Then there’s ”Hailie’s Song,” his pledge of love and devotion to his 6-year-old daughter. In the creepy-crawly, mesmerizing ”Superman,” he depicts himself as both sexual predator and commitment-phobic single guy.
The song is both fragile and furious, and the syncopated music-box arrangement matches it in tension. The unhealed scars of his childhood are pored over in ”Cleaning Out My Closet”: In the chorus, he apologizes for making his mama cry, but in the verses, he lashes out at her (”you selfish bitch”) and vows to be a better dad than his own absentee father (”I wonder if he even kissed me goodbye”). The album is like a therapy session in which the shrink becomes a human beatbox. The playful, if dated, humor of the single aside, the largely dark ”Eminem Show” focuses more on agonized confessionals than dis-a-minute one-liners (although there are plenty of those).