But if you find the idea of a Transformer with breasts, a penis-shaped Enterprise, or Em parading around dressed like Bret Michaels at all amusing, then please, give it a watch.
It's as if somebody gave the biggest douchebags from high-school enough money to make a fully produced music video and simply laid the track down over it. It doesn't play like social satire or even work on any real comedic level. In fact, we here at IGN found that our impression of the single improved dramatically when not watching it alongside the video. The video, however, is simply too obvious, too silly, and it does the song -– which, at its worst, is still mildly enjoyable -– a huge disservice. The lyrics are all sex-and-celebrity with jabs directed toward the usual suspects of media whores: Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, Kim Kardashian, etc. The tempo is upbeat and while the drum-and-piano mash-up throughout the verses is familiar territory for Em, the chorus (sung by Dina Rae) sounds a bit like the post-modern, 1950's-nostalgia pop that made the last Amy Winehouse album such a refreshing listen.Įm's flow is quick and witty, as always, but his delivery doesn't necessarily gel with the music beneath it. The music is decidedly non-rap, borrowing the style of verse-chorus-verse embraced by Em in his later records. Without knowing what the rest of these two albums will sound like – and, frankly, how could we not see the aggressive, angry, more serious Em we came to love in The Eminem Show – "We Made You" is still a bad first-foot-forward, mostly because it's such a large step backward. And instead of forging ahead with a single that stabs directly at the heart of the post-Bush, Obama-led, downsized America, Em's taken a giant leap back to the days of Slim Shady or Marshall Mathers with a celeb-hating, teen-angsty, radio-friendly, pop-rap tune that either throws up its hands and says "F*** it!" or grovels at the feet of former fans to drop their $9.99 on iTunes. Jump ahead five years to the release of "We Made You," the opening salvo from the first of two new records in the Relapse series. And despite a fourth, rather sophomoric album, Em faded slowly into the hip-hop background. Hell, even Jay-Z came out of his short-lived retirement and managed to put out a succession of albums that quickly reaffirmed his status as a rap legend and seized the relevancy that Eminem had abdicated. And then the other rappers emerged – rappers like 50 Cent, Kanye, Common, Nas.
He'd attained the very pinnacle of his success. Then came The Eminem Show, which eschewed the teen-friendly media-bashing for an Eminem vastly more interested in discussing the economic, cultural and political landscape of a post-9/11, George Bush America. The Marshall Mathers LP took that foundation and evolved it, matured it, upped the production value and celebrated the record's sharp writing and near-flawless vocal performance. But beneath it all, there were tracks that spoke to a deep, boundless, seldom-stated anger that hooked a generation of enraged teenagers and politically pissed-off twenty-somethings who appreciated that a white kid from Detroit could dominate rap with a then untouchable flow. Eminem burst onto the scene a decade ago with The Slim Shady LP and quickly took the piss out of Hollywood at a time when bubblegum pop-music and pre-blog celebrity gossip was still ripe for parody.
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