“I guess I had to go to that place, to get to this one.”

Encoresucked ass, there’s no denying it. Relapse sucked even more ass. With Recovery, Eminem decides to stop sucking that same ass, and kick it all over the place. With what? With honesty.

As he frankly puts it, Em was ‘on drugs’ during Encore, and ‘flushing them out’ with Relapse. All of a sudden, the one-time king of white hip-hop became a target of pop culture ridicule. The world hadn’t seen the genuine Marshall Mathers since The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP. 

With a healthy dose of honest lyricism, and a return to roots in terms of blatant subject matter, Recovery is the best Eminem record in 10 years. An unmistakable maturity resides in this work, and it is admirable. In admitting the error of his ways, Eminem’s Recovery is a near restoration of his prior claim to royalty: Marshall Mathers is the most genuine exponent of mainstream hip-hop we have.