I make music to make you sick of fake music

Continuing my trip back through the 2001 album charts.

08/07/01 : Devil's Night - D12


Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before this happened. There's a lot to admire (I'm not sure "like" is quite the right word) about Eminem's albums around this time, but the contributions on them from D12 are, shall we say, somewhat unfocussed - so the idea of a whole album from them is not exactly filling me with joy.

Hmmm. Yes. "Somewhat unfocussed" would be a very kind verdict on this indeed - it's very juvenile and (for the most part) decidedly average. Whether you love or loathe Eminem, there is definitely humour, intelligence and talent (particularly around song structure) present on at least some of his tracks - and all those qualities are noticeably absent here. I also think on his solo stuff Eminem can at least claim he's just acting the part of Slim Shady (and there are times when he uses that argument quite effectively) - but when you have twelve people all being somewhat repellent, the jury are less likely to find in their favour. So let's just say I'm not a fan and move along...

We're at #3 in the charts this week on their third week of a fourteen week run - it spent the first two weeks at #2 and the first seven weeks in the top five. Hmmm. The rest of the top five were Travis, Dido, Shaggy and Stereophonics (a somewhat peculiar mix) and the highest new entry was James (#11).

Wikipedia has way more text than the album deserves, but I did enjoy learning about Devil's Night (which is also known as Mischief Night) and is celebrated in various areas of the US on October 30th. It generally involves harmless pranks but they go somewhat overboard in Detroit and set fire to abandoned homes - and in the 80s and 90s, there were a lot of abandoned homes to set fire to (800 fires were reported in '84). The only other thing of interest is that they produced a censored version of the album (and the entry is amusing in that it lists the words that were and weren't acceptable) - you have to wonder why, but they never actually released it anyway. Critically, the entry describes the reviews as mixed but they're still a lot nicer than I was and commercially it did way better than it deserved, getting to #1 in Canada and the US, selling three million copies globally - I imagine 99% were bought by "men" between the ages of 11 and 25.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent copy for £1.50 but if you want the double, gatefold, deluxe, numbered, limited edition reissue with orange and red marbled vinyl then it's going to set you back £100 - spoiler alert, I will not be spending that. And let's just leave it at that.

15/07/01 - A very enjoyable revisit

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