
It’s not easy being an icon.
Eminem’s first three albums are essential, autobiographical, to-the-minute accounts of the thoughts, dreams (or nightmares) and experiences of an antagonistic, complicated and unlikely superstar, and they’ve sold millions of copies. Eminem captured the zeitgeist of the early 2000s, and remains as integral a component to the cultural landscape of that era as Jim Morrison is to that of the late 1960s. By the release of 8 Mile, Eminem seemed like an indestructible force in pop music, immune to the fickle, constantly shifting nature of pop culture; but then he developed a nasty drug habit. And then Eminem released Encore in 2005, and suddenly the magic was gone.
And then he was gone as well, disappearing to his mansion outside of Detroit and privately battling an addiction to prescription drugs, which was only exacerbated by the violent death of his longtime friend and mentor, Proof in 2006. After an OD in 2008 scared him straight, Eminem got the monkey off of his back and recorded last year’s Relapse during that process. Although Relapse is unquestionably rife with evidence that Eminem is a top notch emcee, it was the first time that his graphic, horrorcore-inspired content drove listeners away rather than reeling them in, and overall it paled in comparison to his previous work.
Surprisingly, this is a sentiment stated multiple times by Marshall Mathers himself on his latest release, Recovery, an album clearly fashioned to be the true return to form for the best-selling artist of the 2000s. And most of the time, it is.
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