The Eminem songs he admitted were “silly”
Eminem, from The Slim Shady LP onwards, experienced a remarkable run of form in terms of his album releases.
That record, followed by The Marshall Mathers LP, then The Eminem Show, and then the 8 Mile soundtrack, secured his place as rap’s leading figure of the era, but following the end of this incredible streak, it all started to go wrong.
In an essay he wrote in 2022 for XXL, Em reflected on his career and identified his early albums as a source of pride. While he could be critical of them in parts, he nonetheless found he could return to them years later and feel good about what he’d created. He does not feel the same way about 2004’s Encore, however.
Encore, Eminem’s fifth album, was a troubled work from start to finish. Not only were many of its best songs leaked online before the release date, forcing Em to scrap them or to include them on a bonus disc rather than on the finished album itself, but its creator also had succumbed to a terrible drug addiction by the time; hence the project, in hindsight, was always going to struggle to reach the heights of its predecessors.
The leak really disrupted Em’s plans for Encore. Some of the songs, like ‘We as Americans’ and ‘Love You More’, had to be pushed from the original tracklist, which he believed was a hugely negative development. He had to “start over”, which, in his words, “felt like a mountain I had to climb”. “You climb half the mountain,” he said, “and then all of a sudden, you get knocked back down”.
Perhaps these setbacks would have been easier to handle if not for Em’s addiction spiralling out of control at the same time. His mental state, as a result of the drugs he was on, made him “goofy”, as he put it, which led to songs he now looks back on with some regret.
“So now, I go make ‘Ass Like That’, ‘Big Weenie’, ‘Rain Man’,” he recounted, looking back on Encore’s lower moments, “all those silly songs which I’m writing in fuckin’ seconds at that point in time. I was just writing high and feeling good about what I’m doing because I got fuckin’ 20 Vicodin in me and this is fun to do, and I’m having fun, so fuck it.”
While Em was fond of certain Encore tracks, most notably ‘Like Toy Soldiers’, he knew in his “heart of hearts” that it was “not the same quality as The Eminem Show”. This realisation struck him as “a wake-up call, a slap in the face, a sobering moment”.
Eminem realised he had a problem, and it was one that would not easily be remedied. He struggled for several years with his addiction, kicking it for periods before later relapsing once again. But, as of this year, he is celebrating 18 years of sobriety.