Eminem's The Eminem Show: A Review

After releasing his vitriolic, sales-shattering sophomore album The Marshall Mathers LP, the rapper faced considerable, nationally publicized backlash. The release of the double platinum Devil's Night from his group D12, containing similarly controversial content, did not help matters, nor did impending legal troubles. But his acclaimed sophomore album had made him into a household name, his face instantly recognizable to much of America and many overseas countries; and the lyrical skill he displayed made it increasingly difficult for him to be dismissed as simply a novelty act. The bad-boy white rapper, the hip-hop artist, was now permanently on the national stage. And in 2002, he returned with his third studio album The Eminem Show.

Despite their titles, each of the rapper's previous albums was equal parts Eminem, the rapper, Slim Shady, the sociopath, and Marshall Mathers, the man beneath the masks. Here, however, Slim Shady is strangely in short supply. The songs here are less a tortured mass of identity, surrealistic satire, and laser sharp lyricism, than a collection of rather straightforward confessionals, in the vein of the previous album's The Way I Am, told in a direct and occasionally ponderous fashion. It is not that Eminem is not still a top-notch rapper, but many of the songs laboriously grind over the details of his life since the last record, without the satire, sarcasm, or basic acerbic levity that pervaded The Marshall Mathers LP. It is amazing, in fact, how humorless this album is. targets such as underground rapper Canibus, his on-again, off-again wife Kim Mathers, Jermaine Dupri, and President George Bush are set up to be skewered, but the shots are few and far in between, nothing like his attacks on boy-bands on his last record. Elsewhere, his relationship with Kim, here-to-fore presented as farce is treated seriously on tracks like Soldier, and Say Goodbye Hollywood; because of the previous farcical presentation, it is hard to take seriously.

The lyrics are less sharp here; compelling bursts of lyrical ingenuity appear on the otherwise sluggish Soldier, and on Till I Collapse; but rarely elsewhere is there anything as impressive as his use of multiple voices on Criminal or the pig latin intro to Under the Influence on the The Marshall Mathers LP, or the storytelling of '97 Bonnie and Clyde on The Slim Shady LP. Even when there is, it is undercut by the somber undercurrent of the album, and while the emcee provides a number of seemingly hard-won insights into the price of fame, and into his own life, they are really only enjoyable if you like his infamous creation "Stan" are voraciously devouring the Marshall Mathers narrative. Without the satiric mask of Slim Shady, anger, rationalization, and self-pity are just that, and all the less enjoyable. It is still more compelling than the majority of hip-hop albums released during the decade, but it is in dire need of the rapper's trademark humor.