“Rap God” revisits a crass joke about the 1999 Columbine school shooting initially censored on the first LP’s “I’m Back”.

Opener “Bad Guy” is a sprawling epic that finds the brother of “Stan”’s titular obsessed fan hatching an elaborate revenge plot, and “Parking Lot” inexplicably revisits the heist in the middle of “Criminal” to inform us that the getaway driver split, and the shooter died. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is an album-length bout of moral recidivism, Recovery’s motivational rehab narrative ditched wholesale for a second helping of the celeb-hating, self-deprecating juvenalia of Eminem’s beloved third album peppered with samples of and references to the source material. Serious Eminem proved a drag despite Recovery couching its penitent 12-step dispatches in rivulets of the usual Slim Shady chicanery, so here we are staring down a once-more radioactive blonde Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP 2. 2010’s Recovery maneuvered out of Relapse and Encore’s chum bucket humor by detailing the artist’s struggle to overcome a long-simmering prescription drug dependency. Relapse sold well but its serial killer shtick was uninspired, as Eminem openly admitted on the next year’s “Not Afraid” (“That last Relapse CD was ‘enh’”).

After showing his first signs of wear with 2004’s patchy Encore, Eminem rebounded with 2009’s Dre-beats-and-horrorcore-rhymes retrenchment Relapse. As such, Em’s last decade worth of albums has suffered under jarring shifts in tone.

The more the triumphs of Eminem’s world beating Slim Shady/ Marshall Mathers/ Eminem Showtrilogy recede into memory, the more each subsequent release struggles to strike a tone that leverages an audience raised on the crass iconoclasm of “My Name Is” and “Kill You” with the aging, now sober father of three behind the music.

Eminem the slim shady lp 2