I miss Slim Shady.

Okay, so the new album is out.  And everywhere all over the world, thousands of writers (and hundreds of thousands of bloggers) are already, ad nauseam, proclaiming the brilliant return of or deriding the ungraceful fall of the one and only Marshall Mathers.  So in case you're one review away from slitting your own wrists, I'll just focus my attention on one point.  

I definitely don't hate the album... but I was, at the very least, underwhelmed.  Throughout "Relapse", we seem to get Marshall-Mathers-era content, Eminem-Show-era flow, and bits of the reviled Encore-era delivery.  Save for one track.  On the final song, "Underground", we get a glimpse of what I had personally been anticipating for the last half decade, the return of Slim Shady.

It is all the more frustrating because, strictly off the strength of that one track, Eminem proves he still has it.  The skills that made him the respected MC to begin with... and set him apart from the Vanilla Ices, the Kains, the Asher Roths, and every other white MC who was thrown at us by the industry.  And in some ways, it seems as if Eminem did it intentionally.  Maybe just to lift a middle finger to all the naysayers and hip hop snobs such as myself... who claim he fell off, that he had become the very gimmick he had been mocking since the beginning of his career.  But the whole song still screams old school, classic Slim Shady.  Apart from the song itself, it is preceded by a Steve Berman skit, opened by his traditional "A lot of people ask me..." intro (a la "Still Don't Give a F**k and "Criminal"), and followed by the triumphant return of Ken Kaniff. Coincidence?  I think not.

With "Relapse 2" supposedly to follow, what I would like to believe is that this is an intro to the second disc.  Wasn't there supposed to be a collab with Premo in there somewhere?  Anyways, call me Stan, but I'm crossing my fingers and still hoping Slim Shady is back.