Eminem - Encore (2004)
Sometime back in, I don't know, 2013? Something like that, I told a friend "Y'know, "Encore" isn't as bad as people say, it's just an album you gotta let play in the background" AKA the same bullshit excuse everyone uses for a shitty album that you should just somehow "vibe to" by majorly ignoring. I was a fucking moron, but you know what? So was Eminem. He had so many amazing features, a good D12 album, a fucking movie ("8 Mile"), and three classic albums, the last of which being "The Eminem Show" which this is a sequel to, and while it was fucking incredible and normally unheard of to capture such an intense burning flame in your hand to be able to nonstop entertain the world for -five- fucking years in different ways and leave them wanting more and more, and then to not only drop the ball (or flame, I guess) with an album, but to drop it in such a spectacularly depressingly shitty way that makes everyone who listened to it when it came out feel uncomfortable in a "is Eminem going to be alive by this time next year?" kind of way, because holy shit, he is drugged out of his fucking mind on this album. When my brother got this album back in 2004, he knew it and every single one of his friends knew it without Eminem even needing to say anything in a song about it. This album is actually horrific to read between the lines and analyze.
Let's start with the positives: This album has a good song on it, that being "Never Enough (feat. 50 Cent & Nate Dogg)" and it's pretty fucking good, and there's a few decent songs on it, two of which being "Yellow Brick Road" which is entertaining in the way that he talks about his life growing up, "Like Toy Soldiers" in which he talks about the beef with Ja Rule and shit, and the very loving "Mockingbird" directed towards his daughter Hailie, but the rest of these songs.. Fuck. There's a three song stretch on this album (excluding a small skit), "Puke", "My 1st Single", and "Rain Man" ALL FUCKING FEATURE BODILY SOUNDS! Either throwing up, farting, or taking a shit, motherfuck this!! Not even the song featuring D12 is that good!! This entire fucking album is some drugged out fucking moronic shit that sounds like it was written by an 8 year old boy and then rapped out by his alcoholic, Xanax-abusing father. You can hear the addiction in Eminem's voice and the severe deterioration of his mental capabilities on this album nearly constantly, because he sounds like he's fucked up on sleeping pills while he's cracking jokes about farting. I could spend this entire review bashing the living fuck out of this album like literally everyone else has, but you know what? You know about this album, I know about this album, let's not waste our times sticking our thumbs up our asses and circlejerking about how much it fucking sucks compared to literally ANYTHING else he's ever put out, past or even fucking present, because you know everything I'm going to say, and lemme tell you: I can't fucking word it anymore interestingly than a million people before me.
OKAY, "There is no denying that my weenie is much bigger than yours is. Mine is like sticking a banana between two oranges" is a good line but that's all you fucking get. I'm fucking done.
4/10
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