TSTR wrote:Might be an odd question, but I'm taking a trip to lower Michigan sometime in the near future, and was wondering if there were some good record stores in the area? I post this here, since I'm mainly looking for 90s hip-hop jams. Other musics of the 90s is cool too.
speaking of Michigan...
Eminem
Encore
2004, Shady
The actual disc that Encore was released on is meant to look like some sort of suicide note. The last line reads "to all my fans I'm sorry." In a sense you could already know what this is before hitting play. You'd know that Eminem or Marshall or Slim or whoever he is, is his own worst enemy. And this album is self-mutilation - a sabotaging of a career that was riding high thanks to "Lose Yourself" winning a Grammy. Which is a shame because when Em can get out of his own way (and when he's actually got something to talk about), he is a brilliant lyricist and performer. And the top half of this record actually shows some of that brilliance with some brutally honest tracks like "Yellow Brick Road" and "Like Toy Soldiers." Even "Mosh" comes across as sincere and emotional, even if heavy-handed. By the time you hit "Puke," the 300th or so Kim-bashing song you start to worry that Em's running low on ideas and that maybe this should have been an EP length companion to The Eminem Show. But at least "Punk" has a decent beat. And then all hell breaks loose. The vast majority of Encore is bad. And I don't just mean it's filler - there is some straight up embarrassingly awful material here such as "My First Single," and "Big Weenie." Other tracks aren't just horrible, they're confusing. Take the skit where Em takes shots at Michael Jackson while using a trach tube. This is also the record where Em starts really over-using odd accents for no apparent reason. And while a couple of other songs that are actually about something do pop up later in the tracklist, they come off as too little, too late. "Mockingbird" is nice, but feels like a rehashed "Hallie's Song," and "Crazy In Love," struggles to keep the momentum of the Heart sample going. Em has gone on to say that Encore was a record recorded while he was heavily addicted to pills, and that's easy to hear. Key track "Rain Man" is a prime example of the mess he created. Somehow "Rain Man" is offensive, lazy, and a hilarious self-deprecation all at once. It is the attempted career suicide hinted at on the disc artwork. And if it weren't for those moments of brilliance ("Like Toy Soldiers"), he may have succeeded to make an album that was impossible to bounce back from. Instead we just got something that's hard to defend. Encore is one of those albums that fans should own for a handful of songs, but it's likely you'll never sit through it from beginning to end again.
