Sheer Uselessness

Again, this is one of those intelligent Facebook-Notes enterprises, which I shall use to fill my blog up. I suck. Big time.

There are a lot of artists I’d have wanted to select for this. But I realized I had no other alternative. His music occupies the rarefied zone of my subconscious. No, I'm not 'putting pseud' here, but this is something I just can't put a finger on. For me, Slim Shady is the first and last option, despite the fact that choosing The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, The Police, U2, Aerosmith or some other such band would have been a lot more conventional(and the answers would have come more easily) and I like those bands just as much.

But when has a Shady fan ever done ‘sensible’?

Anyway, here we go:

Pick Your Artist:
Eminem (Marshall Bruce Mathers III)

Are you a male or female?
Superman

Describe yourself:
Soldier

How do you feel:
Hellbound

Describe where you currently live:
Amityville

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
Underground

Your favourite form of transportation:
Under The Influence

Your best friend is:
The Flyest Material

Your favourite colour is:
The Sauce(That's the closest to red I got)

What's the weather like:
Beautiful

Favourite time of day:
3 AM

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
No Apologies

What is life to you:
Same Song and Dance

Your current relationship:
Crazy In Love

Breaking up:
My Fault

Looking for:
Medicine Ball

Wouldn’t mind:
Bagpipes from Baghdad

Your fear:
When the Music Stops

What is the best advice you have to give:
Stay Wide Awake

If you could change your name, you would change it to:
Jimmy Crack Corn

Thought for the Day:
Just Lose It

How I would like to die:
Like Toy Soldiers

My motto:
Run Rabbit Run




Well, that's done. So you can do something useful. Chew on these lines from 'Till I Collapse':

Till the roof comes off, till the lights go out
Till my legs give out, can’t shut my mouth.
Till the smoke clears out - am I high? Perhaps
I'ma rip this shit till my bone collapse.
Till the roof comes off, till the lights go out
Till my legs give out, can’t shut my mouth.
Till the smoke clears out and my high burn out
I'ma rip this shit till my bone collapse.

Totally, Em! We'll be screaming for you till the very end.

On Dr. Dre's latest prescription drug

I haven’t done any album/movie reviews here because (a) nobody cares what a random blogger thinks and (b) why else are popular publications like Rolling Stone etc in business? They are the ones whose reviews shape the general reception of any movie or album that finds its way into theatres or stores. If you want to know whether you want to buy it or whether it’s worth a dekko, you’ll be better off reading what they think of it.

Anyway, the album is question is Eminem’s Relapse. It’s been four years since an Em record went on the shelf, and it’s most obviously an extremely important album for his biggest fans as well as people who hate him the most. The former group wants to know whether that magic and madness in his rhymes is still alive and kicking. The latter want to have another shot at belittling him. And truth be told, I myself wasn’t too optimistic when I listened to the first two singles from Relapse to have been released – 'Crack a Bottle’ and ‘We Made You’.

That skepticism changed for good once I listened to the rest of the album (‘Never has there been so much finesse and nostalgia’, as Em asserts in ‘We Made You’). For me, the first two singles were the weakest in the album – ‘Crack A Bottle’ with 50 Cent and Dr. Dre sure became the most downloaded song of all time, but didn’t exactly set my trousers on fire – it was nothing special. And as far as ‘We Made You’ is concerned, it’s a pale shadow of probably the best parody-rap song of all time, ‘The Real Slim Shady’. This one doesn’t even come close. The beats and chorus are okay, but Em’s accent in the song is annoying and the rhymes jar at places. The video was a good laugh, though.

But the rest of the album is at least as good as Encore, if not better. It’s vintage Eminem all over again. With ‘Dr. West’, there is a sinister (and homophobic, as the critics would spit) tone set for the album which is taken to an even scarier and gorier level with ‘3 AM’, whose music video was banned from being aired on TV, because it was deemed ‘unfit for TV audiences’. The TV regulatory bodies could have given themselves a break. Who cares these days when you have Youtube?

‘My Mom’ sees Em take the road he’s travelled so many times – he trains his hellfire on his mother, blaming her for what he is today (That's why I'm on, what I'm on, 'cause I'm My Mom!). ‘Insane’ is one of the best – and the probably the most cringe-inducing song in the album. He talks about his childhood experiences with his stepfather, which were anything but pleasant, and his mother’s constant indifference to the same (If you could count the skeletons in my closet/Under my bed and up under my faucet/Then you would know I've completely lost it/Is he nuts? No, he’s insane). ‘Bagpipes from Baghdad’ has been in the news to the barbs Em’s directed at Mariah Carey and her husband Nick Cannon, but it’s much better than a page three story, the Arabic Rhythm surprisingly works with the Dre beats and of course, Em’s rhymes.

‘Hello’ makes you smile at the start (Hello.../Allow me to introduce myself.../My name is, Shady/It's so nice to meet you/It's been a long time/Sorry I've been away so long/My name is, Shady/I never meant to leave you). The song is decent enough as well. In ‘Same Song and Dance’, he realizes how oft-repeated and flogged the jokes and disses about the current music scene generally are. ‘Medicine Ball’ has the references to Christopher Reeve, and has come in for a lot of flak, but towards the fag end of the track, Reeve has his own back – “Eminem, I'm coming to kill you, always hated you and I still do /You'll never fill my shoes, my Superman costume/Doesn't even fit you, they don't feel you/You're taking this shit too far, who do you think you are?”. This track is also among the better ones. ‘Stay Wide Awake’ also has an extremely dark, murder-ly and manslaughter-ly theme to it. Works. ‘Old Times’ Sake’ is a sort of nostalgic trip, and Em along with Dre really rocks this number (So one more time for old time's sake/Dre drop that beat and scratch that break). Dr. Dre’s beats and Em’s rhymes come together perfectly in this track.

‘Must be the Ganja’ revisits the drug theme, and by this time, Em has already introduced zillions of drugs, almost as if he is reading off the inventory list of a pharmaceutical corporation(Valium, Zantac, Nyquill, Vicodin, Klonopin, Hydrocodone, Ambien, Xanax, Formula 44d, Percodan, Lunesta, they’re all here). ‘Mr. Mathers’ has medics tending to a passed-out Eminem, and the next track ‘Déjà vu’ talks about him falling ‘deeper into a manic state’. ‘Beautiful’ is a surprisingly pleasing track, with a mellow chorus, and Em’s voice is used for proper singing in the chorus lines. Here he’s on about how difficult it was for him to get out of the drug problems and the extreme depression that had encumbered him in the recent past. It was extremely tough, but like he says, ‘But I need that spark to get psyched back up, in order for me to pick the mic back up’. Em’s pen still hasn’t lost any of its ability to stir the emotions. Some of my favourite lines are from this song:

"In my shoes, just to see, what it's like to be me
I'll be you, let's trade shoes, just to see what it'd be like to
Feel your pain, you feel mine, go inside each other’s minds
Just to see, what we find, look at shit through each other’s eyes
But don't let them say you ain't beautiful
They can all get fucked, just stay true to you
Don't let them say you ain't beautiful
They can all get fucked, just stay true to you"

His long-time antagonist Steve Berman makes a comeback in the nineteenth track of the album, and this time, he sums things up as far as Em’s critics are concerned: “Let me guess, another album about poor me, I'm so famous that it's ruined my rich little life, and I'm such a tortured artist. Let me make music about it and my tragic love life, am I on to something here? … Big selfish superstar (Steve, I had a drug problem) Oh poor me, I had a drug problem. Who hasn't had a drug problem in this town?” The twentieth track on the album is ‘Underground’, which draws the curtains on a worthy comeback by Slim Shady – Obviously, like all Shady albums, this one’s also a love-it or hate-it compilation. If you hate it, you obviously shouldn’t have listened to it in the first place. People who are quick to dismiss this as a rehash of his previous work, think again. This is what he does best, and in Relapse he takes off where Encore left. Nobody does this better, and in most of the songs, the target is Eminem himself. His pen’s acerbic and biting wit is still there, and the rhymes still pack more than a punch. It’s that time again, as Em says in ‘Medicine Ball’:

“I said I guess it's time for you to hate me again
Let's begin, now hand me the pen
How should I begin it, and where does it all end
My medicine ball, you're in my medicine ball friends”

The lines that usually announce Shady’s comebacks are conspicuous by their absence in Relapse, and so I absolutely had to end this with those very lines.

“Guess who’s back, back again?
Shady’s back, tell a friend.”

He’s back. And how! Good to see you back at it, Em! And here's hoping the next album is an even bigger step up.

Earworm-ation

Something’s happened to me, and for some incomprehensible reason. I’ve been listening to one particular song repeatedly for the last 3 days now. And going by the way I just can’t have enough of it, I think I’m going to listen to it for another 3 days at least.

This is something I didn’t know about – there is actually a term for describing this condition. It hasn't been scientifically authenticated yet, but it looks like its usage is fairly common.

As Wikipedia says:

'Earworm, a calque of the German Ohrwurm, is a term for a portion of a song or other musical material that repeats compulsively within one's mind, known colloquially as "music being stuck in one's head". Use of the English translation was popularized by James Kellaris and Daniel Levitin. Kellaris' studies demonstrated that different people have varying susceptibilities to earworms, but that almost everybody has been afflicted with one at some time or another. This usually happens when a person sings the song or hums the tune once and then repeats it in his or her mind." However, this information is not supported by any scientifically published information and was presented only as a guess of an unknown author.'

‘Rabbit Run’ is the song in question. I’m muttering that song under my breath all the time – out of bed(rather late) in the morning, while brushing my teeth, walking into class, loafing around on campus, heck, even while doing the unmentionables.

I have developed this weird tendency of picking up my deodorant can, holding it to my mouth and repeatedly singing the lines from random parts of the song. Especially:

"Some days I just wanna up and call it quits
I feel like I'm surrounded by a wall of bricks
Every time I go to get up I just fall in pits
My life's like one great big ball of shit
If I could just, put it all into all I spit
Instead of always tryin to swallow it..

This is it, last straw, that's all, that's it
I ain't dealin with another fuckin politic
I'm like a skillet bubblin until it filters up
I'm about to kill it, I can feel it buildin up
Blow this buildin up, I've been sealed enough
My cup, runneth over, I done filled it up

The pen explodes and busts, ink spills my guts
You think, all I do is stand here and feel my nuts?
Well I'ma show you what, you gon' feel my rush
You don't feel it, then it must be too real to touch

Peal the dutch, I'm about to tear shit up
Goosebumps yea, I'ma make your hair sit up
Yea sit up, I'ma tell you who I be
I'ma make you hate me, cause you ain't me
You wait, it ain't too late to finally see
what you closed-minded f***s were too blind to see
Whoever finds me is gonna get a finder's fee
out this world, ain't no one out their mind as me
You need piece of mind? Here's a piece of mine
All I need's a line

I'm fizzlin now, thought I figured it out
Ball's in my court, but I'm scared to dribble it out
I'm afraid, but why am I afraid?
Why am I a slave to this trade?
Cyanide I spit to the grave
Real enough to rile you up
Want me to flip it I can rip it any style you want
I'm a switch hitter bitch, Jimmy Smith ain't a quitter
I'ma sit until I get enough in me to finally hit a
f****n boilin point, put some oil in your joints
Flip the coin bitch, come get destroyed

I'll be back baby, I just gotta beat this clock
F*** this clock, I'ma make 'em eat this watch
Don't believe me watch, I'ma win this race
And I'ma come back and rub my shit in your face, bitch
I found my nitch, you gon' hear my voice
'Til you sick of it, you ain't gonna have a choice
If I gotta scream 'til I have half a lung
If I had half a chance I'd grab it - Rabbit, run."

It…just charges me up. Eminem’s energy is just too frickin’ contagious. It just courses through as an invisible, overpowering force. I spit those lines out all the time. I reply to my own self when in doubt, “I don’t know it’s just the way I am”.

Even the background music for this track is haunting me in the moments when I have a little peace and quiet around me. What’s going on? It’s just…inexplicable!

By the way, I just noticed that towards the end of the Wiki article on earworms, there's this line that goes:

“Medications that are used to treat Obsessive-compulsive disorder or anxiety can alleviate the symptoms of earworms.”

Uh oh.