It's also Em's best exploration of living his life in the rare space between America's too-wide racial divide. Childhood tale 'Yellow Brick Road' is the closest thing to biographical narrative he's ever done, and his remorseful explanation of the situation around which he, as a hurt kid, lashed out in a few racially-tinged rhymes at a black girl is not only compelling but effectively diffuses Source editor Benzino's long-running attack campaign on the rapper. Much of the first third of the record features Eminem unloading his emotional weight. Unfortunately, most of the tracks that don't veer toward either extreme are plodding and unremarkable. Despite the album's pronounced maturity/infantilism divide, it's a different dichotomy that characterizes the album's highlights: Here, Em is at his best when he's either more focused than even before or at his most scattered and playful. After an image-confounding trio of pseudo self-titled records, the Eminem of Encore is wounded and weary he's removing the layers of meta, still laughing and nodding but rarely winking, and not disappearing behind what The Village Voice's Frank Kogan once labeled Em's lyrical 'trapdoors and escape hatches.' Instead, the LP is the sound of a man who seems bored of re-branding and playing celebrity games, and often seems to be rapping only to entertain himself with little regard for any potential audience. Therefore, if Encore is anything, it's a transitional record. He's also scrubbed his lyrics of homophobia (instead, the fascinating and eyebrow-raising homoeroticism hinted at on The Eminem Show- and literally fleshed out in his music video cross-dressing- colors a handful of his songs here) and, save a few blasts at Kim, any elements of misogyny. Tracks in which Em offers confessions, explanations, and apologies for previous comments and his participation in high-profile beefs share time here with belching, farting, vomiting, and urinating. Well, Maureen, Andrew, and Greil, get ready to be excited most of the rest of you- the ones who've been held enthrall by Em's complex games of shifting his identity, challenging hypocrisy, baiting liberal guilt, and spitting deft rhymes with his labyrinthine flow- prepare for disappointment: Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.Д®minem's reaction to respectability seems to have been to move in two different directions: introspection and reconciliation on the one side, and bodily fluid-obsessed humor on the other. For whatever reason, a film career can do that- maybe it's the ability for a lengthy narrative to be more explicitly mutli-dimensional or maybe it's just lazy thinking and knee-jerk reactionary assumptions about pop, but you're now as likely to see Em torn down on Vibe than The New York Times Magazine. The epistolary weepie 'Stan' and the survivalist self-helpisms of 'Lose Yourself' played a part in the slow mainstream media embrace of Eminem, but it's that 'slash' that seemed to complete the embrace. And yet, somewhere between hugging Elton onstage at the Grammys and sending that guy in the Pistons jersey to pick up his Oscar, Em was feted by many of America's best-known cultural crits, columnist, and pundits: Frank Rich, Andrew Sarris, Maureen Dowd, Greil Marcus, Neal Gabler, and Paul Slansky (among others) either laid garlands at his feet or rhapsodized about the supposed transformation of the rapper/actor. In 2000, Eminem was frequently vilified as a hatemonger, homophobe, and misogynist in 2002, he was on the shortlist for Time magazine's 'Man of the Year.' America loves a tale of redemption almost as much as one of comeuppance, but at the start of the decade you'd have gotten pretty long odds on the media and cultural elite spinning the Marshall Mathers yarn as the former before the latter.

Eminem recovery album cover road