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By Clive Martin, Wednesday 13th July 2005 08.18pm (1977 views)
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Ain't it funny how the tides of music change? I remember when Papa Roach played this tour to packed out stadiums full of frat boys across the states, nowadays Papa Roach couldn't sell out your living room. Around this time Eminem was also the most interesting contemporary artist on the planet. He was cool, dangerous, politically explosive and a media hate figure. Your parents didn't get him and the Daily Mail didn't like him. He was rapping about killing his mother and pistol-whipping people in his private life. But five years or so later, he's singing about his daughter and his new single is dire sex rap that nobody wants to hear because Jay-Z and Missy Elliot are doing it with better rhymes and better beats. So I was filled with scepticism at the thought of his new DVD, but luckily this tour is three years old. This is the point where he was still credible, but going sour rapidly.
The stageshow here is impressive, with the feel of some kind of David Lynchian dark carnival. There's a Big Wheel, Dwarves, a huge mouth for some reason and our ringmaster for the evening, Slim Shady himself. The music quality veers in the manner that you'd expect it to, most stuff made before his third album is superb, morbid, vicious poetry reflecting the life of a troubled young white man. Things falter when he changes to his later stuff which appears to either be silly motivational nonsense, comedy tracks with some scarily weak beats or maudlin rubbish. I thought people didn't like that stuff, but the crowd appear to love it spitting every word back at him through their grinning american mouths. The lyrics still aren't going to please Germaine Greer or Peter Tatchell with the audience screaming "Beeyatch!" at him, in some faux ghetto way. The thing is though, these are the best bits. Eminem is at his best when he's angry, the scarier he becomes the more pieces of his once abundant genius are revealed. But nobody with a sense of Irony can resist chuckling when he bellows "White America" into the sea of beige and baseball caps.
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