It has been five years since the world last heard from Eminem, but the
most incendiary rapper of all time is returning to the fray with perhaps
his most stunning album yet. In his only major interview to mark the
release of Relapse, he talks to Anthony Bozza about fame and his
fondness for serial killers, the addictions that nearly finished his
career and why he's in a better place now than ever before.
It has been five years since Eminem
last emerged from his Detroit compound with a new studio album, Encore.
By then, the rapper born Marshall Mathers III had established himself
as the most significant US artist of his generation – driving and
reflecting fierce debate in George Bush's America on racial and sexual
politics, violence, dysfunctional families and the pitfalls of
celebrity. He survived a traumatic childhood in the racially divided
lower-class suburbs of Detroit to win nine Grammy awards and an Oscar
(for best song, from the film 8 Mile, the loosely autobiographical tale
in which he starred); but even as critics and commentators belatedly
sought to embrace him, the United States Secret Service found itself
considering an investigation into the suggestion – on the 2003 track We
As Americans – that he had threatened the president's life.
No one could be insensate to Eminem, or Slim Shady, those aliases
born of a hip-hop tradition to which he had always been true. Shady
righted the wrongs the rapper had suff ered in life and ridiculed the
insincerity and injustice he saw all around him. But somewhere along the
way it seems as if holding a mirror up to his culture caused the real
Marshall Mathers to lose his way. The stuff of his life – from his
acrimonious relationships with his mother Debbie and his now twice
divorced ex-wife Kimberley Anne Scott (mother to his daughter Hailie ) –
fuelled lyrics that were often painfully detailed and explicit. But
following a greatest hits collection – with the ominous title Curtain
Call – in December 2005, Eminem disappeared from the limelight.
In the years since there have been endless rumours: Eminem was
struggling with drug addiction and weight gain; Eminem had put down the
microphone for good; Eminem intended to focus on acting; Eminem was too
paranoid to leave his home. The truth is mixed.
In his time away from the world at large, the 36-year-old star
struggled with an addiction to painkillers and sleeping pills that had
been with him for years. He gained weight, he grew depressed and he lost
the creative spark that had always driven him on. The murder of his
best friend and partner in rap, Proof – real name DeShaun Dupree Holton –
on 8 Mile Road in Detroit in April 2006 did nothing to help his
downward spiral.
I
first heard Eminem in 1998, when he was an unsigned rapper freestyling
on a Los Angeles radio show and I was on staff at Rolling Stone
magazine. I kept my eye out for him and a year later, when he signed to
Interscope records and was working with Dr Dre
– one of the most infl uential hiphop producers in history – I was
dispatched to interview him for a 250-word piece on the "novelty" video
for his surprise hit My Name Is. The Eminem I met then was on fi re,
with wit, with creativity and with a nothing-to-lose momentum that was
carrying him further to the top day-today than I think even he reali
sed. But as time went on, and over the course of several in-depth
interviews that saw me finally writing a book called Whatever You Say I
Am (Transworld) about his rise to fame and his cultural significance, I
saw the Eminem I knew change.
It wasn't just the stress of success and the complicated life he
chronicled so well in rhyme. In our last interview, circa the album The
Eminem Show in 2002, he had grown very visibly reserved; it was a trend
that seemed to continue in his subsequent dealings with the press and
public at large. Soon after, on Encore, his rhymes fell short of his
acerbic, acrobatic best. It sounded from the outside as if the wordsmith
who was never without a pen and a pad had grown bored of his craft.
In truth, he had. He was midway through a spiral that he has finally
turned around: he is now a year sober and ready to re-emerge with the
feverishly awaited Relapse. His voice is clear, his speech is focused
and for the first time in too long – to my ears at least – Eminem sounds
like the man he used to be. The outward signs are positive: rather than
remaining in his home studio to record, Eminem has built a new facility
in Detroit, full of his favourite vintage arcade games, where he now
prefers to work. And though he has not decided if he's going to tour
this album or Relapse II, a second studio release tentatively scheduled
for later this year, he has decided that he's ready to keep writing and
rapping rather than working behind the production desk for other
artists. It sounds as if Eminem has realised, once again, that rap saved
his life and that no one should turn their back on what they're born to
do – especially if they're given the chance to do it their way.
Eminem: Anthony, long time, no speak.
AB: Marshall Mathers, it is good to hear your voice.
Eminem: Yeah, I'm doing that "I am back" thing a little bit. Uh… cool. Is that all you need for this article?
AB: Definitely. Interview over. Thanks! Seriously, though, what made you want to put yourself out there again?
Eminem:
Honestly, I never really put the mic down. The problem was, as I'm
going to be explaining over and over again for a while, is that I had a
pretty bad drug problem. I was messing with Valium, Vicodin, Ambien and
anything to [help me to] sleep. Basically I'd take Vicodin to get me
through my day.
AB: You went to rehab for the first
time in August 2005 when you cancelled the European leg of the Anger
Management 3 tour, which was your first in three years.
Eminem:
Right. And when I went to rehab that time I wasn't ready to go. So when
I came out I relapsed pretty much right away, within a week. I was
still writing at that time and trying to do my producer thing. I was
sitting in rehab reflecting for the first time in a while. I felt like I
needed to pull back from the spotlight because it was getting out of
control. I mean, you could blame my drug problem on genetics, you could
blame it on my career and the way it took off, or you could just blame
it on me.
AB: Which did you blame it on?
Eminem:
I think more than anything it had to do with me. You know, my career
certainly played a hand in my drug use and how bad it actually got, but
it was also my own doing.
AB: It sounds like you got
a bit of perspective that first time in rehab, even if it ultimately
didn't work. What changes did you make?
Eminem: I
felt like I had to pull back from the spotlight. I thought I'd try to
produce records and work with artists from my label and shit like that. I
thought this would be my way to pull back a little bit and not be the
front man.
From the start, growing up in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Eminem
immersed himself in hip-hop culture, performing at high-school talent
shows under the moniker M&M (as in Marshall Mathers). While
promoting one of those shows he met Proof, the rapper who urged Eminem
to challenge himself and, along with some of the future members of the
group D12, inspired him to create his alter ego, Slim Shady. Eminem has
remained fiercely loyal to these roots – to his hometown and to the
rappers that made him the artist he is. It was clear, from my first trip
to Detroit with him back in 1999, that even though the city and many in
it hadn't shown him much love, he still had love for where he was from.
It makes sense that Eminem turned to producing his friends during his
darkest days – like his house and the city itself, they are his refuge.
AB: During your "retirement", you did release Eminem Presents: The Re-Up (2006), with Obie Trice and Proof and others...
Eminem: We
did do that album during that time… you have to excuse me if my memory
is a little blotchy from those four years. It's probably understandable
looking back at how much I was actually using. But yeah, that album came
out and it did what it did and came out how it came out. I never
stopped working, but I had a problem I was hiding. I guess it was a
combination of writer's block and being lazy, because I just didn't want
to write rhymes any more.
AB: Really? Every time
I've seen you since day one you've always had a note pad or a napkin or
something nearby that was always full of rhymes.
Eminem:
I don't know, I was just too lazy to write my rhymes so I started to do
the Jay-Z thing. I'd just go in and freestyle whenever I did a verse.
[But] I had writer's block. For the first time in my life I couldn't
write. I couldn't write a rhyme to save my life.
AB: That is shocking to me. I've seen you literally not be able to stop rhyming.
Eminem:
I mean, don't get me wrong, I could write rhymes. But I wasn't able to
write anything that was good and up to my standards. This went on for
two, probably three years. It was the worst case of writer's block.
Going through that I felt like shit. Me, personally, if I don't write
all the time, if a couple of weeks go by and I'm not writing, I feel
shitty. I need to write, just as little exercises to feel like I'm doing
something.
AB: So you must have felt completely strange.
Eminem:
It was the pills I was taking; they had my mood really fucked up. I was
already depressed and with the drugs it just became a vicious cycle of
depression. And as if my drug problem wasn't bad enough, when Proof died
it was like, "Son of a bitch, what I am going to do now?". I went
through a lot when he died. It was the worst time in my life. It just
gave me a real legitimate excuse, in my head at least, to use drugs. I
didn't care if my drug problem got worse at that point so I took more
pills. And the more I said fuck it and took more pills, the higher my
tolerance got. The higher my tolerance got, the more I needed those
pills in my body just to feel normal and not feel sick. It's a vicious
cycle. I got over it all last year. I ended up coming out of all that
shit that was cluttering my mind and as I came up out of the haze from
the pills and everything, shit started to get clearer.
I
met Eminem's long-serving manager and close friend Paul Rosenberg in
the Shady Records offices in Manhattan, before being taken on a ride in a
well-appointed Cadillac Escalade to listen to the new album at full
volume. Though the first single We Made You, with its pot-shots at
Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse and Sarah Palin, reintroduced the clowning
Eminem to the world, the album as a whole is a darker, more lyrically fi
erce aff air. In fact, Relapse contains, hands down, some of the best
work he's ever done. That doesn't mean it's full of Grammy-ready
collaborations or radio-friendly jingles. The subject matter is ripe
with humour and horror, and injected with a dark intensity.
Getting there wasn't easy: after a few false starts, the record
finally took shape in the course of a recording session with his old
amanuensis Dr Dre. It didn't happen in Detroit, nor in Dre's studio in
Los Angeles, but in Orlando, Florida.
Eminem: I was nervous about it. I had called him and
told him I had something for him so I was nervous. You see, he and I
had got together five or six times over the past few years and literally
left the studio with nothing.
AB: Are you serious? The two of you have such chemistry, you really must have been in bad shape.
Eminem:
Yeah. I was really nervous about that trip. I had let him down, like,
five times. I wasn't sure if we were going to work on his record or
mine, but I didn't want to get down to Orlando and not have anything
again. A couple of weeks before the trip I was still pretty new to my
sobriety. I was a few months clean but my mood was elevating and my mind
was getting clearer. I started writing more and I told Dre that I had
been writing songs without beats. I was making beats in my head and
writing lyrics down just like I used to do. At that point I had a couple
of songs and a few loose verses. In hindsight I was doing mind
exercises, getting myself back into shape. I wasn't sure if I was ready
but I called him anyway and was like, "Yo, homie, I think I'm starting
to come out of this writer's block." He was like, "All right. That's
what I like to hear." When I got to Orlando we recorded a batch of songs
over two weeks. We did 11 songs and when we were done I felt like I did
when we did the first two records. It was that same feeling, so the
word "relapse" just kept playing over and over in my mind. It all made
sense.
AB: You were relapsing back into the old ways of being yourself, just without the drugs.
Eminem:
Yeah. I'd had conversations with Dre over the years about what people
wanted f rom me. I was hearing all these things about what if Em comes
back and the different ways he needs to reinvent himself as a completely
diff erent person. Dre was just like, "Man, people want to see you,
they just want to hear you get the fuck out there again." I don't know
if it was the first, second, third time he said it to me but then it
just clicked. Like, "He is right." I don't feel like I need to reinvent
myself, I feel like I just need to go back to doing what made me me in
the first place. We did 11 songs and then I went back to Detroit and I
was worried about that. I was going home and I thought I'd feel
uninspired to write. I thought I'd need to leave home for my mind to
expand. But we came back and it never stopped. Once I got sober, man, it
was a whole shit storm – these thoughts that I could not control. That
really made me feel like me again. I'd lay down to go to bed and think
of three lines I had to get up to write down before I forget them. It
was that sort of thing.
AB: Did you change up your routine to keep you from falling back into your old ways?
Eminem:
I had been recording a lot of shit at home during the past few years
and got real comfortable doing that. So I got a new studio and started
recording there. I didn't like doing vocals and recording at that studio
at first – it took me a while to break it in, but once it got broken
in, I liked it better. Now I don't record at home at all any more.
Dre
produced every track bar one on Relapse, many with Eminem as
co-producer. The exception is Beautiful, the most revealing tune on the
album, produced by Eminem alone. It follows the tradition of cuts such
as Rock Bottom and Hailie's Song in frankly detailing Eminem's
depression and chemically enhanced ennui. Its anthemic style is equally
different from the rest of the album, too; it's more mid-tempo rock song
than window-rattling rap track.
Eminem: It was a relief for me to not worry about
the beats and strictly focus on writing and what the hell I wanted to
say. It took a lot of the stress off. But Beautiful is a different
story. That song is the only one out of a whole batch of songs –
probably three or four albums' worth of material – that I recorded in
the time I was gone. I did all of that when I wasn't sober and that is
literally the only song that's on this record. I don't know if any of
the others are going to make it to Relapse II, which I plan to release
later this year, because I haven't picked out those songs yet.
AB: Is this the best of the bunch? Or is it the only one you're willing to let the world hear?
Eminem:
It's the only one I could actually listen to and feel OK about. It
brings me back to a time when I was really depressed and down, but at
the same time it reminds me of what that space is like and what never to
go back to. There is a lot of honesty in that song that I wouldn't want
to just throw away. I started writing the first verse and half of the
second when I was in rehab going through detox. I didn't have a beat in
my head or anything like that… I wrote the verse and just knew I wanted
it to be a bounce-style, I guess. I got that first bit out and finished
it when I got out of rehab, when I relapsed right back into taking
pills. If you listen to that song and how it starts off, I'm just so
fucking depressed.
AB: Where were you exactly when you wrote that?
Eminem:
I was sitting on the end of the bed in detox, not fully committed to it
and not fully detoxed. They give you medicine to make your detox not as
rough. I wrote it during that period – the first two days. I was
sitting there not knowing where I wanted to be in my career. I didn't
even know if I wanted a career any more, because this shit was too much.
It just wasn't worth it.
The second single from the album, 3am, is different: it marks a
return to the horror fantasy that Eminem does so well. His battle rap
style, born of lyrically battling rivals in high school lunch rooms and
Detroit clubs, is Eminem's trademark. Whatever his subject, Eminem takes
it apart, deconstructing it lyrically – usually with an extra dose of
ultra-violence – as if it's his opponent. His skill with rhymed
evocative language and a fearless pursuit of shock and indecency has
outraged many and made fans of even more.
On
Relapse, Eminem is unrepentant in this regard: on this single he is out
to maim and offend. And if anyone wonders what he's been watching on TV
late at night, they shouldn't be surprised to hear he's been catching a
lot of serial killer fi lms – albeit in a positive way. Really.
AB: I have to say that, Beautiful aside, there's a
real serial killer theme running through this album. Did you have
Silence of the Lambs on loop in your house?
Eminem: I
did find myself watching a lot of documentaries on serial killers. I
mean, I always had a thing for them. Oh, that's not twisted in itself at
all, right? I've always been intrigued by them and watching movies like
that, and I found that going back through my DVD collection and
watching movies about killers sparked something in me. The way a serial
killer's mind works, just the psychology of them, is pretty fucking
crazy. I was definitely inspired by that, but most of that imagery came
from my own mind. I did everything I could to relapse into the old me.
When you relapse you go into your old ways harder than before.
AB: Is that where the story in 3am came from?
Eminem: Yeah,
in that song I relapse in a rehab facility or something like it. I just
black out and fucking kill everybody. I was trying to create a triple
entendre with the [album] title: relapsing literally, going back to the
old days – just blacking the fuck out and killing everyone. I wanted to
paint a picture for the listener, to make them feel like they are in the
story and part of it as each line progresses.
AB: Are you angry at life right now?
Eminem:
Honestly, I'm not really angry at anything right now. I'm OK with my
life and what's going on right now. This is not really an emotionally
driven album. There are a couple of songs, Beautiful being one of them,
that touch on where I am emotionally, but it goes there without getting
too dark. The overall theme of the record is to have a centre. I feel
like I lost that on my last albums. Encore is a good record but I don't
feel like it was a great record for me. It wasn't quite up to what I
feel like my personal standards are for myself. It wasn't all that I'm
capable of doing.
AB: Are you saying that Encore falls short musically, lyrically or both?
Eminem:
It feels a little too self-loathing to me. When I go back and listen to
it… it just feels like I'm pissing and moaning about whatever. It
sounds like in my head I feel like I have all these things to piss and
moan about. And maybe I did, maybe I didn't, I don't know, but to
actually bring that kind of shit to the forefront like that, I just
don't agree with it. I guess to me now it feels like I beat up the
subject of what was me. That's what that record's overall theme feels
like. Even Curtain Call feels like that was me then and I guess it was.
That is where I was at then. AB: Are you at the point in your sobriety where you look back at those albums and trace how you were changing at all? Eminem:
Oh definitely. Encore wasn't the start of my drug use but it was the
start of the progression of my addiction. It really went to the next
level between The Eminem Show and Encore – that's when it started
progressing from recreation to a real problem. Even though I knew it
inside, I would never let on that it was a problem. Obviously I was
pretty good at hiding it because I was pretty busy. I was a functioning
addict. I knew in my mind, "I'm taking these pills just for the fuck of
it now." I was taking them and I needed more and more. When I think back
on my mental state back then – "Oh, I wrote this because of this" – I
can see what I was going through. Sedative drugs like Valium and Vicodin
and Ambien, they certainly put a cloud over your head. They put a
dumbbell in your mood. If something is bad in the first place, it's
going to seem so much worse than it even is. A normal, thinking person
would approach a tough situation in life like, "Wow! This is a really
fucked-up time period that I'm experiencing right now but I'll get
through it." My attitude was, "I'm never getting through with it. This
is the most horrible shit." I was concerned with things like "I can't go
to the fucking mall any more, I can't go to the gas station, I can't
pump my own gas, how fucked up is that? I can't walk into a 7-11 store!"
I couldn't do those things any more and all I did was sit and bitch and
complain about it.
He
may have complained but he wasn't imagining it: Eminem occupies a
rarefied realm of celebrity that crosses all borders. But success didn't
come to him until his late 20s, only then arriving overnight. The first
24 hours I spent with Eminem saw us travel to three club engagements in
New York City – booked well before the explosion of interest that
followed the release of his debut single. The first gig was at a
sold-out all-ages show, where his fans were so rabid to see him that
their mass presence stopped traffic outside the venue. Police were
required to escort us out through an alley and to part the crowd so that
our car could leave. When we returned to Detroit just a few days later,
however, I saw the reality of where he really came from: there was an
eviction notice on the trailer he still called home and in Gilbert's
Lodge, the restaurant where he'd worked for years, many of his former
co-workers did everything short of mock his new-found success to his
face. That was 10 years ago and the stakes have risen exponentially.
Eminem has always been a private person; in one of our earliest
interviews, when the attention coming his way was just starting to sink
in, he told me that all he wanted out of his career was to make a living
and support his family. He wasn't after fame, he wasn't after
celebrity, he just wanted to make enough money rapping to get by. He
also said he wasn't seeking controversy. But like everything else that
has ever been a challenge to Eminem, he's shrunk from none of it.
AB: The paparazzi and all that comes with fame has driven a lot of people crazy.
Eminem:
Yeah, but that's bullshit. Because would I rather be working back at
Gilbert's Lodge for eight bucks an hour cooking and doing dishes having
never made it? Or would I rather be like this dealing with my life as it
is now? Like, what really do I have to piss and moan about? I mean, I'm
not saying that I have the easiest fucking job in the world, but it's
certainly better than what I was doing. Would I have been a happier
person if I had never made it? Fuck no, I wouldn't! I'd be ten billion
times worse than I could even imagine. So at the end of the day, what do
I really have to complain about?
AB: Perhaps not so
much. On earlier albums you did complain a lot about your family life. I
noticed a lack of that on this album. Is that another change you've
made?
Eminem: Yeah. I'm probably going to keep my
family life personal from now on. The kids are old enough now – I just
want to let them be kids. I don't want to comment on them too much.
They're at an age where I just want to let them be kids.
In
the years that Eminem has been away, hip-hop has grown more
candy-coated than ever. Aside from a few artists, the majority of recent
rap records have focused more on the dancefloor than the lyrical weight
that made artists such as Tupac and the Notorious BIG international
icons . No one else can simultaneously appeal to die-hard fans of rhyme,
rock fans, pop fans, young and old quite like Eminem. I'd suggest that
no one else could have made an album like Relapse, either.
AB: What do you have to say on the state of hip-hop at the moment?
Eminem: Hey, do you mind holding on for two seconds? I've got to piss really bad.
AB: Wait, is that your answer to my question? Are you going to go piss on hip-hop?
Eminem: No,
man! I've been holding but I can't hold it no more! [A few minutes
pass]. Ahh, I'm a brand new man! OK, hip-hop. Well, from what I heard on
the radio while I was away the past few years I feel hip-hop went to a
bad place. It got watered down lyrically, contentwise, everything. But
at the same time there have been artists like T.I. And Lil' Wayne and
Kanye [West], they've all been here doing their thing. Those guys
elevated their game. All of that is making me a fan of rap again. It
feels like people are starting to actually give a shit about the craft
and about writing.
AB: What are you doing when you're not working to stay out of trouble these days?
Eminem: Well, I'm working all the time to stay out of trouble! Aside from spending time with the kids, it's all work for me right now.
AB: Hip-hop needs some records fans can sink their brains into.
Eminem: You
know what though? Hiphop has always been like that. When I was growing
up, there was LL [Cool J] and Run DMC and there was Big Daddy Kane and
KRS-One. It was the few and far between that made the game interesting.
There were plenty of rappers out there that were wack but they had a
purpose. They just made you appreciate the good ones so much more. If
there wasn't that variety, you wouldn't actually know it when you heard
somebody that was really good. Hip-hop is ever changing but you'll always have the pack. And you'll always have those people who are separated from the pack.
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