Eminem: Relevant?

I mean, not really, but whatever.

So Relapse, like everything Eminem's done solo, deserves a little attention to what the hell is going on. Cursory listen of Encore was, for me, more disappointing than the mild nostalgic enjoyment of the pared-down (and more blanket-sadistic) reiterations of previous themes from times past: mom-killing, valium. Y'know. But Encore revealed itself as a concept piece after a few listens, and in some cases I reversed my original position completely after a while (see: "Just Lose It").

Ultimately Relapse is much worse, both in the visible rust of Eminem's delivery, which he hides in a strange, pinched tone (not present on every track) that suggests he had like an eighth of a stroke or something, and also in the sense that I will NEVER be able to see more in these songs, as they're not really trainwrecks, more like a guy that's now been driving his car that somehow still ran fine after a horrible accident for several years afterward. I mean, it was kind of shocking at first, scrunched like a crushed can, but now it's just kind of ugly.

But hey, let's not sell the concept short. I theorize that, rather than Jordan S.'s claim of a Blackout parallel, Relapse is more like Lindsay Lohan's nadir-period art: awful horror flick (and recipient of many a Razzie) I Know Who Killed Me:

It seems to me that Eminem has established a weird third splinter serial killer personality from Marshall/Slim — Nasalface, maybe? — but this character is a pathetic regurgitation of nu-horror flick cliches, a kind of Troma/z-budget horror aesthetic given a multi-million dollar budget. I really hate these movies, which manage to lose BOTH the odd no-budget charm and the actual power of well-done higher-budget horror. Ironically enough Relapse reminds me not of Blackout, but of Lindsay Lohan’s I Know Who Killed Me, which kind of figures out how campy it is about halfway through but just won’t let go of its pretensions to being a real horror movie.

This is a useful lens for looking at the album, I think, because it helps to articulate its flaws and also its modest successes. I think the "tone problem" is a big one that ultimately ruins both of these -- visceral unpleasantness (basically torture porn in both cases) makes the aura of self-parody/self-consciousness wilt, but you can look at the wilt and kind of reconstruct what it might've been like in full bloom (kind of like Encore?). Lindsay would be in a trashy meta-grindcore flick in the vein of Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse contribution (and, probably not coincidentally, Tarantino's characters name-drop Lindsay Lohan in Death Proof). But there's a certain professional failure that doesn't allow the meta-failures to hit properly. Dre's beats are sub-par, the IKWKM film school editing conceits (blue filters! Jump cuts!) are failure-failures, and it's hard to do "meta-tedium," since bored is usually just bored, not "about boredom." I mean, maybe there are some experimental structural films that do this, but I'm talking look-at-your-watch-and-yawn tedium. "3AM," which is a horrendous song, is also far too long, including a full minute loop of the weaksauce Dre horror beat. It's the first track, too, which is kind of a death knell for listening to the album as an album.

But I can sort of reconstruct the "pure" meta in Relapse's mess: first, there's the somewhat arbitrary focus on nu-celebs, Kim Kardashian, Lindsay & Samantha, Amy Winehouse, figures that have no relation to Eminem culturally -- someone on ILM points out that when he was singing about Britney and Xtina he was also premiering alongside them in the same venues; he was them. But nothing has really changed: his targets are contemporary; they're as washed-up as he is. Kardashian is, if anything, symbolic of a post-zeitgeist reality TV landscape, Lindsay and Britney (the two targets in what feels like an aborted triptych or something in "Same Song & Dance") are at the slight incline from their (presumable) rock-bottom points. And maybe that's exactly what Relapse is: a slight step up from rock-bottom, a reflection on a moment that's passed.

Frank Kogan's take on "We Made You" is provocative:

Eminem "We Made You": Since we made you, we should have you, says our man Slim to the celebs; but that's not how it works, and his come-ons come to naught, of course. There's the same mutual dysfunction as in the old days, Em and his love objects complicit in each other's pathology ("You're my Amy, I'm your Blake"), but he keeps finding new angles and new gags ("Oh Amy, rehab never looked so good, I can't wait, I'm goin' back!"). What's strange and compelling but not fun about this track is its struggle, the narrator's compulsions reduced to an impersonal mechanism, a player piano rattling on. He's not the ebullient Slim of past days but a machine that's filing syllables into slots: "Back by popular demand/Now pop a little Zantac or antacid if you can." It's the ghost of jauntiness, performed by skeleton bones. TICK

One thing to note is that "we" made him, too -- on Encore he, perhaps by choice, thrust himself onto a wash-up track that many of the media celebrities he's targeting here have no real choice to participate in. "Asking for it" arguments aside, there's really no argument that there's a double standard in press and popular reception of the downfall of women celebrities compared to men; but in so willfully pissing away whatever goodwill was left toward Eminem as icon in 2004 (and after "Lose Yourself"/8 Mile I'd argue that he was still fairly relevant) he resembles a female celebrity in terms of scorn/expectations of his fans: people expect him to fail, expect him to be long past his sell-by date. Which is odd, because male celebrities by and large don't have "sell-by dates," they have lulls.

Still, there's a distinct undercurrent in Eminem gossip of a guy who just by no stretch of the imagination could possibly reinvent himself. This has a few semi-plausible (but all a little specious) root causes, like hyper-identification with the same post-Britney/BSB music landscape that right now is the NOSTALGIA DANGER ZONE from which no real pleasure may be derived (approx. 1997-2003?), the fact that his "thing" is White Rapper, a thing that (1) isn't as strongly A Thing these days (at least not in the way it was when Eminem was at his peak, when he was being held up not only as a "minority" within the rap community but also an exemplar who sort of stood beside rap) and (2) arguably gives him a certain "novelty" curse -- that along with the fact that many of his hits were actual novelties, or at least anomalies (could anyone possibly have a non-hip-hop/pop/R&B career break from doing the vocal hook on a rap song the way Dido did on "Stan"?).

Eminem, for a variety of reasons, has about as much against him in public perception in 2009 as Britney/Lindsay do in their respective fields, without being (1) a woman or (2) perceived to be within a general social spectrum that is half-legit at best (e.g. the Backstreet Boys being marked in boyband land, though you can always point to Justin Timberlake as an exception here, and "moving on" from a boyband is actually a quite acceptable legitimacy grab). This puts him in a unique position among all artists, and perhaps also points to how insane the gender disparity in public perception really is: I really cannot think of a single male artist in my entire lifetime whose "legit" success (hedge phrase to exclude novelties like Vanilla Ice) was comparably schadenfreuded. I recognize that much of this is Eminem's own fault for artistic choices he made, but one could point to Britney and Lindsay as two possible routes forward: reform and return to success (Britney post-Blackout) and general floundering with a few baby-steps upward (Lindsay post-series-of-trainwrecks).

None of this changes the fact that "3AM" is awful. And one issue that comes up in this is that Eminem has to do a lot more demonstrable heavy lifting on this album -- in the format he's chosen, which is basically his tried-n-true format (as opposed to featuring on a series of omnibus tracks a la first half of Jamie Foxx's Intuition) -- and has to remain front and center, spotlight on, the whole time. I called Britney's presence on Blackout "power-stained in," which is right, but there are no real ballads on Blackout (though the demo for "Baby Boy" is strikingly different and spare, and would have made a good final track after "Why Should I Be Sad"). Also, the studio construction of Britney's vocals is more transparent than, e.g., taking different takes of Eminem's verses and splicing them into a coherent line or chorus or whatever else. In a way Eminem's job is more comparable to Britney's rehearsed but front-and-center live performance, and that would mean that Relapse falls somewhere between a VMAs disaster and a modest holding pattern on the level of the "Piece of Me" video, to use the two extremes within two years of MTV history.

MTV itself won't be much of a factor in any of this, either -- Eminem probably won't have the kind of last-gasp clout thrown behind him that Britney did for mediocre-but-not-bad video "Piece of Me" at last year's VMAs, in part because that really was a last gasp for MTV, and one that they won't be able to redo much as time marches on, and in part because Eminem just isn't the crossover artist that Britney is anymore.

So what I'm saying, basically, is that Eminem has kind of placed himself in the Axis of Shevil. Which means that he's reclaimed Lindsay after she, in North Korea-like fashion, was kicked out, and proceeded to kick out Paris Hilton, who doesn't receive a single nod, knife, or rape fantasy on Relapse (interesting). At least, that's where I can most charitably see him at the moment -- a distinctly Axis of Shevil-ish media presence whose newest fantasies are more indebted to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake than some kinda id-spasm. It's an oddly calculated affair, which makes it (viscerally) unpleasant but (conceptually) provocative: it's not at all clear exactly what he's calculated, but the process itself isn't a failure -- only the result is.

EDIT: Eminem hides a strange, sort of pretty track, "Beautiful," that says much of the above (sort of) explicitly.