Eminem's Encore: A Review

On the heels of his mega popular third album The Eminem Show (read review), the rapper born Marshall Mathers returned in 2004 with his fourth studio album Encore. Released at the height of Shady/Aftermath Record's popularity - 50 cent had at that point sold nearly five million records of his debut Get Rich or Die Tryin (read review) the year before, the G-Unit group album went double platinum, and G-Unit artists Young Buck and Lloyd Banks had each sold a million copies of their debut record respectively only months before, Eminem might have been riding high, but for that old Notorious B.I.G. adage: more money, more problems. Signing 50 Cent had led to a heated dispute with Ja Rule and The Inc. Records, and bizarrely enough another with The Source magazine owner Raymond "Benzino" Scott, a self-styled rapper from Boston. By the time of Encore's release, both camps had flooded the market with mixtape (and magazine) insults, and while the Shady/Aftermath camp was clearly the victor, the battle had cast a pall over them, as well as over the album. The excellent Like Toy Soldiers features a clearly weary Eminem calling for a truce. But tracks like Never Enough and the bonus track Ricky Ticky Toc illustrate he is still willing to take on any and all challengers to prove his manhood, despite his cartoonish public persona.

Indeed, the hypermasculine, alpha male trope common to hip-hop seems to pervade this album - and not in a good way. Songs like Never Enough, and the puerile Big Weenie have Eminem proffering his toughness - which does not play well given his past antics. A man who has made his living off of self-caricature releasing a serious album is likely to be met with some skepticism, especially when political tracts like Mosh and autobiography like Yellow Brick Road are undercut by more self-caricature - My First Single, and the Kim-bashing Puke and Crazy in Love respectively.

The main problem is that this album eschews the rapper's trademark complexity, in favor of randomness. The songs are not multi-dimensional, not layered, not meta. They are simple, surface, often shallow. There is nothing like Criminal off his masterwork The Marshall Mathers LP, with its use of multiple voices and acerbic humor, except perhaps for the somewhat disturbing Rain Man, a companion piece to that album's I'm Back. Rain Man suggests that the rapper is in something of an artistic quagmire, as he references various earlier personas he can no longer seem to conjure, and ends the third verse by admitting that he is out of tricks.

There are various high points here, depending on your appreciation of the rapper's various facets: if you like the odes to Kim and Kim's death, you will probably enjoy Puke, Love You More, and Crazy in Love. If you enjoy the self-caricaturist, you will like My First Single, Evil Deeds, and Rain Man. If you appreciate chest thumping a la 50 Cent, you will enjoy Never Enough or Spend Some Time. The album is all over the place though, and if you appreciate the literarily complex black humor Eminem brings to hip-hop, you will likely not like this album. Cohesive or not, the album still outstrips much of post-2000 hip-hop; but it is below the rapper's own transcendent talents.