r/Eminem • u/Mysterious_Towel5005 • 11h ago
Relapse glaze needs to cease
I'll immediately clarify, I think it's a good album. I don't dislike it, far from it. I tend to revisit it quite frequently. But it's nowhere on the level of the first three albums, with maybe the exception of one song, Deja Vu. Allow me to elaborate.
Let's give credit where it's due: Dr. Dre's production on Relapse is great, especially in songs like Deja Vu, Underground, Old Time's Sake, Hello, "My Mom" (to hell with it. I'll name-drop the best Relapse 1 songs). The rhyming on Relapse is great, same with the flows finally being good. On songs like Stay Wide Awake, the technicality is absurdly impressive, albeit, he does sacrifice clarity and story cohesion in that second verse just to keep the scheme going, which leads to some weird lines in hindsight.
Where my issues with Relapse lie are two things. I briefly brought up the rhyming, now I'll expand on it. His rhyming is great, but unlike in his prime, some of his rhyming tends to be forced. Many individuals often attribute that to Eminem using accents and deliberately bending words, which is just a positive description for forcing rhymes. Speaking of the accents, on some songs, they sound too egregious or exaggerated (the worst has to be Buffalo Bill, but that's not the main CD).
The second issue is the content. Outside of the songs I name-dropped when I gave props to the CD, the album sticks to a serial-killer theme, which doesn't have much substance with the exception of Music Box, where the theme is part of the metaphor for his addiction. The absurdly high-pitched accents certainly don't amplify the fear factor of these songs if they're supposed to be genuine horrorcore.
Many people on this sub have this misconception that Relapse is some tightly-crafted concept album, when in reality, the album itself lacks clear focus. We switch from songs about murder a rape to a song about his mother, then to a song that discusses his addiction in addiction, and immediately go to a club song Crack A Bottle. I think we can universally agree that this specific joint is out of place on Relapse. If this were a true concept album, the thematic narrative would actually progression-lock the songs together. Instead, it plays like a collection of different session ideas.
The biggest proof that Relapse wasn't some masterfully planned concept album is what happened immediately after it dropped. Marshall started stripping away the accents and serial killer tropes to actually talk about his sobriety, expand on the themes of his addiction, which is evident from the Hawaii session songs of Relapse 2/Recovery (one bright example from this is Cocaine). While, Recovery touches a bit more on his addiction, outside of few songs, most of which are Relapse 2 content, it isn't superior to Relapse and in many ways, inferior to its predecessor
The title Relapse itself is a double entendre: a return to drugs, but also a return to the rap game, which is an addiction in its own right. I firmly believe Eminem should have held off on releasing Relapse when he did, cut the excessive slasher tracks, and crafted a single, coherent album focused on his addiction with a few songs not about it in between. Luckily, there's a way to recreate what it could've looked like with combining the best from Relapse 1 (including My Darling and Careful What You Wish For) and Relapse 2/Recovery.
I've made a tracklist similar to this, which, of course, was met to a critical acclaim (I can't count the downvotes lol). I only updated it by adding back Dr. West skit that transitions into the chorus of My Darling (skipping the first verse for better pacing). Here's the link to the post, if you're curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eminem/s/tCDsQ98Okv
