On “Not Afraid,” the first single, he catalogs his climb back to sobriety but doesn’t know when to duck a shoddy double entendre: Just because words rhyme doesn’t mean they should. This is redolent of Eminem circa 1997-98 before the whimsical accents and cadences just as his Slim Shady alter ego was being formed, when wordplay mattered far more than subject or tone. Throughout “Recovery” he is practically panting from rapping at such a frenzied clip. When I’m not even at my harshest, you can still get roasted cause Marsh is not mellow. Take this tightly packed run from “No Love”:Ĭold hearted, from the day I Bogarted the game, my soul started to rot, fellow Were this same album to come from a new artist, it would be met with head scratching and possibly derision, but for Eminem it’s merely charmingly bare-bones.įirst and foremost Eminem’s rapping has survived largely intact, still a wondrous thicket of internal and complex rhymes that come off as feats of athleticism as much as language. But over the last few years, as he retreated into drug-fueled isolation, Eminem one of the most crucial figures in pop culture in the last 20 years, who pushed hip-hop over the final hump to mainstream acceptance has been a nonentity. He sounds far more invigorated than on anything he’s released since 2002, the year of his last strong album, “The Eminem Show,” and the soundtrack to the quasi-biopic “8 Mile.”įor the first few years of his fame Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, exerted a gravitational pull on pop and was impossible to emulate, making him only more powerful. He still has the familiar preoccupations: cartoonish gore, sexual aggression, astonishingly intricate rapping. In many ways, the Eminem captured on “Recovery” is reminiscent of the artist he once was, before the world got hold of him. On Monday he released “Recovery” (Aftermath/Interscope), his sixth solo album on a major label, his first album as a sober man and the most insular of all his releases. His pop megasuccess was serendipitous, explicable by no common measuring sticks.Ĭertainly, in the rear view, it’s tempting to see Eminem’s ascendance as a fluke, never more so than now, several years past his commercial peak.
Just over a decade ago he emerged as an unlikely worldbeater: a white rapper from Detroit with a vexatious obsession with violence and social dysfunction.
Maybe there should never have been room for Eminem in the first place.
0 kommentar(er)
