It’s amazing how much Eminem has changed in the past ten years. In his very first interview with MTV News, the still hungry Marshall Mathers told Kurt Loder that hip hop had become a stagnant artform. He was going to take it back to its most basic form, away from the bloated samples and guest rappers. Five years later, Encore was cluttered with guest verses from Obie Trice and Martika samples. Relapse finds Eminem trying to go back to his original mission.
The good news: Relapse is not as bad as the first single, “We Made You” suggests. The bad news: Eminem is a shadow of his former self. It follows the template set by The Slim Shady LP a decade ago. The “serious” side of Eminem is balanced by the “funny side.” However, the funny side isn’t funny, and the serious stuff is flogging a dead horse. Did you know that Eminem’s mother did drugs? How about that Eminem had a hard time in school? It wouldn’t be so bad if Eminem brought his razor-sharp tongue, but he didn’t.
Eminem’s themes remain the same, but his delivery has changed. He doesn’t sound as listless as he did on Encore, but the familiar annoying cadence of his alter-ego Slim Shady has been replaced by an odd mixture of Detroit street slang and dancehall scatting. Slim Shady wants to lickey-boom boom down. One of the bright spots of the album is Dr. Dre’s production. Although it’s nowhere near his previous work, he keeps it simple and loud. It’s reminiscent of the early LL Cool J records, where the forceful beats are meant to accentuate the rhymes. For the first time, the beats outshine Em’s rhymes, which has never happened before.
Relapse is meant to be Eminem’s redemption. It opens up with Marshall Mathers in rehab, preparing for his release. The doctor comes in to release him, and transforms into a demon. He wakes up at 3 AM, and begins to tell us just how fucked up his life is. He spares no detail about his drug abuse, and it’s tired. When Slim Shady gave a girl an entire bag of mushrooms on “My Fault” it was shocking, but “3 AM” sounds out of touch, especially with the Silence of the Lambs reference. Nobody has ever referenced Buffalo Bill before, way to be innovative. On “My Mom,” Debbie Mathers is portrayed as a terrible mother. You might have heard this before on much better songs, like “My Name Is” and “Cleaning Out My Closet.”
He does throw one curveball though. On “Insane,” he accuses his stepfather of sexual abuse. We’re supposed to be shocked, but we’ve been told about his horrible childhood so many times that it has lost all of its cache. The sing-song tone of his voice doesn’t help his cause.
In the middle of the drug abuse, sexual abuse and Munchausen’s syndrome, we are given “We Made You.” On his earlier albums, Eminem’s one lighthearted song would be the sugar coating that made the dark themes palatable. “We Made You” kills what little momentum Relapse has. We’re all supposed to laugh at Em’s “irreverence,” but when was the last time Jessica Simpson was culturally relevant? It’s like he has been hermetically sealed in 2004.
In the beginning of the decade, the rock elite was predicting that Eminem would probably be the next Bob Dylan. Based on his first two albums, that was a fair assumption. However, an artist is like a shark, he has to keep moving. Eminem is just coasting on the good will given to him by The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP. The innovative, shocking, funny, inventive rapper on those two records is gone, replaced by a rapper determined to milk every last metaphor from the same themes.