Eminem Loses One-Third of His Audience – Fox

[b]Eminem Loses One-Third of His Audience[/b] Wednesday, November 17, 2004 By Roger Friedman Eminem must be wondering where all his fans have gone. The rapper, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, will have the No. 1 album this week when all the counting is completed. But those numbers are quite different than they were two years ago. “The Eminem Show,” released May 26, 2002, indeed sold 1.3 million copies it first week out and went on to sell a total of almost 10 million. But my how times have changed. “Encore,” Eminem’s latest, probably moved 737,000 copies at most. That’s a great number for most artists, but is a little sketchy for a recording artist who was riding high until recently. Eminem may have turned off a lot of his old fans with anti-Bush rhetoric and a highly inflammable video to accompany that message. He also didn’t do himself any favors parodying Michael Jackson on the subject of child molestation. Someone should have told Mathers that when “Saturday Night Live” cartoonist Robert Smigel did a short animated film about Jackson as a molester it was shown once and once only and will probably never be seen again. A whole video, intended for repeated viewings, was probably overkill. Of course, Eminem’s defenders will rush in saying that “Encore” was only on sale starting last Friday and missed three purchase days. But I don’t think that was a huge factor. The weekend would have told the story for “Encore” one way or another. I do think a lot of his credibility was lost when he, like Ashlee Simpson the week before, got caught lip synching on “Saturday Night Live.” The “Real Slim Shady” didn’t seem too genuine after that. Source: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138791,00.html