In today’s world of crowd-sourced accountability, wherein Em deletes the “F-word” from a rap about Tyler The Creator and still gets dragged online, many of Recovery‘s tracks would see the chopping block or the editing room before the album saw store shelves.Marshall Bruce Mathers III, also known as the legendary Eminem, has made significant strides in his career as a Hip Hop artist. Some of the beat choices are a bit anachronistic and jarring - particularly “Cinderella Man” and the album closer, “Untitled” - and Em’s frequent and flagrant use of homophobic slurs firmly freezes Recovery as a product of pre-Twitter media society. While, yes, many of the issues that plague his newer albums crop up here as well, Recovery was still early enough in his career that those nitpicks hadn’t yet become nagging complaints. In fact, he just raps on the rest of the album as well, poking just enough fun at himself throughout - admitting to the overuse of accents on his previous albums - that the focus remains on the world-class wordplay, not trying to mystify listeners into missing the genericness of his lightspeed fast flow. Recovery‘s efficacy in comparison with latter-day efforts comes from the comfort he displays on this track, on which he sounds less invested in whether anyone thinks he’s a good rapper. There’s even a precursor to Music To Be Murdered By‘s “Those Kinda Nights” in “WTP,” on which Em coins his storytelling club-rap conceit and executes it much better than he would a decade later. However, Em also showed that he was unafraid to get busy, busting out his old battle-rapper persona on songs like “On Fire,” then trading bars with the rapper who would become one of hip-hop’s most influential figures in the coming decade, Lil Wayne, on “No Love.”
#Tracks on eminem recovery album update
It showed that he could update his sound while remaining thematically true to his core content - the soul-baring, confessional raps that people related too, not the Triumph The Comic Insult Dog jokes that only appealed to a certain brand of frat humor aficionados. The proof is in the pudding “Love The Way You Lie” became Eminem’s best-selling single ever. While they may have been as focus-grouped and algorithmically calculated as more recent attempts like the lackluster “ Walk On Water” with Beyonce and the head-scratching “ Nowhere Fast” with Kehlani from Revival, the chemistry he has with his first female collaborators made the plug-and-play tracks sound organic. Collaborations with Rihanna on “Love The Way You Lie” and Pink on “Won’t Back Down” were Em’s first and most successful experiments with bringing a feminine touch to his song construction. “Not Afraid” is defiant without indulging Eminem’s grudges, while “Love The Way You Lie” features some of his most emotive language. That balance between earnest and playful is most evident in the album’s anthemic singles. Some songs have aged better than others, but this is the first flash of the “mature” Em that the world has had a decade to become accustomed to.
For sure, he targets critics and celebrities, but he doesn’t fixate on them - Recovery is about Eminem.
By finding the balance between those warring impulses, Eminem made an album that sounds like he was making music, not trying to make a point. Unlike his more recent output, he still sounds like he’s having fun, while still taking his job seriously enough that it doesn’t feel like he was making an endless, recurring fart joke. There’s one major difference between this album and those both before and after it. Recovery saw him find that balance and while it’s far from his best album - that honor still goes to The Eminem Show - it was a major turning point in Eminem’s career, bridging the gap between his drugged-out Slim Shady era and the hyper-focused technician he was to become. His previous albums, Encore and Relapse, had received criticism for leaning too heavily into his comedic personas and he was “still finding his feet” after getting sober as he told Rolling Stone in 2013. In 2010, Em was in an odd place with both critics and fans. 10 years ago, Eminem released Recovery, a musical return to form for the once-masterful chief mischief maker of hip-hop.
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