The Network Marketing Success Ezine

Nothing in popular culture ages more quickly than carefully calculated outrage.

For the first few years of the new millennium, Eminem undeniably was America's favorite cultural bogeyman — right after Marilyn Manson, and just before Paris Hilton. But the platinum-selling rapper has been hiding out in the Detroit suburbs for nearly five years, which might as well be a century in these hyper-accelerated Twittering times.

"I guess it's time for you to **** me again," the now 36-year-old Marshall Mathers intones in an annoying sing-song midway through "Relapse," his sixth studio album, which arrives in stores on Tuesday. "Let's begin, now hand me the pen / How should I begin it and where does it all end? / The world is just my medicine ball you're all in."

There's an air of weary resignation in those words and in the rapper's delivery as he returns to venting his frustrations and taking out his boundless anger on any target that's handy: This shtick is well and truly played, and he knows it. And lest you doubt it, realize that much of the rest of the song "Medicine Ball" is devoted to once again mocking paralyzed "Superman" actor Christopher Reeve — who died in 2004.

The precise moment when Eminem jumped the shark can be debated; I'm torn between the duet with Elton John at the Grammys telecast in 2001 — which followed "The Slim Shady LP" in 1999 and "The Marshall Mathers LP" in 2000, both of which sold 9 million copies — or his starring turn in the 2002 film "8 Mile." But the impulse behind both of those projects was the same.