Eminem Curtain Call The Hits Torrent Download
Marylee Guffy
Frankly, I don't want to hear these songs anymore. Nothing personal, but are there people who think "Without Me" has resonance? Eminem has even worn himself out. It shows in interviews, and as he watches hard-won respect slip through his fingers whenever he shits out another scatological invective like "Just Lose It". He's been swindling his audience for some time now, milking stardom for all its goopy dairy: D12, the 2Pac album, the outrageously overrated 8 Mile, a cartoon, radio station, DVDs, and books. His most recent LP, Encore, was a shell, full of flow-fuckery and canny hooks, signifying nothing. Eminem's rise, in all its Great White Hope glory, paralleled the rise of modern hip-hop as America's dominant musical form. But it also happened mostly in conjunction with Em dipping into the pop well. It's a sad state of affairs now for someone who could have been the premier musical artist of the last decade.
For all intents and purposes, Eminem's position as globo-mega-star and intriguing personality began to wane after the release of his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, a record regarded by most as his masterpiece. But his 1999 debut The Slim Shady LP marked his creative zenith. Only two songs from that album are included here: the hits. "My Name Is" remains blissful and more complex than the novelty it was written off as-- it's funny and bizarre, and each punchline could have been a chorus. "Guilty Conscience", the role-playing jaunt between Eminem and mentor Dr. Dre, also holds up, especially when Em puts his producer on blast as "somebody who slapped Dee Barnes." Eminem's strengths-- verbal elasticity, the ability to write thunderous hooks, chameleon-ism, being white-- have hamstrung him psychologically, but in these early days, before fame, 65 million albums sold, and media persecution, his joy for rapping shone hard.
From the moment Dre and Interscope CEO Jimmy Iovine forced Eminem back into the booth to record "The Real Slim Shady", the cake icing on his colossally important second album, his fate was sealed. The songs Curtain Call culls from that album are fine, but had little to do with the outrage he caught from parents, GLAAD, and the conservative right. "The Real Slim Shady" made him profitable; songs like "Kim" and "Kill You" made him interesting. "Stan", however, still stands out as an exception. Overplayed as it may sound today, it remains a cultural milestone-- throngs of people, fans and not, flipped upon first hearing it, essentially forcing the label to release it as a single. All didn't end well, though: Dido has a career now.
Third album The Eminem Show is repped here by two songs: "Without Me", and the underrated "Cleanin' Out My Closet", which contributed as much to the confusing Freudian glints in Em's persona as anything else he's done. Which leaves the compilation's four new throw-ins: the Nate Dogg collaboration "Shake That", the ridiculously inane "FACK", and new single "When I'm Gone" are all desolate placeholders-- lesser versions of Eminem songs that already piss me off. "Gone" is the worst offender, yet another love letter from Em to daughter Hailie, it, like Encore's "Mockingbird", is heavy-handed and saccharine. The final new track is the live version of "Stan", performed with Elton John at the 2001 Grammys. Its inclusion is pointless.
Eminem has always had a self-loathing streak. He still comes across as uncomfortable with both stardom and his standing as a white rapper, and in a recent MTV interview seemed unhappy with this compilation's tracklist. This isn't his art-- it's his commerce. That's partly alleviated by Curtain Call's seven-track bonus CD, which contains five of the 10 best songs he's recorded. Included are two incredible album cuts from his debut, "Role Model" and "Just Don't Give a Fuck", one of his earliest, funniest thrillers. "Kill You", from his second LP, is psychotic mania but it's also hilarious and paramount to his dichotomy. Also featured are tracks he recorded with two giants: The first, "Renagade", comes from Jay-Z's The Blueprint, and finds each MC handling two liquid verses apiece. It's also a rare occasion in which Eminem's funeral dirge production doesn't sound overwrought. The other, Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous "Dead Wrong", is about as vicious and beguiling a thing as I've ever heard, featuring both men pulling the razors out from under their tongues. The fact that Em stands toe-to-toe in the face of two potent Biggie verses was a sort of unofficial "okay, we can all fuck with this dude" moment for hardcore fans.
Eminem was a battle rapper first, then a backpacker, then a hook-slinger, now a tortured artiste-- the last bastion of the overexposed. He's still a star, but he no longer seems nearly as fascinating as we've been made to think. And Curtain Call, an inevitable and adequate document of his hitmaking, allows him the opportunity to remain in the spotlight while also receding from it. And with that, he's back into hiding for the forseeable future, building mystique: His next album is unscheduled, and, promo for this collection aside, his profile never seems to rise above churning out goth-rap backing tracks for lesser artists. Which, of course, is all probably intended to get me wishing the guy who once pleaded, "Some people only see that I'm white, ignoring skill," would come back around once in a while.
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Topping the chart on its release week in December 2005, the retrospective spent five consecutive weeks at Number 1 and has appeared in the Top 100 every year since, with the exception of 2008. View Eminem's complete Official UK Chart history so far here.
Eminem has a huge fanbase who continue to stream his back catalogue on a daily basis, but Curtain Call is also readily available on vinyl, with the LP shifting an average of 105 copies per week over the past three years. Combined sales for Curtain Call stand at 2.3 million to date, split between 1.9 million paid-for sales and 400,000 streaming equivalent sales.
ABBA's greatest hits Gold is the all-time leader when it comes to longevity with 932 weeks currently logged in the Top 100, Bob Marley & The Wailer's Legend is second with 916 weeks logged, while the UK's bestselling album of all time Greatest Hits by Queen is in third on 884 weeks.
Meanwhile, I spotted on this week's chart how remarkably many weeks Michael Jackson's Number Ones has on the top 100, but hadn't twigged that ranked it quite so highly in the all-time lists. Seems no matter how his reputation may have plummeted among the public at large, shall we say, there's still a fan base out there that's never going to stop streaming this stuff in significant numbers.
OCC needs to consider how Greatest Hits albums get their popularity incorrectly inflated by streams. They assign the streams of all an artist' singles to the album. However most of the time when people stream these hits, they're not streaming them from Greatest Hits albums. You could be listening to The Eminem Show album, and Without Me's stream would benefit the Greatest Hits album.
If an artist like Ed Sheeran released a Greatest Hits in the streaming era, it would practically chart top 10 every single week, whether people are actually streaming the album itself, because all of his huge singles would have their streams combined towards it every week. Thus the actual popularity of the GH becomes largely inflated.
Also, if NOW Compilations don't have streams of their 50 hit tracklists included in their totals, why should Greatest Hits? It's unfair to have compilations that have dozens of radio hits combined from various studio albums get their streaming compared to single studio albums. All compilations should have sales only counted towards them.
Yes, a track isn't streamed in a vacuum, is it? The listener is still picking it from a virtual album at any given time, even if they just search for the individual song. Plug in, say, Billie Jean to Spotify's search function and it'll presumably pop up with multiple responses, listing it as respectively a track on Thriller, HIStory, Thriller 25, Number Ones, The Essential, Michael + Jacksons compilations, etc. Whichever one of those you pick will be the album whose streams it counts towards, surely.
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