Eminem’s new CD delivers

The best thing about a new Eminem album is checking in with Eminem. What’s going on with Marshall Mathers? Not in a National Enquirer-sort of way. Eminem’s built a career on setting the intimate details of his life to beat. But a quick Google gets you the 411 on the 32-year-old rap MC’s business, any nastiness with his ex-wife Kim or estranged mom Debbie, his legal troubles, or the latest celebrity or interest group he’s offended. It’s not the dirt that makes Eminem and his music compelling — it’s how he uses criticism and his circumstances to grow as an artist.

So here comes “Encore,” Eminem’s fifth album, hitting stores four days before its original November 16 release date. That’s to thwart the bootleggers leaking the new LP on the Internet. The same thing happened 2 ½ years ago with “The Eminem Show.” The kids are screaming for Em and he delivers. Our first taste came with the silly trifle, “Just Lose It.” (The video depicts Em as Michael Jackson with kids jumping on his bed.) Then, in typical Em M.O., came the soul-kicking follow-up. “Mosh,” with its equally powerful video, aimed at getting voters in the booth and Bush out of office. Things didn’t work out the way he hoped, but this powerful song marked the first time Em used his keen wordplay towards a cause other than his own.

As hip-hop hits its third decade, it’s showing the same signs of wear as its older sibling, rock n’ roll. There are more lousy rap acts than good. Artists on the scene too long get tired, mostly because they’re doing the same thing. It’s hard to find new ways to tell the world how great you are — the keynote in most rap music. And it’s laughable to listen to a multi-millionaire rhyme about keepin’ it real. “Encore’s” first track, “Evil Deeds,” acknowledges these pitfalls, as Eminem speaks of himself in the third person, “whining about his millions and his mansion and his sorrow he’s always drownin’ in.” But repetitiveness is not a problem for Em. With each successive album, he broadens the range of what he’s talking about — his thinking is subtler, his wit more searing. This is why he continues to be relevant.

Smarter than most of his critics
Eminem broke onto the scene by being smart, if not that experienced. His first major release, 1999’s “Slim Shady LP” garnered both accolades and outrage for its street-wise vitriol. The follow-up “Marshall Mathers LP” did much of the same. He was like that really funny friend who said terrible things you couldn’t help laughing at. Not that everyone was laughing. His 2002 Grammy nominations were protested because of homophobic slurs in some of his lyrics. Others fumed over the brutal songs about both his mother and his wife. And there was also the obligatory comparison to Vanilla Ice, despite other white musicians who made good in rap music (i.e. the Beastie Boys and 3^rd Bass). But there was no ignoring his lighting-fast rhymes and ability to embed narrative in a lyric.

If Eminem is guilty of anything, it’s being smarter than most of his critics. His songs hit on multiple levels. Parents howled over the songs that seemed to celebrate dangerous behavior, when often the undercurrent was, do these stupid things and bad things happen to you. Discovered by Dr. Dre of the seminal group NWA, Eminem honed his skills as a battle rapper in Detroit clubs. He created an alter ego, “Slim Shady” to represent the violence he experienced and felt from a life of poverty and neglect. With sudden fame, Eminem was thrust into a world where verbal misogyny and homosexual pejoratives carried more weight than the generic insults he says they were. A ninth-grade dropout, he didn’t come from the middle class environment enjoyed by many of his critics, where politically-correct speech is drilled into your head from childhood. Not that he gets a free pass. But he learns fast.

If Eminem were an open-and-shut case, we’d be done with him by now. As his environment changes, and with each new experience, Eminem changes his model of thinking. He now hits the targets he’s aiming for. This is what happens when you take an intelligent person and educate them. He reformed his image by playing a character sympathetic to homosexuals in his semi-autobiographical movie, “8 Mile.” And he performed his song “Stan” with Elton John. He’s savvy. For every Elton John duet, he is sure to throw in a celebrity insult or expletive-packed lyric to make someone scream, “You MUST NOT listen to this album!”  That’s what makes CDs go double platinum, kids. It’s this intelligence that’s taken him from reviled street rapper to winning the Oscar for the “8 Mile“ soundtrack.

Revisiting old themes
“Encore” revisits many of the same themes consistent in Eminem’s work — his relationship with his mother, ex-wife, and daughter, his career, and the Cult of Personality of which no one has a better understanding. In “Big Weenie” he chants sarcastically, “You are just jealous of me cuz you, you just can’t do what I do.”  As quick as Eminem is to point out weakness in others, no one is quicker to point out his own foibles than Eminem. In “8 Mile,” Eminem’s character wins the rap battle by listing his failures. In “Encore’s” “Like Toy Soldiers,” he confronts the controversial early basement tape found by The Source magazine in which a teenage Eminem uses a racial epithet, and laments his feud with fellow hip-hop artist, Ja Rule: “Why would I want to destroy something I helped build?”

Eminem works hard for hip-hop, and props must be given.  In fame, he left no one behind, returning to Detroit to push his old group, D-12 to the charts through his label, Shady Records. In almost every song, he shouts out to Dr. Dre, and pays it forward by mentoring 50 Cent, G-Unit, and Lloyd Banks. Nearly his whole crew shows up on “Encore.” He recently produced a Tupac Shakur LP, and launched a hip-hop channel on SIRIUS Satellite Radio. But in the end, its skill that matter: This is a man who once rhymed the allegedly-unrhymeable “oranges” with “syringes” just to show it could be done.

Eminem takes a deceptively-playful tact with another media storm in “Ass Like That.” Extolling the virtues of famous female behinds in a Shaggy-like Dance Hall vocal, Em slips into the borscht-belt guise of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog — the puppet with whom he had an infamous run in at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards. “Britney Spears has shoulders like a man,” he croons as Triumph. “And I can say that and you’ll laugh cuz that’s a puppet on my hand.”

His last LP, “The Eminem Show” may contain his most misogynist words, with equal bile spewed towards his mother, his ex-wife, and women interested in him only for his fame. “Encore” features two songs about Kim, and although one is called “Puke” (“Every time that I think of you, I puke”), he seems to have a more balanced understanding of their relationship. The second song, “Crazy in Love” sums up what it is to love someone you can’t live with. 

Eminem has custody of his daughter, Hailie and his niece Alaina, both 8, and takes care of his half brother Nathan, 18. His responsibility as a father of children from broken homes is crystal in the love song Mockingbird, where he explains to his girls why their family life isn’t perfect. The responsibilities of a father, hip-hop impresario, and superstar, weigh heavily in Eminem’s work. As he evolves, he deals with things accessible to more people — not just the angry poor kid who got beat up daily. Like a lunge towards a mouthy puppet dog, Eminem’s surface remains street-wise defensive. But it’s always interesting to hear what he’s got to say after he’s been thinking about stuff for a while. 

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