i'll do some kind of review of relapse after i've listened through a couple of times (and actually i might not be blogging until monday or tuesday), but i'll respond briefly to j. freedom du lac, the unbelievably named washpost pop critic. he's certainly right to praise the dre production, which is, of course, loping, melodic, absorbing. he's right also to be impressed - as how could one not be? - by the verbal gymnastics. i think it's also right to have some misgivings about the persona, which remains pretty much unchanged. i'd like to see eminem mature...and i fear his maturation. he could apply the killer skills to things other than his maniacal internal dialogue that's somewhere between entertainment tonight and nightmare on elm street. of course, sometimes maturity in a pop act is just deadly, like when the delightful romonettes the donnas went from "get out of my room" and "40 boys in 40 nights" to the deadly melancholic love poetry of the american 23-year-old female. or when the beatles went from crack r&b unit to melancholic oompah band.

but eminem is not the donnas. he writes amazingly well, and could express almost anything. i'd like to see him try some things, though doing what he does with dre at the mantrols is plenty.

and my first impression is that the horror of addiction is at once explored devastatingly and also turned around into sick fatalist humor in these songs, which are like fever screams, deathbound hallucinations, like edgar allan poe, gangsta rapper and comedian. and so i'm gonna listen again and think about where this material really is. there's no doubt it still in a sick way romanticizes pills and booze etc. but there's no doubt it goes beyond that first move, and em has always oscillated between sensationalism and psychic suffering. it's getting on toward twenty years since the chronic and i think that dre probably feels a little differently about dope, even if he still smokes all the time. but these people have a professional interest in recommending drug abuse. it must, in some ways, be a terrible place to be.