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.Įminem'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.
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