Or to put it another way, these tracks are undercooked juvenile shite. The Dre-produced ‘Ass Like That’ and ‘Big Weenie’ are silly, groin-levelled doodles that demonstrate both producer and rhymer aren’t just on autopilot, they’re having a nice snooze in the cockpit while the plane plummets towards Earth. You can write off a good 50 per cent of the album’s tracks before you even get started – ‘Yellow Brick Road’ is sombre in tone, part-autobiographical and part-confessional in lyrical content, but it’s absolutely nothing we haven’t heard before or, more to the point, seen before in 8 Mile. Mocking Jacko isn’t just shooting fish in a barrel, it’s stuffing a mackerel into a jam jar and then blasting it with a bazooka – only nowhere near as much fun. The very fact that the target of its teasing, knowingly throwaway lyrics is Michael Jackson suggests that Em is severely guilty of coasting. The fact that those noises are the most interesting things about the track tells its own story. The single ‘Just Lose It’ is a prime example, with Em reduced to making funny noises to keep things interesting. Too often, perfunctory click-beats and directionless noodles of bass are served up without spice or variation.

Well, a good half of ‘Encore’ certainly sounds, musically at least, as if there were more pressing issues – the smoking of blunts, coming up with amusing outfit ideas for future videos – than ensuring a basic level of compositional complexity for every track. Is he doing this out of pure braggadocio, or signposting the end of the road? And what are we to infer from the album title itself, a pretty straightforward articulation of a final flourish, the end of a spectacle? Is the problem that, as he once rhymed in leaner times, he “just don’t give a fuck”? Lyrically, he seems intent on bringing ongoing disputes to a close, debunking and disseminating the significance of his work, letting us all know how easy it all is and basically intimating that he’s not even trying any more. Seriously, this might be the death of Eminem, or at least of Slim Shady. It’s an album of bluff and double-bluff, sophistry and suggestion, the rapper’s most overtly political material to date and, unless we are very much misinterpreting it, the very real possibility that ‘Encore’ represents Eminem’s retirement speech, at least in his current guise, a fact borne out by the fact that a new persona is explicitly introduced in the track ‘Rain Man’. One thing’s for certain – anyone expecting Marshall’s usual mixture of inflammatory outrage, introspective musings and party-hearty buffoonery will end up a little flustered and flummoxed. Even so, what better time for America’s anarchist Antichrist to come blasting back? He’ll make us feel better, won’t he? Ironically, Eminem’s ‘Encore’ was not meant to be out so soon after the US election – rapacious bootlegging of the album has forced its release date forward. High time, then, for rock’s number one do-badder to jump back into the fray and do what he does best – piss the right wing off and spoil the party a little. He won, and the rock do-gooders (and we at NME can, in a small way, count ourselves among them) lost. Over at the Dixie Chicks’ place, a pile of fiddles and banjos huddle in preparation for an administration-change hoe-down that will just have to cool its boots for another four years.īecause Bush won. In Bruce Springsteen’s cooler, rows and rows of suitably blue-collar celebratory beer languish, gathering refrigerated dust, waiting for a party that won’t happen.

At the back of Michael Stipe’s fridge, conspicuously uncorked, a jeroboam of organic, environmentally-friendly champagne nestles, waiting for another, better day.

Encore eminem album back cover