At 31-years-old, Marshall Mathers finds himself at a crossroads. What has he got left to achieve? Acting? Nope. Brandishing a chainsaw? Done that. Sponsorship deal with satellite radio? Already in the bag. Dancing like Osama Bin Laden? Come on…that was 2002. Even his mother and ex-wife have been crucified about 37 times by now.
In short, he’s cleaned out his closet to the point of emptiness. The question now is how he can stop his career turning into "Friday The 13th Pt VII"?
Potentially, it’s a depressing scenario and for the first twenty minutes at least, “Encore” appears to be Eminem’s “In Utero”. Not that he hates himself and wants to die (although, unerringly, on the inner cover he’s depicted with a gun in a mouth) but more that he’s looking down on himself and the ‘personality’ that he’s become in some kind of disgust.
“Man, I’d hate to have it as bad as that Mr Mathers,” he spits in the opening track “Evil Deeds”. “That little rich poor white bastard needs to take some of that cash out of the bank and have a bath in it.”
This internal wrangling is Eminem at his most thrilling - we all know how he pours itching powder down the back of conservative America (although you’d have to be Billy Graham to be truly offended by what he says) but what’s more intriguing is his outsider status and his own realisation of it.
“Never Enough” acknowledges how a white trash kid will always struggle for respect in the world of hip-hop, while “Yellow Brick Road” gives his side to the infamous “racist rap” ‘exposed’ last year by The Source.
“Like Toy Soldiers” offers an intimate insight of how a ‘beef’ gets out of hand (rappers are dumb/pawns in a game) and the Martika sample it’s built around should give him his biggest hit ever. The anti-Bush “Mosh” is another great leap forward and to hear Eminem actually directing his anger constructively is a welcome change, if a little redundant since November’s election result. These two tracks alone are among the best he’s ever completed.
But, just when you’re preparing the superlatives, the sound of puking comes through the speakers. Followed by a flushing toilet it's an appropriate metaphor for the rest of the album.
Quite why Mathers chooses to go down the route marked ‘woefully unfunny‘ (the prominence of D12 may have something to with it) but, like a deflated whoopee cushion, “Encore” suddenly turns into a succession of retarded cock jokes. After the self-explanatory “Big Weenie”, this reaches its nadir on “Just Lose It”, “Ass Like That” and the charming Shady Records guide to dating that is “Spend Some Time” (or, as his associate Stat Quo would have it, “my only motive is to get head and f**k a bitch”).
It’s like 2 Live Crew never happened, and once down at the barrel’s bottom he shows few signs of wanting to come back up.
Desperate to be controversial, you’d believe this was a “Weird Al” Jankovic record had you tuned in halfway through. To find lines like, “I ain’t never seen an ass like that, the way you move it, you make my pee pee go, da doing doing doing” amusing (and that‘s one of the better rhymes) you’d have to be a particularly twattish nine-year-old.
Where this now leaves Eminem is even more confusing. From the jaws of victory he seems more than happy to taste defeat. Maybe that’s all there is. Maybe with nothing left to prove all you can aspire to is getting crunked-up, f**king bitches and making fart noises with your arm pit.
It’s a depressing conclusion. But if that’s the case, and with the encore over, maybe he should just pull the trigger and have done with it.
