Eminem's 'We Made You' video: Snap judgment

The video for Eminem’s official comeback single, “We Made You,” debuted today, featuring all the crass pop-culture parodies you’d expect from an Eminem video. And I mean all. It’s like Em took every single unused video treatment that came across his desk in the past five years and put it into this clip. (Click through to the jump to watch the whole thing.) Bret Michaels hooking up with Sarah Palin! Mr. Spock in Psycho! Elvis getting electrocuted! Kim Kardashian’s posterior! Amy Winehouse behind bars! Eminem as Jason Mraz? Those are a mere fraction of the wacky scenarios that Em and various lookalike models act out here. Also, much of the video appears to take place in the middle of an ongoing Rock Band game for some reason.

That’s a lot of tasteless zaniness for one video. Which is fine in principle: Tasteless zaniness is one of Eminem’s strong suits, and if you’re not on board with that by now, you’re probably not interested in watching an Eminem video in the first place. But somehow I feel like he’s trying too hard this time. Maybe it’s the pot shots he takes at Samantha Ronson, Lindsay Lohan, Ellen Degeneres, and Portia de Rossi — not only are these gags homophobic, they’re random and unfunny. I get that Eminem has a lot to prove with this album. I can even understand why he might feel like he needs to shock people into paying attention to him. For now, though, I hope the quality/quantity ratio of the jokes in his next video is a little higher. How about you?