Classic Em

As is often the case, some of his best lines are in his bootlegs, and as is typical for hip-hop beefs, it's trivial as hell. That shit with Benzino felt like it dragged on for decades! But a lot of it was first-rate Eminem. A beef with Mariah Carey is slightly less lame, cuz of her fame, but then you factor Nick Cannon into the whole thing, and we're back down to the typical inane level of these feuds.

Eminem, "Underground"

(It's not often that you get a rap song in 5/8)

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More Problems

With only a few exceptions, Eminem has stuck to a very rigid, albeit rivetting, formula when he's behind the board. He skews towards thunderous beats and ominous, droning bass lines. Almost all of these songs have either one chord throughout or a bass pedal tone working the same trick. Now, I love this gimmick. Rimsky erred greatly when he cleansed Modeste's scores of pedal tones. However, there is only so much that it can do, and Eminem exhausted its possibilities long ago. He's not bringing anything new to his flow when he raps over productions like The Game's "We Ain't". Especially when The Game's debut listens exactly like the retread of Get Rich or Die Tryin' that everyone expects it to be, it's a pretty big disapointment to encounter tunes like this, as compelling as they would be without knowing he's done a dozen others just like them.

One of my favourite examples of his maturation as a producer is the brilliant cut from Encore, "Crazy in Love". At first, it looks like Em's headed for the formula heap. He'd sampled another classic rock cut on his last album, after all. The minor bombast of "Dream On" fit perfectly with Em's first efforts, offering up yet another track with a simple, booming beat and pedal bass. But right from the start, it's clear that he's going to do a great deal more with Heart than he did with Aerosmith. He cops the boogie in his flow, while using a half time bass line. Yeah, it's a one note thump, but the flow is completely different than what we'd come to expect from his ostinato bass lines, and the juxtaposition is thrilling. Then he has the good grace to go old school and let Ann Wilson's bridge be heard as he raps new words along with it. In an age where high-priced samples are trotted out like Ashanti hooks, it's so refreshing to hear someone have fun with his source material like this.

Empty Eyes

No one I know in the United States likes Mike Skinner's records under his stage name, The Streets. I even went to one of his shows in New York City once, and the room was full of enthusiasts, but none of them were American, oddly enough. Perhaps they were just pretending to be from out of country, and I'm just donning my critical groupthink cap by praising The Streets, but I genuinely love his two albums. His second, A Grand Don't Come for Free, is the most artful concept album of the year and in rap history.

It's a day in the life of a geezer. The day starts off miserably, with him losing a thousand quid. By the end of the story, he's convinced himself that no one is really his friend. He paints himself into such a corner that he loses his girl, and I've simply never heard such an effective description of the tetchy physicality of a break up conversation as he pulls off in "Dry Your Eyes".

In the final song, "Empty Cans" he begins by deftly summing up his miserable isolation:

If I want to sit in and drink super tennants in the day I will,
No-ones going to fucking tell me jack,
But can you rely on anyone in this world?
No you cant; its not my fault there's wall to wall empty cans

So, wallowing in self-pity, he turns down his friend's offer to repair his TV, and ends up getting into a fight with the TV repairman. Then, in the most inventive moment of the year (to my ears), he rewinds the tape, tips his hat to the separate narratives of "A Day in the Life", and proceeds to tell the story again. This time, however, he accepts his friend's offer, and the friend finds that the thousand quid, which has so quickly derailed his life by going missing, had fallen into the back of the TV, necessitating the repair.

The quasi-tribal drum pulse and sparse string figure remains exactly the same as The Streets re-writes a happy ending, brought on by a simple, capricious adjustment to the story. That whimsy, which made him lift the veil of his misery long enough to accept his friend's help, is reflected with a suitably trivial musical gesture: the addition of a three-chord piano figure. The new piano figure transfigures the landscape as though Paul McCartney himself had started bopping around and singing about cups of coffee. The simplicity of the alteration deepens its power and draws up the loose ends of a sprawling narrative in one brilliant stroke.

Perhaps it's his Birmingham vernacular that puts people off, or maybe it's the Casio-chic sound world. I certainly do my fair share of struggling when I have to listen to Dizzee Rascal and understand what's so important about him. To me, though, The Streets' is not only an emotional favourite, but he's taking rap into the territory that Eminem seemed destined to reach first. Perhaps he's a latter-day Aaron...

The Eminem Problem

The New York Times does many things well, but rock criticism is not one of them. Even great critics do their worst work on the Times' pages. When it comes to rap, the paper is utterly adrift; hence, the release of the album of the year, Eminem's Encore is accompanied by a typically meandering and shallow review.

For the universally curious, the Times' editorial decision to allow critics to hold court on a subject is a treasure unmatched anywhere in daily journalism. But quite frequently, reviewers fail to offer any substantive opinion about the product under discussion. In the case of Kelefa Sanneh's review, an opinion is given, but it is based on a thorough misreading of Em's career which is exposited in the first quarter of the piece.

Sanneh's basic position is that Eminem has achieved everything he hoped for and has nothing vital left to say, creating a record which is unfocused. He explains, "[Eminem'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.'"

Apparently, Sanneh never listened to anything else Em ever released. From the smash that broke him through to white America, he's been poking fun at himself before anyone else: "I haven't had a woman in years/My palms are too hairy to hide." Later on The Slim Shady LP, in one of his best songs, "Rock Bottom", he tips his hat to the destination which Sanneh thinks he's arrived at, "I want the money, the women, the fortune, and the fame/ That Means I'll end up burning in hell scorching in flames".

The obvious question is, "If he knows that's how things turn out, why bother?", and the answer always has been that Marshall Mathers has to. He's laid to waste the early argument that he's no good at anything else by acting well, producing brilliant tracks, and generally playing well with the Celebrity Empire Hobby Kit. Sanneh believes that all the other success renders the music irrelevant, whereas he misses the vocational aspect which is there right from the beginning when Em first said, "Excuse me. Can I have the attention of the class?" Like all merry pranksters, this guy can't help himself, and that's a good thing for hip-hop.

Encore is his best album yet. He improves on the gains made with The Eminem Show by broadening his range as a producer. Lyrically, he revisits his favourite subjects, but his perspective is always fresh. Nothing in his canon has ever sounded like "Puke", and in the subcategory of songs about his ex-wife, he has never approached her with such a perfect mix of humour and desperation as he does on this extraordinary track.

The gallows humour of "Bonnie and Clyde '97" has been supplanted for a gastrointestinal trope, and indeed the entire album sees Eminem tinkering with his approach to subjects he's covered so many times before. Perhaps because his obsessions are so singular, people more readily cite the predictability of his themes, but Jay-Z never released an album that failed to reference his wonderful mother and his hardscrabble upbringing. Has Steven Tyler ever forgotten to sing about sex on an Aerosmith album?