Eminem – Relapse (original) (raw)

Dignity isn't the first word that springs to mind when thinking of Eminem, but there was definitely something impressively graceful about the way he brought his career to an apparent conclusion in 2006. A smart man, he had evidently realised he was fast running out of things to say. There was something deeply enervating about his 2004 album Encore - the sound of a man whose provocations had once incurred the wrath of both the White House and the CIA reduced to making farting noises. And so, with 75m albums sold, he quietly slipped away into domesticity. It made you wish more pop stars took stock, realised they were running on fumes, then went home and stopped bothering everybody.

Except, on the evidence of Relapse, it wasn't quite like that. Eminem's retirement was precipitated not by ruthless self-examination but a catastrophic addiction to prescription drugs. The album's lyrics frequently read like a spam email from a dubious online pharmacy: Ambien, Valium, Seroquel, Xanax, Lunesta, Percodan, Vicodin. According to Relapse, he spent the intervening three years in such a daze that rousing himself enough to masturbate counted as a major achievement in his personal development. Dignity, it seems fair to say, was not much on the agenda.

At least his addictions provided him with a source of new material. Now clean, a man who sounded exhausted on Encore sounds utterly re-energised on Insane, a genuinely terrifying depiction of childhood abuse at the hands of his stepfather. It's a rare moment of finger-pointing: what's particularly striking about Déjà Vu and Hello's brilliant depictions of ennui and overindulgence is the absence of self-pity. A track called My Mom returns to an old target - "I know you're probably tired of hearing about my mom," he admits - only to conclude that, for all the frenzied accusations of bad parenting he throws her way, he's ended up exactly the same: "That's why I'm on what I'm on/ 'Cos I'm my mom." He even resists the temptation to pay mawkish tribute to D12's Proof, merely mentioning his friend's death in passing as among the excuses he used to indulge his habit. You could argue that's probably because it's hard to turn a man shot after murdering someone in a row over a pool table into the noble hero of a moist-eyed eulogy, but that's never stopped umpteen other rappers; it's one of hip-hop's most keenly observed rules that when your homie is killed after moronically provoking a pointless fight, you should start carrying on as if he'd selflessly laid down his life rescuing babies from an orphanage consumed by fire.

Eminem slips up only on Beautiful, which lets fly with all the self-pity held back elsewhere, and furthermore sets it to a horrible sample from Reaching Out by Rock Therapy, a mid-90s charity single featuring Brian May and Lulu that no one seems to remember. Elsewhere, the music tends towards the functional rather than the fantastic: the idea is clearly to focus attention on the star rather than the beats, which seems fair enough, given the moments on Relapse when you're dazzled anew by Eminen, by the acuteness of his imagery - he summarises his aimless, futile, juvenile delinquency as "stealing gum from under the seat" - and the relentlessness of his panic-stricken flow. Equally, however, there are problems, not least his baffling decision to keep dropping into a cod-West Indian accent, something that it's just never a good idea to do, either in music or, indeed, in life generally.

More troubling is the sense of going through the motions - something that comes with the album's attempts to scandalise, and which seems to have seeped through into the song titles: Old Time's Sake, Stay Wide Awake, Same Song and Dance. There's more than a hint of the old Onion story about Marilyn Manson going door-to-door trying to shock people in Same Song and Dance's fantasy of murdering Lindsay Lohan, or in Crack a Bottle, which features 50 Cent sounding as ever like a man suffering from a potentially fatal lack of gorm. On the closing track, Underground, a suitably OTT backing can't drown out the sound of boxes being dutifully ticked: sex with the disabled, homophobia. It's depressing partly because it now has all the shock value of Status Quo launching into a 12-bar riff. But mostly it's because Eminem doesn't need to do that stuff any more. He might think he has to, but as Relapse's highlights prove, it's when he talks about himself that he really grabs your attention.