Being Eminem

Being Eminem
Published:May 30, 2009

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The most incendiary rapper of all time talks to Anthony Bozza about fame, his fondness for serial killers and the addictions that nearly finished his career



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 suffered 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: that he was struggling with a drug habit and weight gain; had put down the microphone for good; intended to focus on acting; 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.


In the decade that I’ve known of Eminen, I’ve seen him go from the man on fire I first interviewed in 1999 to a wordsmith who appeared to have become bored with his craft in 2002.




In a sense , 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, Eminem sounds like the man he used to be. And though he has not decided if he’s going to tour this album or with Relapse II, a second studio release tentatively scheduled for later this year, he has decided he’s ready to keep writing and rapping rather than working behind the production desk for other artists.

I chatted to him about putting himself back out there.


Eminem: I never really put the mic down. The problem was that I had a pretty bad drug problem. I was messing with Valium, Vicodin, Ambien and anything to [help me ] sleep. 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 I wasn’t ready, so when I came out, I relapsed 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. What changes did you make?

Eminem: I felt like I had to pull back from the spotlight a bit.


Back to his latest release. Although 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 fierce affair. In fact, Relapse contains 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 in Orlando, Florida, with his old amanuensis Dr Dre.


Eminem: 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 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, and 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.” We recorded 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.



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 than window-rattling rap.


Eminem: Beautiful is the only one out of about three or four albums worth of material that I recorded in the time I was gone. I did all that when I wasn’t sober and that is 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 it that I wouldn’t want to just throw away.


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.



And if you’re wondering, the rapper admits that during his hiatus, he watched a lot of films and documentaries about serial killers.



Eminem: I always had a thing for them and I found that going back through my DVD collection and watching those movies sparked something in me. The way a serial killer’s mind works, just the psychology of them, is pretty f***ing 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.

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 f***ing kill everybody. I was trying to create a triple entendre with the [album] title. 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.


He may have complained about the pressures that come with being in the public eye, 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 , however, I saw the reality of where he 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, 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. 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 f***ing 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? F*** no, I wouldn’t! I’d be 10 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 complain a lot about your family life. I noticed a lack of that this time. Is that another change you’ve made?

Eminem: Yeah. I’m probably going to keep my family life personal from now on. The kids (Hailie and adopted daughter Alaina) are old enough now — I just want to let them be kids. I don’t want to comment on them too much.


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: 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? Hip-hop has always been like that. When I was growing up, there was LL [Cool J], Run DMC, 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 who 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. — © 2009 The Guardian