Eminem Hires Pauly Shore to Review 'Recovery'

First, Vince of ShamWow fame peddled Eminem's upcoming album Recovery in a hilarious mock infomercial, and now Slim Shady has recruited some offbeat celebrity friends to share their testimonials about his new disc. First up: Renowned Jury Duty actor and former MTV VJ Pauly Shore, who was perhaps a bit too critical of Eminem's Relapse follow-up, due June 21st.

"I'm a little bit disappointed because this album doesn't have all the accents that he had on the prior album," Shore says in his review, which the actor makes a point of noting several times was filmed at his uncle's house. "On Relapse, he had all these Jamaican dialects, girl dialects, he had all these cool funny goofy little dialects… I think if you're going to evolve as an artist, you should keep doing the accents."

As Rolling Stone previously reported, Eminem revealed to BBC host Jonathan Ross why he ditched the accents on Recovery. "Looking back on it now in retrospect, I feel like there was a lot of stuff on [Relapse] that was humorous and shock value and I had to go back and listen to my older material and figure out why these songs off Relapse didn't make me feel like those used to and kind of put the feeling back into what I do," Em said. "I think that once you listen to it once, at least I felt like, the joke's over so it's not something you can continuously listen to over and over and over."

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter