He was rowdy because he needed something to set him apart. For years, he was the loud, obnoxious, and sometimes offensive white rapper in a sea of black emcees. This is where people started looking at Eminem as this deep, complex, emotional rapper, when this was never the image he created for himself. The problem with Recovery is that it is very much a transitional album. After this string of disappointments, I had to loosen my grip on his music for a long time, so for years, if I wanted to listen to Marshall, I put on one of his first three records, occasionally I’d throw on Relapse, and that was that. His guest spots were weak, his performance on Hell: The Sequel was atrocious, and I still contest that The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is one of the worst albums in his catalog. One of the main reasons I hadn’t listened to Recovery in such a long time is because Eminem lost me shortly after its release. It became clear almost instantly that this was the turning point in his artistic career, and I think I knew this subconsciously, so I just chose to ignore the album for a while. Unfortunately, right as I started it up, I realized why I hadn’t touched it in so long. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to anything off this record, so it almost felt like I was going into the album for the first time again no expectations. I remember downloading the album, I remember editing the metadata, I remember walking around school listening to the album, I remember talking about it with this other kid who was also a really big fan of Em, I remember listening to “Cinderella Man” as I walked to meet my mom at the Post Office after school one day, and I vividly remember walking almost six miles to the nearest Best Buy to purchase a hard copy the day before it was supposed to get released (they had put them out 24 hours early for some reason).Īgain, there are a lot of memories associated with this album specifically, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel. So to say I was excited to see Recovery pop-up online would be a massive understatement. A big chunk of my personal Hip Hop journey stems from his records, both good and bad, and when high school came around, everything fell into place, and he was all I wanted to listen to for those first three years. It’s important to note that, at the time, Eminem was my favorite artist. I was a Junior in high school, we were in the final week of school before Summer break, and then it happened. Going into this album, I was worried if I was going to be able to separate the art from the significance it held at the time of its release, because like most things music related, I have a very vivid memory of this album coming out. As part of the process, I have been revisiting old albums and mixtapes that I haven’t listened to in a while, and the most recent record on the chopping block was Recovery. Recently, it’s come to my attention that my music library has become a little bloated, which has resulted in me trimming some of the fat these past few months. This is when Eminem’s fanbase really began to fracture and Marshall set foot on the artistic path he continues to walk today. It seems like everyone has different expectations for Marhsall as an artist, something he seemed incredibly aware of around this time, which led to the release of yet another album 13 months later.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this record would arguably become his most polarizing, dividing his fans even more than its predecessor, Encore. Following a five-year hiatus, Eminem returned back on the scene in 2009 with his fifth studio album, Relapse.
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