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A serious look at the rap trickster's continuous complexities
By Michael Shilling
Special to MSN Music
Love him or hate him, Eminem's totemic importance in popular culture and hip-hop over the last decade is indisputable. Equally infused with humor and cruelty, self-parody and righteousness, he is the enfant terrible of popular music. Simultaneously capable of heartbreaking work and juvenilia, and straddling the line between the ironic and the moronic, he is an extraordinarily talented rapper with an amazing ability to complexify rhyme, a linguistic switch-up artist who poets should study for mastery of meter. On the occasion of "Relapse," his first studio album in five years, we take look at Eminem's primary recordings, in the interest of contemplating the complications of Detroit's biggest act since the days of Motown.
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Though it was not his first album -- that honor went to the limited release of "Infinite" in 1996 -- "The Slim Shady LP," which came out in early 1999 and marked the beginning of his alliance with producer and provocateur Dr. Dre, is the disc where Eminem's bizarre confabulation of contradictions were put on full display, and its oddball brilliance is undeniable. Take "97 Bonnie and Clyde," which is arguably the only song about homicide that's also laugh-out-loud funny. What's the secret? Absurdity. It's a song simultaneously about a guy going for a moonlight drive with his daughter and disposing of the body of his wife, with Bill Withers' "Just the Two of Us" co-opted in a way that doesn't make it clear who the "two of us" are. The singer and his deceased beloved? The singer and his baby girl? On top of this moral, er, ambiguity, Eminem lays down an intricate rap that, in its winding snakiness, shows off his ferocious intelligence. And though you wouldn't be crazy to disagree, that intelligence is his big wink to listeners that, uh, yeah, this is black comedy, not misogyny.
While "Slim Shady" showed off the trickster persona that's Eminem's organizing principle, his next album, 2000's "The Marshall Mathers LP," eschewed demented fantasies and slices of thug life for matters more personal, yet also functions as one of the great id-fests in pop history. Songs such as "The Way I Am," "Stan," and "Kim" created a cultural firestorm that matched the album's commercial success (it sold 1.7 million copies in its first week). Critics demanded that the dude atone for his nasty words regarding his mother, his wife and, they said, the entire homosexual community. But they again missed Eminem's tell, which lay in the sophistication of the wordplay and the fluidity of his delivery. Not to mention the focus; this was not some bratty kid long on looks and short on talent taking cheap shots, but an artist authentically wrestling his demons to the ground, and not without injury to his image, his ego, his identity. The end result constituted a stirring whirlwind of musical conflict.
Eminem's next album, "The Eminem Show," was a calmer affair, relatively speaking. On the whole, it's a more controlled, reflective effort. That said, Mathers is still the master chef of takedowns; on "Without Me," he takes the fight to an impressive cross-section of pop culture: from Lynne Cheney to Moby to Limp Bizkit. However, the album definitely has a less furious feel, and tracks such as "Cleaning Out my Closet" and "Hailie's Song" show a growing maturity in Mathers, as he begins to reckon with the price of fame and the limits of his shortcomings without feeling the need to burn everything down in the process.
This maturity is brilliantly exemplified on "Mosh," the plea for electoral sanity and civic involvement off of 2004's "Encore," the follow-up to "The Eminem Show." The easy approach to take would have been an adolescent, chest-thumping yawp about the evils of The Establishment. Instead, Eminem weaves together a narrative of uprising that manages, to the degree that a brawling MC can, to minimize his role in the revolution that he's proposing: "Come along follow me as I lead through the darkness /As I provide just enough spark that we need to proceed." Throughout, Eminem uses a trudging, staccato rhythm to discipline and align the lines of the song, so that they too begin to march in a growing fury. Polemical and desperate, it's a long cry from "The Slim Shady LP," and other tracks on "Encore" display a similar simpler approach to lyrics and meter. Some felt "Encore" was a step backward, but others took it as a reflection of the wisdom of age.
And now, five years on, and after a semiretirement in which many thought Eminem would forever steer clear of the mic in favor of producing, we get "Relapse," the first of two planned releases for 2009. If "We Made You," the first single from the record, is any indication, Eminem has decided from his recent struggles -- one of which was beating an addiction to sleeping pills -- that this time around he's gonna have a lighthearted good time. The song's video is a ridiculous send-up of celebrity, while also containing the trademark quicksilver cleverness that makes Eminem, a true, unstoppable original.
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Michael Shilling is a frequent contributor to MSN Music. He is a novelist and short-story writer who teaches writing at the University of Michigan. Send him an e-mail
