Eminem Reasserts His Core Values

Just over a decade ago he emerged as an unlikely worldbeater: a white rapper from Detroit with a vexatious obsession with violence and social dysfunction. His pop megasuccess was serendipitous, explicable by no common measuring sticks.

Certainly, in the rear view, it’s tempting to see Eminem’s ascendance as a fluke, never more so than now, several years past his commercial peak. On Monday he released “Recovery” (Aftermath/Interscope), his sixth solo album on a major label, his first album as a sober man and the most insular of all his releases.

In many ways, the Eminem captured on “Recovery” is reminiscent of the artist he once was, before the world got hold of him. He still has the familiar preoccupations: cartoonish gore, sexual aggression, astonishingly intricate rapping. He sounds far more invigorated than on anything he’s released since 2002, the year of his last strong album, “The Eminem Show,” and the soundtrack to the quasi-biopic “8 Mile.”

For the first few years of his fame Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, exerted a gravitational pull on pop and was impossible to emulate, making him only more powerful. But over the last few years, as he retreated into drug-fueled isolation, Eminem — one of the most crucial figures in pop culture in the last 20 years, who pushed hip-hop over the final hump to mainstream acceptance — has been a nonentity.

In 2010 he’s a true anomaly, neither an integral part of the pop landscape nor of the rap landscape. He’s become a multimillion-selling cult figure, trafficking in a peculiar style that once transfixed the world but now feels anachronistic.

“Recovery” could have been an opportunity for re-evaluation or redefinition, a record that would steer Eminem into new, possibly difficult topical terrain. But instead he’s used it as a platform to reassert his core values, stripped clean of the self-induced trauma of recent years.

Even he knows how much damage he’s done to his reputation. “Them last two albums didn’t count,” he raps on “Talkin’ 2 Myself.” “ ‘Encore’ I was on drugs, ‘Relapse’ I was flushing them out.”

What’s left behind is the same petulant child he’s always been, the one that was rescued and polished up by Dr. Dre and subsequently sustained by critical adulation, financial success and self-medication.

Were this same album to come from a new artist, it would be met with head scratching and possibly derision, but for Eminem it’s merely charmingly bare-bones.

First and foremost Eminem’s rapping has survived largely intact, still a wondrous thicket of internal and complex rhymes that come off as feats of athleticism as much as language. Take this tightly packed run from “No Love”:

Cold hearted, from the day I Bogarted the game, my soul started to rot, fellow

Maybe there should never have been room for Eminem in the first place.

When I’m not even at my harshest, you can still get roasted cause Marsh is not mellow.

Throughout “Recovery” he is practically panting from rapping at such a frenzied clip. This is redolent of Eminem circa 1997-98 — before the whimsical accents and cadences — just as his Slim Shady alter ego was being formed, when wordplay mattered far more than subject or tone.

That propensity can be a liability too. Just because words rhyme doesn’t mean they should. On “Not Afraid,” the first single, he catalogs his climb back to sobriety but doesn’t know when to duck a shoddy double entendre:

The way I feel, I’m strong enough, to go to the club or the corner pub

And lift the whole liquor counter up

Cause I’m raising the bar.

Thankfully, there are just a handful of his quickly outmoded pop-culture references on this album: — Michael Vick, Brooke Hogan, David Carradine, David Cook. (What, nothing rhymed with Kris Allen?) A decade ago they marked Eminem as a provocateur willing to take on enemies. Now they suggest he’s become a passive and sluggish consumer of pop culture. Even the tongue-in-cheek infomercial spots for “Recovery,” starring ShamWow/ Slap Chop spokesman Vince Shlomi, feel like shtick.