The Eminem Show's first single, Without Me, casts desperately around for something to attack before settling on oafish nu-metallers Limp Bizkit and, unbelievably, Moby, who Eminem complains is too old and bald. Last year's album Devil's Night, recorded with D12, was dire, a collection of unfunny jokes about sex with the disabled and eating babies - all Eminem's censor-baiting nastiness with none of the vindicatory existential angst.
Where does Eminem go now that he's established that his upbringing was turbulent and fame isn't all it's cracked up to be? Certainly his releases since The Marshall Mathers LP have suggested lyrical inspiration was running dry. As the rapper Proof, of Eminem's Detroit crew D12, pointed out in a recent interview: "If he's still talking the same shit about how he's broke or wants to kill everybody, what would be the maturity in it? He's happy now. Meanwhile, only Nirvana's swansong In Utero can match 2000's Marshall Mathers LP as a livid, self-baiting document of instant and unwanted celebrity. In the process Eminem redrew hip-hop's racial boundaries, proving the genre that had spoken for America's disenfranchised black population could be adapted to speak for its disenfranchised whites. No album in history articulated the frustration of life among America's trailer park underclass more luridly than his debut, 1999's Slim Shady LP. It's a problem that Eminem should feel more acutely than anyone else. By their third album, they find themselves rich, successful and contented - and lost for anything to say. As the career of Oasis proves, fast-burning rock phenomena traditionally have two great albums in them: their debut, fuelled by success-hungry self-belief, and its follow-up, a kind of musical lap of honour powered by a beguiling, we-knew-we-were-right arrogance.
The cliche of the "difficult third album" is rooted in reality. The Eminem Show certainly finds the rapper at an intriguing and crucial juncture in his career.
"Whoever put my shit on the internet, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going, 'I got Eminem's new CD! I'm going to put it on the internet!' I think that anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch." The man who wrote songs called Just Don't Give a Fuck and Still Don't Give a Fuck has apparently found a subject he gives a fuck about.Ī cynic might suggest that the internet piracy palaver is a convenient way of detracting attention from the album's content. "I think that shit is fucking bullshit," he remarked.
Eminem himself has weighed in with the sort of sparkling and considered argument against internet piracy that Liam Gallagher would applaud for its eloquence. So widespread and serious is the result that his label has been forced to bring the release date forward by a month. Last weekend, it was reported that bootleg CDs of the album were available on the streets of New York for a bargain $5.
The Eminem Show has been readily available for illegal download on the net for weeks. As Marshall Mathers III readies his third album, The Eminem Show, the controversy stems from a more mundane source: internet piracy. No pressure group has accused him of penning "the most blatantly offensive homophobic lyrics ever" or compared him to Hitler, as Peter Tatchell did last year. No one has attempted to sue him for defamation. This time, however, the storm is rather different. No new release from the rapper who can justifiably claim to be the world's most notorious recording artist would be complete without controversy. Such trifles, however, do not seem to fit Eminem.
Most content themselves with a tabloid splash based on their love life or a self-produced TV documentary highlighting their genius, munificence and, of course, their regular-guy humility. T oday, it is de rigueur for major artists releasing a new album to receive a publicity blitz that stretches far beyond the usual interviews and reviews.