What makes Mississauga so fascinating, though, is the way that such lyrics don’t seem to fight for attention, but just simply rest on the (very catchy) melodies. Punk bands for years have been singing the same sort of things and, often in Germany, sometimes dramatizing them on-stage. But in those cases, sensationalism and emphasis are the key traits. For the Hidden Cameras, the opposite is true. And what makes this new disc even more powerful is the way in which “he swallowed my pee” can be followed two songs later by “We Oh We,” which sounds like the “quiet song” at a contemporary church service. If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim about the true test of intelligence can be extended to albums as well, then Mississauga is a pretty damn smart album; but, like all smarts, it’s only bound to appreciated by a select few.
—Drew C. Ashwood
Encore
Eminem
Aftermath Records
It’s Friday now and that means it’s been almost a week since ODB died of presumed heart failure in a Brooklyn recording studio. Which is absolutely horrible, because as great as Eminem is, ODB was greater—wilder, looser, more natural and generally less packed with baggage. There’s some rot in Eminem, some ugly bitterness and insecurity that has not gone away despite his enormous popularity. He wasn’t cool in high school, in other words (see “Oh Foolish Pride” a.k.a. the “Source Racist Tape”), and even though he’s pretty cool now, the resentment’s still in him and it colors everything he does. The new album is a demonstratively detached exercise in dorky weirdness and juvenile mockery—a bit like his first album, but dramatically different because of everything we’ve found out about him since.
With such familiarity comes a danger though, and with 2002’s The Eminem Show, Marshall Mathers backed himself into a corner, exhausting the cache of material about his family, his past and his celebrity, and leaving himself with precious little to work with. The 8 Mile stuff was amazing because he suddenly had a story to rap about, and his recent diss tracks against Murder Inc. and Benzino were great for the same reason. Now, with Encore, he’s all alone again, and at times, he sounds like he’s trying to squeeze blood out of rocks, reaching desperately for inspiration, or at the very least, a decent punch line.
The fierce roar he appropriated in the years since his last record has been largely replaced with a coy mumble, as if he’s sleeptalking his lines from a couch in the studio instead of spitting them passionately into a mic. Just like his harshest critics, he’s a bit bored with himself, and if the apologetic “Like Toy Soldiers” is any indication, the 32year old is starting to get embarrassed of his younger self. His recent interviews, in which he sounds reflective, somber and eerily father-like, seem to support this, but because Eminem will always have to be Eminem, such change must be presented thoughtfully and strategically. So he does the logical thing, filling the new record with a slew of hilariously regressive, yet stunningly witty jokes that would feel just as comfortable on The Slim Shady LP as they would on any of Weird Al’s records. Suddenly he’s being selfdeprecating, calling himself gay, stupid and whiny, but before we start laughing too hard at him, he flips the tables and nails us for liking him so much in the first place. On “Rain Man,” the bizarre distillation of the entire album, he finishes with a killer line: “I don’t even gotta make no goddamn sense—I just did a whole song and I didn’t say shit!” Joke’s on us for loving every second of it, in other words, and joke’s on The New York Times for taking it as seriously as they started to after he got the Oscar.
Yet, recent years have forced Eminem out of the closet as nothing but a big, worried nerd. Despite all his efforts, he’s never been successful at convincing people he was carefree. And as much as we tried to repress our intuitions, we always wanted to ask him why, if he really had as little to prove as he claimed, he felt compelled to talk about it so much. He’s crushingly smart though, and because he knows exactly what he sounds like, he plays up the tension, pitting his intimidating bravado against his obvious insecurity. It’s the same tension that kept characters like Sal Paradise and Holden Caulfield interesting to us when we were sixteen, and Eminem is compelling for the same reasons. Certainly, the joke runs thin sometimes, and his inability to strike a balance between unabashed silliness (“Ass Like That”) and heavy handed seriousness (“Mosh”) is frustrating. But his flow is only getting better, his rhymes more intricately wound and although his beats are often still rather dreary, he’s doing amazing things with his voice and his hooks. The vocal rhythms on opener “Evil Deeds,” for instance, only make sense once you’ve heard them 10 times, and the chorus of the Kim-targeted “Puke” is more dramatic and more sinister than anything he’s written since, well, “Kim.”
In spite of everything, people will hate Encore. Fairweather fans, I say, and not because it’s a bad album—but because Eminem is going through troubles more profound than any he’s ever faced before. Taken for all its awkwardness and self-conscious anxiety, Encore is the dirtied summary of an existential crisis—a tumultuous internal battle that Eminem will undoubtedly resolve on his next, most likely classic, and most likely final album. In the meantime, he shoots his entire audience with a pistol at the end of the record and laughs hysterically.
—Leon Neyfakh