Album review: Eminem's 'Relapse'
And so it has come to this: rebel-turned-celebrity turns into celebrity-as-cliché.
How else to explain Eminem’s latest studio album, “Relapse” (Interscope)? It took five years to make not because the artist born Marshall Mathers III was squirreling himself away in an attempt to reinvent himself. No, he was preoccupied with a drug habit that sent him into rehab.
His dependency on pain killers frames a 20-track, 76-minute album, and the by-now expected digressions into audio pathology. There are a few genuinely chilling moments, a few shots of dark humor, and a lot of trolling through one of the most disturbing imaginations in popular entertainment.
Eminem has specialized in the sick and the self-deprecating for a decade, in the process becoming the most celebrated (and reviled) hip-hop artist of his time. The outlaw pose has paid off well: his previous studio albums have sold 27 million copies. The problem with transgression lies in its impermanence; once you perform the same trick countless times, the sense of surprise dissipates, and so does your audience.
Yet Eminem has the talent to outlive his moment. When he’s good, he can be very good. His best music has an honesty as withering as a heart attack. He has produced landmark music such as “Stan” and starred in a hit movie, “8 Mile,” that gave his hardscrabble story a context and depth lacking in his albums.
But for anyone who carried a glimmer of hope that this talented if perverse MC had a great album in him, the kind of arty self-reinvention that the Beastie Boys once engineered with their 1989 masterpiece, “Paul’s Boutique,” “Relapse” is a wake-up call. He took five years off to produce an album that retraces his steps rather than forging a bold new path.