Eminem's revenge fantasies have always been linked to his acute sense of victimhood, and on his first album--fresh out of a Detroit trailer park, shouldering a lifetime's worth of underclass resentment--he had lots of material to work with. When the multiplatinum success of The Slim Shady LP deprived him of his seemingly most potent theme ("They said I can't rap about being broke no more," began album number two, The Marshall Mathers LP), he assumed the role of embattled cultural outlaw and reluctant star, producing some riveting music, including perhaps his best song, "Stan," about a crazed fan. But on Eminem's third CD, The Eminem Show, the Superstar Agonistes routine was getting old; and as the public became accustomed to Eminem's shtick, his ability to stir outrage waned, leaving him starved for new enemies. The result was an increasingly shrill and stolid batch of songs that nonetheless sold a cool 8 million-plus copies.

Encore may equal those sales figures, but it's an even more dismal affair. Eminem sounds like a man who is bored with himself. His once pugnacious delivery has slowed to a lazy slur. The backing tracks have turned dour; nearly every song sets a minor-key synthesizer tune against a staccato drumbeat that nudges things along at medium tempo. Part of the problem is that Eminem is now producing most of his music himself, taking over from his vastly more musically gifted mentor, Dr. Dre.

But nowhere is the torpor more evident than in Eminem's lyrics. Fresh out of inspiration, he's fallen back on his tics: taking aim at easy targets like Michael Jackson, savaging his mom and his ex-, resorting to potty-mouth talk (sample song titles: "Big Weenie," "Puke"). The album's biggest clunker is "Ass Like That," in which Eminem impersonates Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a puppet character from the Late Night With Conan O'Brien show, with whom the rapper had a celebrated contretemps during a televised awards ceremony. (You can't make this stuff up.) It's not exactly clear what Eminem is on about in this song, which jump-cuts wildly from dirty lyrics about underage pop stars to sniggling about "pee pees." Like the bathroom noises and chicken clucking heard elsewhere on Encore, it makes no goddamn sense; it all seems like a desperate stab at absurdist comedy, an attempt to pass off a nasty case of writer's block as an outré new aesthetic.

There are a couple of moments on Encore when Eminem plays it straight, and these may offer clues to the deeper roots of his malaise. "Yellow Brick Road" and "Like Toy Soldiers" are elaborate apologias, revolving around Eminem's various "beefs," or feuds, with fellow rappers. The most notorious of these involves Raymond "Benzino" Scott, a middling MC and CEO of The Source, a prominent hip-hop magazine. For several years, Benzino has waged a war of words with Eminem--on records, in interviews and in the pages of The Source--slighting his music, calling him a racist and accusing him of diluting the racial purity of hop-hop culture. Benzino's rather unsavory propaganda campaign has earned him few supporters in the rap community, but he has persisted nonetheless, and he pulled off something of a coup earlier this year when he unearthed a couple of old Eminem demo tapes, recorded more than a decade ago, in which the rapper poured scorn on black women. (The songs were included on a special CD folded into The Source's February 2004 issue.)

In the past, Eminem hit back at Benzino on bootleg "battle tracks," but on Encore he strikes a conciliatory posture. "Yellow Brick Road" apologizes for the racist recordings ("I was wrong") in an intricate autobiographical narrative that is by far the album's best bit of storytelling. "Like Toy Soldiers," meanwhile, seems to forswear battling altogether: "I'm just willing to be the bigger man if y'all can quit poppin'/Off at the jaws with the knockin', well then I can, 'cause frankly I'm sick of talkin'." These songs have led more than one reviewer to invoke the notion of a newly "mature" Eminem.

But has the creator of "Big Weenie" really grown up? Or does he simply not have the stomach for a fair fight? One of the more curious aspects of Encore is that while Eminem endlessly insults women, including a shooting gallery of the most harmless pop divas (Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, the Olsen Twins), and merrily stokes his "feud" with a hand puppet, he shies away from conflicts with the men who are--at least according to the hip-hop ethos that lets no dis go unanswered--legitimate foes.

In fact, Eminem seems constitutionally incapable of partaking in hip-hop's most venerable traditions. When's the last time he recorded a song devoted to the MC's traditional ur-subject, his own rapping excellence? When did Eminem last roll tape and simply let the rhymes flow, without straining to shock us? The persona that made Eminem so original a few years ago has generated its own clichés; it may be time for him to drop the endless pursuit of succès de scandale and join Jay-Z, Nas, Jadakiss and other elite MCs in their friendly contest for rhyme pre-eminence--time, in other words, to become a regular old rapper. It's not quite as sexy a job title as Great Satan, but it's noble work, and the pay is good.

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