It looks like Eminem may be back. At least let’s hope so.
A couple weeks ago, Eminem’s “comeback” single hit iTunes and had people saying, “Eminem is back.” I’m not sure how many times you can go the comeback route, especially after the entire theme of his last album Relapse was that he had his life together again.
But there was something odd about that album. And the oddness wasn’t even that it was terrible. It seemed really forced, as if he didn’t want to record it but had to in order to make his label happy or something like that.
I told anyone who’d listen how bad that album was so that they wouldn’t make the same mistake that I did and purchase it. It wasn’t really Eminem. It was him on auto-pilot.
But the Eminem heads out there claimed that it was greatness. I think Entertainment Weekly gave it an A. But listen to Not Afraid. Marshall Mathers himself says that his last album wasn’t good. It wasn’t him.
Not to be confused with a German band who mined a far less confrontational hybrid of hip-hop and soulful pop in the mid 1990s, Plan B is the wildly ambitious British singer-rapper-actor-producer-aspiring filmmaker Ben Drew, whose 2006 album Who Needs Actions When You Got Words?, a record as nightmarish, epic, and unstoppable as a British Petroleum oil spill, elicited breathless comparisons to artists as varied as Eminem, Justin Timberlake, and Damien Rice. Like Eminem, Plan B knows how to tell a good story, but where Mr. Mathers’ rhymes are self-referential and reek of embellished memoir, Mr. Drew writes mostly bleak and bloody urban fictions centered around drug addicts, gang-bangers, and other assorted denizens of East London’s early-21st Century underworld.
His latest album is a sort of Northern Soul opera called The Defamation of Strickland Banks, and while the record has been lingering at the top of the British pop and soul charts since its release in April 2010, its second single “She Said”, four minutes of achingly tense but oh-so-old-school-groovy courtroom intrigue, has been storming the pop charts all over the mainland as well. Drew takes a cue from Mark Ronson’s pointedly organic strings-and-horns productions for Amy Winehouse, but here that treatment feels more about advancing a sinister plot – heightening the song’s tension – and less retro-for-retro’s sake. A big band underscores the song’s insistent syncopations and Drew’s pleading vocals like a musical judge and jury nodding along with the defense’s arguments while quietly forming their rationales for a guilty verdict they’d long since unanimously decided in their heads.
“She Said” may evoke nostalgia, but it doesn’t do so cheaply or lightly. Plan B may know Eminem’s name, but Strickland Banks suggests that Ben Drew has spent a lot more time with his parents’ Smokey Robinson records and that he’s never taken those Lenny Kravitz posters down from his bedroom wall. This is not backward looking music. This is, rather, almost surely what Maroon 5’s next album is going to sound like. Only not as good. (And I sorta like Maroon 5. Just sayin’.)
The song’s also supported by an instant classic of a video, and Drew is apparently working on a short film of the same title to accompany The Defamation of Strickland Banks which will likely incorporate the videos for record’s singles. If “She Said” is any indication of what the final product might look like, I’m totally in line for the DVD.
In my email this morning was an ad targeting parents of children much younger than my college and high school kids. Take a look:
This is an out-of-touch marketer. If the goal to strive for alteration and invoke another E name overrides common sense marketing and being topical, then I guess they hit their goal. But Eminem as the bogeyman? Go ahead, click the image and make it big so you can see it.
I don’t want that kid listening to Em except maybe a clean version of Mockingbird. But I’m not so sure I want her listening to Elmo either. There’s a middle ground, and my hackles raise up when I see music being used to scare parents. Look, this happened with blues, with jazz, with doo-wop, with pop and Lord knows, it happened with rock.
But isn’t it time to say, “I don’t need that little cutie to be a real emo kid and start cutting herself, but you’re not going to scare my family. She’s listening to Louis Armstrong, early Bach and a mix of the more melodic McCartney tunes. She’s quite fine, thank you.” For her seventh birthday, we’re buying her the new Common release.
