It's also Em's best exploration of living his life in the rare space between America's too-wide racial divide. Childhood tale "Yellow Brick Road" is the closest thing to biographical narrative he's ever done, and his remorseful explanation of the situation around which he, as a hurt kid, lashed out in a few racially-tinged rhymes at a black girl is not only compelling but effectively diffuses Source editor Benzino's long-running attack campaign on the rapper.
Much of the first third of the record features Eminem unloading his emotional weight. Unfortunately, most of the tracks that don't veer toward either extreme are plodding and unremarkable. 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 song "Like Toy Soldiers" is his second song that samples "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" by Paul Simon after "Murder, Murder" on The Slim Shady EP.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. The album made digital history in becoming the first album to sell 10,000 digital copies in one week. The album was nominated for three Grammys at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards including for Best Rap Album but lost to Kanye West's Late Registration. Eminem himself stated in an interview that, the album wasn't his best work. However, most critics and fans alike did note the subpar quality of the lyrics, which were more simplistic when compared to previous albums. Critical reception was generally positive. Nine months after its release, worldwide sales of the album stood at 11 million copies. As of June 25, 2010, it had sold 5.2 million copies in the US. It was certified quadruple-platinum there in mid-December. Encore sold 710,000 copies in its first three days. Its release was set for November 16, 2004, but was moved up to November 12 after the album was leaked to the Internet. Encore is the fifth studio album by Eminem.
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