'Cause It Feels So Empty Without Em

We could have stopped caring years ago. Somewhere between Encore (2004) and Relapse (2009), our memory would've waned to the point where Em didn't really matter anymore. Yet, in 2013, it's been confirmed that a full-length album will be released post-Memorial Day along with some tour dates, and we're still hella pumped.

See also: Eminem's Comeback Neither Shocks Nor Amuses

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It's almost September (it already is on the Hot 100, which is dated over a week ahead of time), and the labels are starting to roll out the medium-sized guns: Muse! The Script! Trey Songz! Slaughterhouse? The best stuff is older, though: The Chief Keef track is from a mixtape released in March, and the Eric Church and Luke Bryan tracks are both over a year old and milking best-selling albums. None of this week's entries is great, and three of them are awful (guess), but the fall season has officially started. Don't forget to duck.

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Jennifer Yin

Yelawolf
Brisk Bodega
Saturday, September 17

Better than: Your neighborhood bodega.

If the Smithsonian upped its cool factor and wrangled a sponsorship from a multinational corporation looking to promote its iced tea line, the result might be the Brisk Bodega, a made-over West Village storefront serving as a branded homage to Shady Records. Relics like Eminem's superhero costume from the "Without Me" video and 50 Cent's diamond-bedazzled bulletproof vest were on display, and shelves of PepsiCo product—Brisk Iced Tea, salty Frito-Lay snacks—were up for grabs to anyone suffering from the munchies. Saturday night, rap media cognoscenti, boys in snapbacks and variations of camouflage, and ladies who refused to relinquish their clingy summer garb despite the turning weather gathered there to catch sets by recent Shady signees Yelawolf and Slaughterhouse.

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The rat who symbolized 50 Cent at Summer Jam 2005. Ah, memories.

Verbal insults! Wanton violence! Temper tantrums! Comical jpegs of foes! Mock lynchings live on stage! Sunday brings us another installment of Hot 97 Summer Jam, wherein rap's leading lights get the chance to prove the accuracy of the adage about modern hip-hop being closer to the world of professional wrestling than anything Afrika Bambaataa ever envisaged back in the '70s. So as a glittering lineup of Lil Wayne, Drake, Rick Ross, Wiz Khalifa, and the peculiarly titled Lloyd Banks And Friends—which may just be a titular ruse to get committed Ross enemy 50 Cent into the venue, what with rumors of Curtis being banned from Summer Jam events—all prepare to take the stage this Sunday, here's a far-from-virtuous look back at Summer Jam's most controversial moments.

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The phrase "the calm before the storm" appears in virtually every chart-related story this week. That's because the latest edition of the Billboard 200, which covers sales from the week ending May 22, is topped by Adele's 21. That album is No. 1 for the ninth and (presumably) final week before Lady Gaga's monster Born This Way makes its foregone chart-crushing debut.

But, come on now... "calm"? For chart-watchers, industryites and Gaga fans, I'd say the storm is already happening.

A meta-discussion has been raging all week around just how many copies Gaga's album will sell in week one, and whether all of the downloads she's racking up should count. Amazon's jaw-dropping decision to sell Born This Way for the unprecedented full-album price of 99 cents has not only engendered controversy—so much that Billboard's editor felt compelled to respond to some angry Britney Spears fans—it's rocket-fueled Gaga's sales.

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Earlier this month, the Voice's Philip Mlynar took a look at the dilemma faced by Slaughterhouse, the all-star underground rap crew recently signed to Eminem's imprint, Shady Records. Balancing their credibility with the profit-making aims of a major label might be tricky in the current moment, but, Mlynar argued, "Slaughterhouse are finally rolling with the right team" now that they're on board with Eminem and his crew. Today's announcement that Em and Slaughterhouse member Royce da 5'9" would revive their Bad Meets Evil collaboration--which was last spotted together on record in 1999--would seem to be the first piece of evidence bearing out that hypothesis.

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Last night's Yankees-Tigers game was kinda dull, so good thing Eminem and Jay-Z were on hand to making just absolutely not at all awkward small talk with a couple bewildered white people as they announced a pair of co-headlining shows: September 2 at Comerica in Detroit, and, yes, September 13 at Yankee Stadium. Ticket info ain't out yet, but they'll go on sale sometime soon and brokers will buy them all and resell 'em to you for a couple hundred clams apiece on Stubhub. In the meantime let's listen to the boys talk a little sports. Eminem: "Honestly, I had stepped away from baseball for years." That is one way to put it.

What we're discovering as Eminem's long-awaited Relapse rolls out is that without threatening to rape and chop up his mom and wife, Marshall Mathers doesn't have a lot to say. This afternoon, "3 A.M." leaked, and it's another horror-core fantasy written from the perspective of a goofball serial killer--pretty much the same sleepwalking murderer character Eminem summoned on "I'm Having a Relapse," who seemed vaguely compelling the first time out, but now just seems like the Saturday morning cartoon version of Jason. This faux-psychopath wakes up in bloody and naked in McDonald's with bodies behind the counter, can't remember doing anything, but must've "keeled" them--yep, Em's still white-trash. More proof? He jerks off to Hannah Montana. So sure, we've got a bit of pedophilia here, I guess to make sure somebody's upset about this song? But what's even worse is that Eminem actually quotes Silence of the Lambs, mentions Kim Kardashian, again, and raps in the wack-ass accent of Apu's naturalized cousin, again. Ugh.

Eminem murdered his baby-mama on his first record and had his daughter help. That was scary. This just sounds like the underdeveloped imagination of a pimply 15 year old who's going through a creepy phase of jerking off to the Neve Campbell/Skeet Ulrich sex scene in Scream. Nine years ago, Em spat at us on The Marshall Mathers LP, "You don't wanna fuck with Shady because Shady will fuckin' kill you." Then we believed him. Now? Not so much.

Eminem, "3 A.M." via 5 Star Hip Hop

"Wanksta" > "I Get Money" > "I'll Whip Ya Head Boy" > "Get Up"

"21 Questions" > "Candy Shop" > "Amusement Park" > "I Get It In"

Every Eminem song ever > "Crack a Bottle"

Aftermath in '09 =

"I'm a very proud mother. I don't think there's anything [Marshall] can do to me that he hasn't already done through the media."

Eminem's mom Debbie Nelson hasn't seen her son since last July, but even then, she didn't really see him. He'd returned to his birthplace of St. Joseph, Missouri, looking for the grave of his uncle Ronnie, who'd committed suicide in 1991 and was later famously mentioned in The Marshall Mathers LP's stalker-fan screed "Stan." Debbie had been alerted to the pair of SUVs seeking out her younger brother's headstone, went down to make sure the visitors weren't miscreant vandals, and discovered that Marshall was behind one of those tinted windows. She went to say hello, but the vehicle took off. "I was kinda hurt," the 53-year-old admits. "It would have been good."

Eminem has rather memorably called his mother a "crazy" "fucking bitch" who "does more dope than I do" and has "no tits." He has also publicly joked about matricide and said, "I hope you fuckin' burn in hell" in the giant fuck-you-mama of a rap song "Cleanin' Out My Closet." For her part, Nelson once told Marshall that she wished he'd died instead of Ronnie ("Of course, I didn't mean it," she has written, "It's something I will regret to my dying day") and sued him for defamation and emotional distress, a move she now describes as an accidental crusade waged by a predictably opportunistic lawyer.

All things considered, Debbie Nelson's new ghostwritten memoir, My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem: Setting the Record Straight on My Life is not a backbiting retort, but rather a long, rocky explanation-by-way-of-defense of her admittedly naïve decisions and lifetime of catastrophe: four failed marriages, four lawsuits (including the one against Marshall), various familial deaths, child-protective-services fights, and one truly horrendous relationship with Slim Shady's ex-wife and baby mama Kim Scott, who supposedly once mailed Em's mom a live tarantula. The book's tone is far more sad than angry--exactly how Debbie Nelson sounded when I recently spoke with her on the phone from Sarasota, Florida, where she was temporarily staying with a friend. An edited transcription of our conversation follows.

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