Schwarzenegger (apparently, they talk the same). A song called, in part, "Like That" is brilliantly inane: Dr. And in "Big Weenie," Eminem rambles on and on about his enemies, even though he knows he's not really getting anywhere: "It's pointless/Why do we have to keep on going through this?/This is torturous." He sounds as if he's stalling, hoping inspiration will strike.Īnd about half the time, it does. The follow-up, "Mosh," gained notoriety for its anti-Bush lyrics, but Eminem sounds nearly as long-winded as the politicians he's excoriating.
ENCORE EMINEM SONGS SERIES
The first single, "Just Lose It," is meant to be fizzy and freewheeling, but instead it unfolds as a series of puzzlingly unfunny jokes. While "Rain Man" cleverly builds upon this nagging sense of boredom, other tracks merely suffer from it. "I don't know how else to put it/This is the only thing that I'm good at," he confesses near the end, and he sounds less like a rapper bragging than like an addict bottoming out.
The real butt of this joke is Eminem himself: it's a track about a rapper in a rut, with nothing better to do than to reel off some more rote insults. And in case listeners don't understand what he's up to, he even picks a surreal fight with one of pop culture's most dearly departed, declaring, "I won't stand for this/And Christopher Reeve won't sit for this, neither," and later crowing, "I killed Superman, I killed Superman." He half-heartedly revives the controversy over his anti-gay lyrics with an absurd riff on homoerotic sports, and swipes at an easy target with a Jessica Simpson joke. In "Rain Man," the album's riveting centerpiece, he reels off wildly offensive monologues as if he were merely killing time. But for "Encore" he unveils a new voice, a slurred monotone that hints at boredom. He delivered many lyrics on "The Eminem Show" and the "8 Mile" soundtrack in a nasal, clenched-throat roar. He's not even halfway through the first song before he starts mocking his own petulance: "Woe is me, there goes poor Marshall again/Whining about his millions and his mansion and his sorrow he's always drowning in." You can hear the change in his voice.
ENCORE EMINEM SONGS MOVIE
But now the movie is over, and Eminem has a tougher role to play: the rapper is also a 32-year-old mogul, too rich and too self-aware to take even his own complaints seriously. The genius of the movie "8 Mile" was that it advanced this story by rewinding it: the pop star became a movie star by impersonating the aspiring rapper he used to be. "Encore" is the sound of Eminem's worst nightmare coming true: it's the sound of a rapper in the studio with nothing but time, trying to figure out how - or why - to get started. On the contrary, "Encore" is almost willfully uneven: it includes some of the most exhilarating songs Eminem has ever recorded, alongside some of the most inert. That doesn't make it the most entertaining. This is the anxiety lurking behind every song on Eminem's new CD, "Encore" (Aftermath/Universal), which is both his least combative and his most conflicted album so far. What's scarier is what happens when you find that instead of having one moment to prove yourself, you have all the time in the world, and there's nothing more you really want to seize. What's scarier is what happens when that "one moment" has passed. What's scarier, of course, is what comes next, after the triumphant chorus ("You better lose yourself in the music, the moment/You own it, better never let it go"), after the triumphant concert, after the triumphant album. As a pair of guitar chords marched forward, Eminem delivered the vivid opening couplet: "His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy/There's vomit on his sweater already, Mom's spaghetti." What could be scarier than that? Look: if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture it? Or just let it slip?Įminem asked that question at the beginning of "Lose Yourself," the hit from the soundtrack to his 2002 film debut, "8 Mile." It's not the sort of question that demands an answer, but Eminem provided one anyway, in the form of a hip-hop pep talk addressed to an anxious wanna-be rapper.
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