This is the thread where we anticipate Eminem's "Encore"

that said....he's been rocking some fucking RIDICULOUS flows on lots on the mixtape stuff he's done in the last two years....it's so fluid and...um...wiggly...would be good word for it...the one really great dis track he did out of the 10,000 benzino ones was just SICK...he actually seems to be getting better as a rapper, if that's possible....

(x-post)

apparently there was a listening party in LA for the new album recently....did anyone on ILM get to attend??

Fuckin' smooth.

dresses like Pee Wee Herman in the new video!

You say this as if you're proud of it.

OTM.

However: interviews suggest that he actually thinks that he's been progressing as an artist since SS LP...which means this will be the biggest drop off ever.

Funny how he's becoming almost as good a singer as he is a rapper. I'm sure they're massaging his vocals in the studio with Pro Tools and whatnot, but he has the potential to become a "proper" singer. I'm VERY curious about the new record in light of "My Band" et al...

haha he does make a reference to Beavis & Butthead Do America actually.

1. Curtains Re-Opened(skit)
2. One Call (Produced By Eminem)
3. He's Here (Produced By Dr. Dre, Mel-Man)
4. Everywhere feat. Mr. Porter(Produced By Mr. Porter)
5. Live For This feat. Dmx, Nate Dogg (Produced By Red Spyda)
6. Crowd (skit)
7. Aint That Funny feat. Obie Trice, Stat Quo (Produced By Eminem)
8. Hear Me (Produced By Kanye West)
9. Hate At First Site feat. Dina Rae (Produced By Eminem)
10. Source (skit)
11. f*ck'em (Produced By Lil John)
12. Under Attack feat. Dr. Dre, 50 Cent (Produced By Dr. Dre)
13. sh*t Hits The Fan Pt.2 feat. Obie Trice, Young Zee (Produced By Dr. Dre)
14. Coming Soon (skit)
15. Third Finger (Produced By Mel-Man, Eminem)
16. Gonna Be What its Gonna Be feat. Ice Cube (Produced By Dr. Dre)
17. This Time Around feat. Tony Yayo (Produced By Eminem)
18. Mad At Me (Produced By Just Blaze)
19. What's It All For feat. D12 (Produced By Eminem)
20. Motor City(skit)
21. Hardest Mothaf*cka's In The World feat. Swifty (Produced By Eminem)
22. State of the Game (Produced By Mel-Man)
23. Show's Over(skit)

hahaha etc.

jesus, he makes mc hammer/michael jackson jokes too. this is depressing.

i thought it was pretty dope reminded me a little of planet rock style beats...cool electro....like em over fast tempos alot....the touched on everything but little boys is great....and when he tells the guys to shake their ass!

I wish mixtape DJs would fuck with the songs so much though...I hate all that "EEEXXXLUSIVE" "GREEEN LANTERNNNN" shit they do on everything?

Who started that by the way? Tony Touch? (he was just the first one who's tapes i started buyting though, maybe they always did)

"Yeah boy shake that ass, oops I mean girl, girl girl girl"

Yeah, this is great.

hahaha etc.

I think Eminem, when he's on, is pretty much indestructible as an MC.

Who is Eminem gonna pick on now?

you mean like he indicated on his first album?

xpost Ned I think that's as good a strategy as any, "limited edition action figure of a crappy character you never wanted" stylee.

Hahah. I have to admit I'm glad my experience involving anything like that ended with me getting Star Wars figures in the early eighties.

D12=Crazy Horse?

-really really xpost-

(x-post)

(Come to think of it, if "Encore" was recorded with Hallie in mind, then maybe that nudges Eminem even closer to "Trans" territory!)

one very unfortunate excerpt:

I've seen a lot in my life. I've seen groupies on the road and women throwing themselves at you just because you're famous, and I hate that."

Did you not take advantage of it?

"I'm not going to say I never took advantage of it. But did I take advantage a tenth of what I could have? No.... It takes your opinion of women and lowers it. How can these girls dress like this? Not saying I'm not attracted to it-but how can these girls portray themselves in this way and then get mad if we call them a 'bitch' or a 'ho,' or whatever the case being.

I find the comedy middle section best dealt with as an American Pitman and am ashamed to say that I found it great fun (even the It Ain't Half Hot Mum Indian accent!), more listenable than the slightly portentous state-of-the-nation/state-of-me stuff elsewhere.

"Mosh" is indeed a powerful piece of music, released three weeks too late. I like the way in which the rhythm, if broken down, is virtually Belgian New Beat.

But the album as a whole is a mess. He apologises for racism and misogyny on "Yellow Brick Road" yet still hauls out his charity for the indigents D12 for more unfunny puerile sexist bilge ("One Shot, Two Shot" - how about at least four?). And the shoot-the-audience pay-off was showing its age even when Sid Vicious did it a quarter of a century back.

The second Paul skit is gold.

This record is so...unfocused that's great. I love love love that he doesn't care anymore. But if his next record is more of the same, it'll suck.

Look: if you had one shot, one opportunity to seize
everything you ever wanted in one moment, would you capture
it? Or just let it slip?

Eminem asked that question at the beginning of "Lose
Yourself," the hit from the soundtrack to his 2002 film
debut, "8 Mile." It's not the sort of question that demands
an answer, but Eminem provided one anyway, in the form of a
hip-hop pep talk addressed to an anxious wanna-be rapper.
As a pair of guitar chords marched forward, Eminem
delivered the vivid opening couplet: "His palms are sweaty,
knees weak, arms are heavy/There's vomit on his sweater
already, Mom's spaghetti." What could be scarier than that?

What's scarier, of course, is what comes next, after the
triumphant chorus ("You better lose yourself in the music,
the moment/You own it, better never let it go"), after the
triumphant concert, after the triumphant album. What's
scarier is what happens when that "one moment" has passed.
What's scarier is what happens when you find that instead
of having one moment to prove yourself, you have all the
time in the world, and there's nothing more you really want
to seize.

This is the anxiety lurking behind every song on Eminem's
new CD, "Encore" (Aftermath/Universal), which is both his
least combative and his most conflicted album so far. That
doesn't make it the most entertaining. On the contrary,
"Encore" is almost willfully uneven: it includes some of
the most exhilarating songs Eminem has ever recorded,
alongside some of the most inert. "Encore" is the sound of
Eminem's worst nightmare coming true: it's the sound of a
rapper in the studio with nothing but time, trying to
figure out how - or why - to get started.

For a long time, Eminem didn't have to worry about
motivation. When he released his major-label debut, "The
Slim Shady LP," in 1999, he was demanding that the hip-hop
establishment let him in. The next year he bullied his way
into the pop mainstream with the brilliant follow-up, "The
Marshall Mathers LP." And once he became a celebrity, he
had a new enemy: his own fame, which was the main subject
of his tetchy 2002 album, "The Eminem Show."

The genius of the movie "8 Mile" was that it advanced this
story by rewinding it: the pop star became a movie star by
impersonating the aspiring rapper he used to be. But now
the movie is over, and Eminem has a tougher role to play:
the rapper is also a 32-year-old mogul, too rich and too
self-aware to take even his own complaints seriously.

He's not even halfway through the first song before he
starts mocking his own petulance: "Woe is me, there goes
poor Marshall again/Whining about his millions and his
mansion and his sorrow he's always drowning in." You can
hear the change in his voice. He delivered many lyrics on
"The Eminem Show" and the "8 Mile" soundtrack in a nasal,
clenched-throat roar. But for "Encore" he unveils a new
voice, a slurred monotone that hints at boredom.

In "Rain Man," the album's riveting centerpiece, he reels
off wildly offensive monologues as if he were merely
killing time. He half-heartedly revives the controversy
over his anti-gay lyrics with an absurd riff on homoerotic
sports, and swipes at an easy target with a Jessica Simpson
joke. And in case listeners don't understand what he's up
to, he even picks a surreal fight with one of pop culture's
most dearly departed, declaring, "I won't stand for
this/And Christopher Reeve won't sit for this, neither,"
and later crowing, "I killed Superman, I killed Superman."

The real butt of this joke is Eminem himself: it's a track
about a rapper in a rut, with nothing better to do than to
reel off some more rote insults. "I don't know how else to
put it/This is the only thing that I'm good at," he
confesses near the end, and he sounds less like a rapper
bragging than like an addict bottoming out.

While "Rain Man" cleverly builds upon this nagging sense of
boredom, other tracks merely suffer from it. The first
single, "Just Lose It," is meant to be fizzy and
freewheeling, but instead it unfolds as a series of
puzzlingly unfunny jokes. The follow-up, "Mosh," gained
notoriety for its anti-Bush lyrics, but Eminem sounds
nearly as long-winded as the politicians he's excoriating.
And in "Big Weenie," Eminem rambles on and on about his
enemies, even though he knows he's not really getting
anywhere: "It's pointless/Why do we have to keep on going
through this?/This is torturous." He sounds as if he's
stalling, hoping inspiration will strike.

And about half the time, it does. A song called, in part,
"Like That" is brilliantly inane: Dr. Dre lays some
curlicued sitars atop a lazy bass line, while Eminem pays
tribute to Hilary Duff and the Olsen Twins, delivering his
rhymes in a thick accent that's supposed to be either
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog or Arnold Schwarzenegger
(apparently, they talk the same). "Toy Soldiers," scheduled
to be the next single, recycles the 1980's pop hit by
Martika so that Eminem can rehash his beefs with Ja Rule
and the Source. But the vitriol is mainly gone, and he
sounds sad and clear-eyed, ending the rhyme by proposing a
truce: "It's not a plea that I'm coppin'/I'm just willing
to be the bigger man./If y'all can quit poppin'/Off at the
jaws well then I can,/'Cause frankly I'm sick of
talkin'/I'm not gonna let someone else's coffin/Rest on my
conscience."

As you can probably tell from that overpacked stanza, this
is an intensely word-centric album. A few beats stand out
(for "Crazy in Love," Eminem creates a thrilling loop out
of the old Heart song "Crazy on You"), but most tracks -
produced either by Eminem or by his mentor, Dr. Dre - are
driven less by music than by the stop-start momentum of
Eminem's lyrics.

Even with no threatening foes to vanquish, no angry crowd
to face, nothing to prove, Eminem can often come up with
enough high concepts and low jokes and unexpected rhymes to
keep his listeners listening. But as he himself probably
knows, he's at his best when he seems to be not quite in
control of his own tongue: when foes are pushing him, when
his own paranoid fantasies are pushing him, when a hot beat
is pushing him.

Maybe that's why the single most exciting thing on "Encore"
isn't the I-love-my-daughter ode "Mockingbird" or the
Em-and-Dre tag-team title track, but "My First Single," a
track so fast and foulmouthed that Eminem doesn't seem to
be entirely sure what he's saying until he's already said
it; he's too busy keeping up with the beat. As he speeds
through five different ways to serve chicken (most of them
more popular on adult-only Web sites than in restaurants)
and pokes more fun at Reeve, you can hear traces of that
frantic, maybe even desperate rapper who once knew he only
had one shot, one opportunity, one moment.

This a bewildering record. Big Weenie, Just Lose It, and that song where he sings like Triumph are just bizarre......I'm really at a loss on this one. I honestly don't know how to feel about it...intentional career suicide? over the top wacky genius? who knows....i'm leaning towards "it sucks" though....The beats are uniformly pretty terrible...cept for Toy Soldiers sample and the Heart one, both of which work way better than they should...

damn, Em....you've got me flummoxed as a muthafucka homie.

Anyway, I think he's trying to go (back?) to just being another rapper, so that he's a little less famous as his daughter starts getting older.

Truly, truly, truly, oh...
Drank too much
And I said too much
And there’s nowhere to go - but down

Young boy - I wanna help you
See these lines ? : truly disappointed

Truly, truly, truly, oh...
Don’t talk to me, no
About people who are nice
’cause I have spent my whole life
In ruins
Because of people who are nice
Oh, this world may lack style, I know
Each bud must blossom and grow, oh...

Young girl, one day you will be old
But the thing is, I love you now
Mmm ...

This is the last song I will ever sing (yeah!)
No: I’ve changed my mind again (aaw...)

Goodnight

And thankyou