Who would ever have thought Eminem would seemingly master the entertainment game by topping both the box office and the Billboard top 100 with a number one hit in both, 8-Mile and its soundtrack.
            All while still having another album, The Eminem Show, in the Billboard top 10. However, unlike The Eminem Show, dominated by commercial hits like “Without Me,” “Hailie’s Song” and “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” 8-Mile is less mainstream and appeals more towards fans of the Slim Shady of old… or at least fans of every other street rapper.
            The 8-Mile soundtrack provides a 16-track musical background to the star’s fictionalized story of a broken down man (Rabbit) battling with a pregnant girlfriend who has dumped him, struggling with a dead-end job, fighting with a mother living with a boyfriend who hates him and, despite his dream of rap success, a debilitating case of stage fright.
            The soundtrack begins with the radio-hit “Lose Yourself,” for fans of the recent, more commercial, Eminem, but quickly leads into “Love Me,” a street rap song where Shady tries to lay out exactly why people listen to his music.
            He raps, “There's a certain mystique when I speak / that you notice that it's sorta unique / cause you know it's me, my poetry's deep / and I'm still matic the way I flow to this beat / you can't sit still, it's like tryin’ to smoke crack / and go to sleep, I'm strapped / just knowing any minute I could snap.”
            In “8-Mile Road,” Eminem raps about the depressing up-hill battle of breaking the racial barriers white people inevitably face in the rap world. He sings, “Sometimes I just feel like, quittin’ I still might / Why do I put up this fight? Why do I still write? / Sometimes it's hard enough steal from the real life / Sometimes I wanna jump on stage and just kill mics / And show these people what my level of skill's like / But I'm still white / Sometimes I just hate life.”
            The rest of the album, with little exception, is performed by other rap artists who provide a number of hard-rap songs to give the album an underground authenticity the now mainstream rap/pop artist may not have been able to deliver on his own.
            Jay-Z, Obie Trice, Nas, Gangstarr, 50 Cent and Xzibit fill out the album with entertainingly explicit songs, however Rakim’s contribution “R.A.K.I.M.,” is just a rip-off of P. Diddy’s “Diddy.” Which raises only one question; if someone is going to copy anything, why copy a song where P. Diddy essentially just spells his name?
            Boomkat and Macy Gray add to the album with “Wasting My Time” and “Time of Your Life,” respectively, giving the album a soothing, yet seemingly out of place R&B element.
            The concluding track by Eminem, “Run Rabbit,” is a return to the more commercial sound of “Lose Yourself.” In the first-person account of Rabbit’s plight, Eminem raps the character’s aspirations for success, “Yea sit up, I'ma tell you who I be / I'ma make you hate me, cause you ain't me.”
            With the 8-Mile soundtrack, Eminem has taken a step in the direction of non-commercialism that he perhaps left behind in The Eminem Show. The album, like the movie, tells an honest story of battling with odds and society’s barriers that is easily recommendable to rap fans.