In 2004, Eminem was one of the biggest names in the rap game. Scratch that, he was one of the biggest names in the
entire music industry. And in that year, Mr. Mathers put out his fifth album,
Encore, a twenty song pile of *** marred by horrible and immature lyrics coated with toilet humor, joke songs that weren't funny, and a bewildering lack of highlights. The album failed, both critically and commercially, in comparison to his first four albums, and left many of his dazed and confused fans wondering, "Will Eminem ever be good again?" Marshall took a five year break to get more addicted onto sleeping pills, and when he came back, his new album
Relapse was being hyped as a darker, angrier and more violent album about drugs, fueled by the return of everyone's favorite alter ego, Slim Shady.
Relapse was going to a brutal, violent and biting return to form after the light-hearted and jokey
Encore.
They couldn't have been more wrong.
It's not that the album isn't violent or angry; it is, but it's angry and violent in all the wrong ways.
The Marshall Mathers LP proved to the world that Marshall's sarcastic, violent sense of humor was one of many talents. Fast forward nine years later, and it's the main flaw in his works. "Kim" was a great song that used its graphic violence to assert dominance and fear. Yet on
Relapse, violence is used to rape and murder both Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan in a song that features a boring beat, misguided lyrics, and no sense of humor or anger anywhere. "Same Song & Dance" is just one song out of many that recycles a theme used on practically every song on this album: rape, kill and enjoy it. The album was supposedly influenced by Em's curiosity over serial killers, and damn, does it show.
It's that repetitiveness that really wears
Relapse down, the fact that more than half of the album is Em expressing his love for forcing himself onto women, then taking their life afterwards. The horrible lyrics don't help matters ("I was born with a dick in my brain, yeah ***ed in the head / My stepfather said that I sucked in the bed... / I want my dick sucked in the shed"), nor do the lazy wordplay and unclever rhymes.
And then there's the accent. Oh dear Lord, practically every song on
Relapse has Em utilize that annoying, grating accent that no one knows why he decided to take on. Perfectly fine songs like "3 AM" or "Bagpipes from Baghdad" are ruined by it (even if they weren't that impressive to begin with). It gets old quick, and over the course of a seventy-six minute album, becomes really repetitive and redundant.
Even then, there are lots of songs that are crap even if the accent hadn't been there. Single "We Made You" is a joke single in the same vein as "The Real Slim Shady" or "Without Me", but lacks the humor that was in those aforementioned singles. Making jokes about Kim Kardashian's ass and banging Sarah Palin aren't funny, nor are they original. "Must be the Ganja" is a boring ode to smoking weed that features a laughably hilarious chorus that borders right on self-parody. "Old Time's Sake" is another song about the sweet leaf that is saved only by Dr. Dre's verse in the beginning, and "My Mom" beats a dead horse again by vilifying his oh-so-sweet mommy. The lyrics are also really stupid here too ("That's why I am what I am 'cause I am my mom" makes no ***ing sense, whatever you think it means).
If you can make it through the first fifteen tracks, there's a reward waiting for you in the latter five songs. “Beautiful”, the “ballad” of the album (if there are ballads in rap), has Marshall pondering whether or not he should quit (and after two lackluster albums, he has every right to). With an excellent beat to create a dark mood, and great wordplay about walking in someone else’s shoes, “Beautiful” is the clear highlight of a misguided and career-destroying album. “Underground” is Em’s best “creepy” song on here, sporting a vicious beat and nice rhymes, while “Déj* Vu” discusses his drug problems and how it affects everyone around him, including himself. Luckily, his accent isn’t that notable, even though it’s still there, and doesn’t ruin the song like it does to so many other songs on the album.
Relapse was a big mistake by Eminem. We needed a dark and violent album, but
Relapse just wasn’t it. With its repetitive subject matter of raping and killing, overuse of his godawful accent, and lackluster lyrics, this is Eminem’s worst album. Only three of the album’s twenty tracks are worth listening too, and over half of them will make you want to run this album over with your car. If you told me that Slim Shady would make an album worse than
Encore, I wouldn’t have believed it, but he got the job done.
Relapse’s entire “serial killer rapist” theme was influenced by Em’s thoughts while on drugs, and those drugs have caused an album that would have killed anyone’s career had it not been a comeback album by one of the biggest names in music. Sure, drugs did cause Em to write two great songs about the pain and suffering he felt during his relapses (heh, heh), but when the end result is an absolutely ***ty album that has no lasting value whatsoever, those two songs could have been scrapped along with the whole album. In the end, this entire album did nothing but prove to us all that Em's success was a fluke, and that he could never make good music ever again. “*** his last CD, that ***’s in my trash!”
