Blue is the only color Eminem comes in.

If you're going to eat something unhealthy, especially if you're going to eat a lot of it, you probably want at least some variety, even if it's superficial. That's why M&Ms are so fun to eat: they come in rainbow colors, and though the taste doesn't change, the scenery does. By contrast, Eminem albums only come in blue. And because every mainstream rap album is long, listening to The Eminem Show or The Slim Shady LP means you're listening to the same song over and over and over. And believe you me, Eminem in any quantity is unhealthy.

Eminem frequently shows up on "Best of" lists, but he's not the best of anything. You don't even have to go underground to find better rappers: Notorious B.I.G., NaS, the Wu-Tang Clan and Common Sense all had (or have) something Mr. Mathers lacks—a talent for clever word play. Words are the heart of rap. Perhaps more than any musical genre, rap is lyrically-based (hence, Tupac's wildly inaccurate claims to poetry). If you can't put words together in a unique or well-crafted way you should probably consider another medium to convey what you want.

Which, in Slim's case, is rage. But it's not socially-conscious rage, or constructive rage, or intellectually-based rage. It's just boring, angsty, narcissistic rage aimed "in no particular direction," making it more sallow than his peroxide-rinsed complexion. He complains about his mom, his dad, his girlfriend, America, drugs, the same things every eye-shadowed mopey emo suburban kid complains about in his diary while listening to My Chemical Romance. Many rappers sing about themselves; Marshall Bruce Mathers III whines about himself, and the realism exists in the feeling one has (while listening to his bitching) of being trapped in a Detroit trailer with a junkie mom.

If his goal really is just to piss people off, he's a failure. There will always be people ready to boycott artists who use profanity or graphic descriptions of sex, but they don't need Eminem around—they'll pick on anyone with any degree of popularity or notoriety. For the rest of the public, listening to an artist like Mathers signifies hipness of a sort, and claiming for him the status of "artist" or "poet" validates their own bad taste. Real hipness, however, is predicated on distance from the in-crowd, so the instant something becomes generally popular is the instant it stops being hip. Eminem's listeners sidestep this difficulty by each pretending they're the only kid on the block listening to him.

It's hard to lose yourself in the music when it's two-dimensional. His beats are pretty good, but if that's the only reason you're going to listen to Encore you may as well listen to techno.