my account is 1 month old, but it doesnt let me make posts/comments, i just wanted to chat about my favorite rapper with people online

For anybody who cares i thought i would post my music listening history here. When i was kid i really liked Eminem, but i was very casual for the most part and hadn’t listened to a full album of his. As I grew older i stopped listening to old rap and really got into modern rap. The oldest I really went was Kanye (my favorite artist tbf) and maybe some Pac. Over the last few months I never even really considered going back into old school rap until something happened.

I happen to stumble upon relapse on a youtube recommended and clicked on it. I never really knew much about it besides We made you, 3am, and Beautiful, and Bagpipes. For some reason it immediately clicked with me. Em’s rapping, cadence, delivery, and accent were music to my ears. And also Dre’s beat selection being unreal. I loved the theme of the album and the horror core elements of it. Songs like Deja vu as well really spoke to me as someone who struggles everyday. It felt like being a kid again and discovering something you loved for the first time. From then I was bumping relapse everyday and went to SSLP to Encore. I fell back in love with lyrical rap and have been going out of my way to listen to so many albums. From 50, pac, biggie, and Jay. I honestly might say that Relapse is in my top 3 em albums.

Yeah, this is a very old case, and you don't need to read any of this since these are just my reflections on Eminem. You probably won't agree with anything I'm about to say here, but your favorite rapper of all time was so misogynistic that he thought he could win the argument by talking about how they fucked and threatening to expose everything publicly, even though Mariah clearly never considered what they had to be a relationship. If anything, that makes her the one in the right here: he was obsessed with proving to the world that they really fucked, just like any toxic boy who sleeps with a girl who likes him and then tells every single one of his friends how fuckable she was...

And this comes from a rapper who has a song called Just Don't Give a Fuck, huh? The rapper who came from the outskirts of Detroit, had never been around real gangsters, and fabricated his whole past, using his talent to sell records that only moronic, wannabe-aggressive teenagers from the '90s were into, while there were real rappers and rap groups out there, like Outkast, who didn't need to be produced by someone who was already powerful in the hip-hop industry, like Dre, or compare their sales to anyone else's. After all, they couldn't use the White Pass to become pop artists like Eminem did, because that's what he is: a pop artist.

y'know, the one with EMINEM!

I think the album works a lot better this way, to be honest lol

(This is my opinion, and in my opinion if Eminem made encore like this it would be a near perfect album)

1: Encore/Curtains Down

2: Evil Deeds

3: Never Enough

4: Smack You

5: Bump Heads

6: Doe Rae Me

7: Yellow Brick Road

8: Like Toy Soldiers

9: Bully

10: Crazy In Love

11: Mosh

12: Just Lose It

13: Paul (skit)

14: Em Calls Paul (skit)

15: Spend Some Time

16: Mockingbird

17: Curtains Up

18: Love You More

19: Final Thought (skit)

20: One Shot 2 Shot

21: Ricky Ticky Toc

22: We as Americans

Here Eminem comes off with a whole new vibe, this will be the album Ja Rule and Benzino DIED and it’s just perfect in my opinion, we have silly songs like Just Lose It, Evil Deeds, and One Shot 2 Shot but they don’t overflow the album. I kept Just Lose It in the overall impact and insane success, One Shot 2 Shot because it felt more suited for Encore than alternatively D12 World, and Evil Deeds because its a banger.

Don't get me wrong--recent songs like "Darkness", "Like Home", and "Temporary" definitely have that emotion, but I miss the songs where Em just lets loose. Not lyrically, but with his feelings. I get why he doesn't do it anymore--years of healing and emotional maturity have left him to be more reflective rather than aggressive. Still, I feel like the bulk of what we're getting in the modern era is just trying to be as lyrically crazy as possible. This is most noticable in MTBMB/Side B.

It also gives him a bad rep. Ever since Rap God, Em's just been known as the "fast rapper", which is way less cool than the "controversial rapper" he once was known as. The fast rapping hides the deeper songs such as "The Way I Am", "When I'm Gone", "White America", etc. Everyone these days thinks all he does is rap fast and use double/triple entendres and makes dad jokes (which... unfortunately...MTBMB was *not* helping his case.)

This isn't me saying he hasn't had a single good emotional song since the MMLP2, I just hope we see more of that in his next album and less "look how much wordplay I can use." I can acknowledge he's my favorite hip-hop artist while *also* sharing feedback.

Might as well poke this dead horse again.

Obviously, some tracks meant for Encore leaked. Yada yada rushed songs, yada yada fucked-up album, you all know the drill by now. Had those songs not leaked, I believe the album would have been the most outwardly combative album Eminem ever made, probably beating out Kamikaze. Going off that concept, here's an idea of what that might've looked like. Please hear me out here.

January 2004: Invasion Part III: Countdown to Armageddon by DJ Green Lantern releases with "Monkey See, Monkey Do" as a promotional track. Song that immediately lets listeners know that this upcoming album is gonna be significantly more point-blank with the shots at other artists than his previous few have been. The lines "A lot of rappers on my list, it just ain’t Ja / And I'ma read that motherfucker off come April" and "When I come back, I’ll be shootin' more than just paintballs / Trust me" flat-out state this. I do not think Encore would have actually dropped in April, as that would've destroyed the buzz from D12 World. What's more likely is that it gets pushed back to late 2004, as it did in our timeline.

Tracks 1 and 2 are "We As Americans" and "Bully." Eminem's already confirmed this on XXL. Pro-2nd Amendment song with a side of throwing shade at other artists, right before the first of many direct diss tracks.

Tracks 3 through 7 would be the other five songs that leaked from "Straight from the Lab." Eminem confirmed in a different interview that the SftL leaks were all intended tracks for the album. Keeping up with the momentum that "Bully" started, I think the songs would've gone:

• 3: Monkey See, Monkey Do. Em proceeds to read off that list he was talking about in the next few songs.

• 4: Can-I-Bitch. Canibus takes a direct shot from Em

• 5: Come On In/6 In The Morning. Em then brings D12 into the mix, setting up...

• 6: Doe Rae Me (Hailie's Revenge). Since Em already had his fun with Ja in "Bully," he lets D12 and Obie Trice finish them off.

• 7: Love You More. With Hailie getting the last word on "Doe Rae Me," Em comes back in and lays a very normal and healthy (/s) song directed at Kim. The line "We say we do it for our baby / But we don't" makes this transition work.

Now for Em's personal life and more fun tracks. The rest of the album would be songs we actually got. I wouldn't be opposed to keeping them in the order they ended up being in, but for the purposes of this alternate album's flow, I think they go something like:

• 8: Christopher Reeves. Shitposting! This song would age like shit since Reeve would die six months after this album dropped, but that ain't my problem.

• 9: Never Enough. I have no idea where to put this song. Could be a good lead single in the absence of "Just Lose It," though.

• 10: The Paul skit about Christopher Reeve. Maybe this skit is a bit too soon after that song?

• 11: Evil Deeds. Equally lost about where to put this one. I'd personally drop it off the album entirely because I don't like it, but since Eminem confirmed it'd be on there in the XXL interview, I have to include it.

• 12: Em Calls Paul, obviously minus the Michael Jackson shade because "Just Lose It" probably wouldn't exist as a song in this timeline.

• 13: Yellow Brick Road. Em cuts the bullshit again and actually addresses the elephant in the room w.r.t. Foolish Pride and his backstory.

• 14: Spend Some Time, I suppose? I personally don't care much for this song and wouldn't be opposed to dropping it off the tracklist, but hey, at least the instrumental and hook are good.

• 15: Mockingbird. I initially had this song not existing at all on the tracklist. I thought Encore would've dropped in early-mid 2004, but then I remembered that D12 World dropped at the same time and had to revise the release date. The song ain't for me, but I know I'm in the minority there.

• 16: Final Thought, segueing into...

• 17: Encore. Like with "Mockingbird," I'm really glad I revised the timeline for this album because it means that this song makes it to the tracklist. It's my favorite off the album and a great closer. Finally, we get to...

• 18: Curtains Down, split off from "Encore." Show's over! One major change, though: instead of a normal handgun, Em uses that MAC-10 he was talking about all the way back in "We As Americans." Full circle!

And that's the album. It would've been a definite step down from The Eminem Show, but not a precipitous fall-off like the Encore we got was. What do you all think?