The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  There was almost no mention of the drug abuse that had defined his recent life, which stayed limited in the public mind to his seemingly successful 2005 rehab spell. The book was, he told the New York Times, “more about Eminem and less about Marshall”. Paul Rosenberg told the paper: “This is the end of the first chapter of his career. Em’s looking forward now.” But his new album Relapse would similarly content itself almost entirely with surface feelings. “This is not really an emotionally driven album,” he told the Guardian truthfully. His rehabilitation was still too fragile to dig deeper.

  He talked further on the theories behind Relapse to the Guardian. “I was hearing all these things about what if Em comes back and the different ways he needs to reinvent himself as a completely different person. Dre was just like, ‘Man, people just want to see you, they just want to hear you get the fuck out there again’ … 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.” Dre explained his thinking to the New York Times. “I talked to my son about it, and he was like: ‘The kids want to hear him act the fool. We want to hear him be crazy, we want to hear him be Slim Shady and nothing else.’ “

  In February 2009, ‘Crack A Bottle’, the first official release from Relapse, broke the US record for most downloads in a first week with 418,000, making it his first home number one since ‘Lose Yourself’. Leaked in rough form the previous October, it was a swaggering reunion with Dre and 50 Cent. More crucially it resurrected Slim Shady. Shot dead by his creator on his last record, he twitched back to life with the inevitability of Frankenstein’s monster. Eminem announced his return like a boxing MC, while the music recalled a three-ring circus.

  A series of videos were released through April, stoking anticipation for Relapse‘s release on May 15. ‘3 a.m.’ began with Eminem waking in a forest, looking at his slashed hands, and gradually recalling the rehab centre where he had slaughtered a nurse and everyone he could find with a butcher’s knife, trailing bloody footprints and finger-smears behind him. Eyeballs staring as he sank into a bath of blood in a serial killer’s dank gothic basement somewhat like Stan’s lair, he finally looked around him and screamed as he realised what he’d done. Eminem could still act. But the video was far less disturbing than the one he’d made for ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ as an unknown in 1998.

  The video that defined Relapse, though, was for ‘We Made You’. A virtual remake of ‘Without Me’, a comeback single after far less time away, Eminem rattled through a new repertoire of comic guises: a topless lumberjack ready to pleasure a negligee-wearing Sarah Palin; waiting in Psycho‘s shower for Jessica Alba; Eminem fan Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man character to Dre’s Tom Cruise; on the deck of Star Trek‘s Enterprise and a morphing Transformer. Finally he rushed back to rehab, lusting for Amy Winehouse. His eyes, so blackly shark-like sometimes, looked empty at the end. ‘We Made You’ got Eminem on TV. But its superficial riffs on his old themes ran through Relapse.

  When fans finally played the first new Eminem album in five years, they found the skits at least were as sharp as ever. Accompanying interviews had at last acknowledged the depths of his addiction. Now, Dominic West, the British star of the great crime series The Wire, was on hand as “Dr. West” to prepare the rapper for the outside world. His advice on the 12-step programme (“Steps? There are a lot of them aren’t there? Christ, I don’t even know them all …”) and how to respond in the company of drinkers (“Take a drink – take the edge off!”), till his voice monstrously warps and he hurls pills at Eminem, who wakes shaking from his nightmare, was a wonderful sketch. Aghast manager Paul Rosenberg and tough label boss Steve Berman (“Lemme guess – another album about poor me, I’m so famous it has ruined my rich little life – am I onto something here?”) rejoined the company. Like Relapse‘s cover image of Eminem’s face composed from thousands of coloured pills, they showed how lightly he meant to treat his years of torment. “The overall theme of the record is to have a centre,” he explained to the Guardian. “[Encore] feels a little too self-loathing to me … like I’m pissing and moaning about whatever … I beat up the subject of what was me.”

  He looked forward to being hated again on ‘Medicine Ball’. It was impossible to feel so strongly about songs such as ‘My Mom’, a bored addendum to ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’. Its claims that Mathers-Briggs had crushed drugs into his meals as a kid to keep him docile, making him repeat her cycle of addiction 30 years later, was something he broadly believed. But when the next song, ‘Insane’, sailed into far fantasies of his mom-sanctioned childhood rape by a step-father, who could care?

  ‘Bagpipes From Baghdad’ was a sheer comedown from ‘Mosh’’s political engagement, allying Arabic music to another dig at old flame Mariah Carey. The rape and murder of fellow rehab habitués Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, and of stray pick-ups on rainy nights, were part of a serial killer theme on ‘Same Song & Dance’, ‘Stay Wide Awake’ and ‘3 a.m.’, among others. “I did find myself watching a lot of documentaries on serial killers,” he told the Guardian‘s Anthony Bozza. “I always had a thing for them … going back through my DVD collection and watching movies about killers sparked something in me.” They helped bring Slim back. “I did everything I could to lapse into the old me. When you relapse, you go into your old ways harder than before.”

  This Slim, though, carried no threat. The women he abused and hunted and corpses he piled high had no weight. Relapse was scrubbed moroni-cally clean of content. Eminem’s truest comment on the album came in the New York Times. “At the end of the day, it’s just words. That’s all it is to me.” And it was here that Relapse conversely touched dazzling greatness. Only a year before, Eminem’s command of language had been struck dumb. Now he rapped with born-again zeal, throwing his crutches away to sing and dance. The even swing and clean sound of Dre’s beats provided regular structure into which he poured exercises in rapping dexterity. Stanzas, phrases and words were stretched, squeezed, broken and stitched with Sinatraesque relish. What he said mattered less than ever before. How he said it showed him rapping himself back to life.

  There were two exceptions. ‘Déjà Vu’ was an intimate narrative of his drug decline. ‘Beautiful’ was a desperate plea during it. The first verse and a half were written sitting on the end of a hospital bed in rehab. He finished it when he relapsed once he got home. That accounts for the naked depression it described, of a man writing only to stop his mind floating away, but who feared his rapping was finished. His only consolation: he’d be hard to follow. This snapshot of Eminem in the pit found him paranoid in rooms which chilled as he entered them, where crawling yes-men howled at his jokes. His penchant for power ballads did see a sample of Queen and Paul Rodgers’ ‘Reaching Out’ add warmth. The video changed the subject to Detroit, as he wandered through the rotted suburban streets of his past, and accusingly watched Depression-style poverty in America’s former powerhouse. Somehow, a song written in a lost place became inspiring. “It reminds me of what that space is like and what never to go back to,” he told the Guardian.

  Relapse was a US number one of course. Eminem’s promotional blitz included an interview on TV’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where he looked lean but wired with nerves. The show’s audience of 200 laid-off Michigan car industry union members was then flown back home to Detroit for his 30-minute set at the MotorCity Casino Hotel. He played with his homophobic image at the MTV Movie Awards, when Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as Austrian fashion designer Bruno, planted his near-naked ass in the rapper’s mortified face, a stunt which made global headlines. He even added to his record’s cartoon style by co-starring in a Marvel comic, Punisher/Eminem: Kill You. But Relapse‘s reviews were poor. Vibe noticed its mastery of the hip-hop form while calling it “patchy”. Rock magazines mostly agreed with the Village Voice: “a dank echo chamber wherein he continues his ‘shock tactics’ in pointless isolation.” US sales stalled below two million. Its predecessor Encore sold five mill
ion, and 11 million worldwide (where the album before that, The Eminem Show, managed 19 million). Relapse simply wasn’t enough. Eminem’s initial plan to cull Relapse 2 from its prolific sessions wasn’t the answer (a compromise Christmas release, Relapse: Refill, added seven songs).

  Eminem instead proved his renewed energy with a second comeback. On June 18, 2010, he released a brand-new album, Recovery. In every interview, he disowned Relapse. “I’ve grown up so much just in the last couple of years since I’ve been sober,” he told Vibe. “Relapse didn’t reflect that or where I really am mentally.” To Spin, he said: “It was a regression, me rhyming to shock people again. ‘How much fucked-up shit can I say?’ … after a while, people get used to it, and the joke is dead.” He put the change most succinctly into a Recovery song, ‘Talkin’ 2 Myself’, where he bravely admitted he no longer ruled. He described his mental shift to 60 Minutes. “I had to go back and listen to some of my older music, and try to figure out why those songs off Relapse weren’t making me feel like those used to … [and] just put the emotion back in.” Relapse‘s relieved gush of words was refined. “I started choosing words carefully,” he said to Spin, “as far as striking an emotional chord.”

  The skits were gone. They had helped make his first five major-label albums seem one long story. Recovery scrubbed that past, and started again. The comforting presence of Dre was also abandoned (bar one track, ‘So Bad’). Instead, Eminem sought fresh sounds from various producers, most prominently Just Blaze and DJ Khalil. The even sheen Dre had given Relapse was replaced by music closer to Eminem’s own tastes: the fuzzed guitars, choirs and sometimes cloying emotion of full-blown soft rock. Aqueous keyboards and Steve McEwan’s high vocal on ‘Space Bound’ made it Pink Floydian Eminem; the guitars on ‘Talkin’ 2 Myself’ could have been The Police. ‘Going Through Changes’ sampled Black Sabbath’s ‘Changes’, and irresistibly recalled Ozzy Osbourne’s sappy duet version with daughter Kelly. The NME, attuned to what was hip in a rock world, rooted for Eminem in his mother’s ‘70s album collection, cautioned against “‘crossover’ songs that just come across as naff as a Care Bear teddy clutching a stuffed heart”. This was doubtless a factor in Recovery‘s commercial success. But this music also helped turn the key to relentlessly heightened feelings in Eminem, as his rapping regained its rasping threat, even as he shamelessly crooned choruses. A year before, he had rapped with numb euphoria at being able to do so at all. Now the anaesthetic had worn off, the therapy of sponsors and friends had dug deep, and Eminem was quivering with pain, rage and wounded pride.

  The new image on the album cover and videos showed a mature Eminem, hair and clothes dark, face gauntly sharp from a year’s worth of workouts: a sleek 37-year-old professional. The opening track ‘Cold Wind Blows’ set the mood. He danced like a cartoon character when his feet were scorched by lightning bolts, and God promised hell if he continued his evil rapping. He begged himself to calm down, futilely. If he still tried too hard with the shock tactics, this was in the context of tough, committed wordplay.

  Shady and the jokes stayed leashed, as the theme continued of a rapper reclaiming his kingdom. ‘Talkin’ 2 Myself’ bravely admitted “you’re no longer the man”, while the sound of his own fans’ laughter at his decline spurred him on. ‘No Love’ then paired him with Lil Wayne. As he confessed in ‘Talkin’ 2 Myself’, he had been consumed with jealousy at the younger man’s success during his addiction, but had known an attack then would have been the pathetic gesture of a flabby has-been. The man acknowledged as the period’s top rapper had already paired with Eminem and the other contenders, Kanye West and Drake, on the latter’s 2009 single ‘Forever’. Now, Eminem let Lil Wayne take ‘No Love’’s first half. He was at his best, his cool, cracked drawl outlining a punished, unregret-ted life. Eminem’s rejoinder burned with resurrected intent. His first words were: “I’m alive again”. Building metaphors for his own brilliance, his rapping picked up pace like a man running on the spot till his feet blurred. Then he cockily slowed for more feeble MCs to catch up, before lines spat with such intense speed it felt like he had launched into space. Egged on by Wayne, he more than matched him, and his own fabled 2001 guest spot with Jay-Z on ‘Renegade’, when he had bested the then king. “I had to resort to other things to make me feel [like] that,” he told Jonathan Ross on his TV show. “Now, rap’s getting me high.”

  ‘Not Afraid’, the first single and a US number one, also had a renewed sense of mission, and the pride of a Detroit underdog. The video showed him standing on a roof as if contemplating suicide, and walking straight through zooming traffic, a common metaphor for a panic attack. But then he punched through the back wall of a hall of mirrors, and became a superman, flying onto that roof. Eminem added a speech straight from his counselling sessions to the video’s start. Observing he had to “get to that place, to get to this one”, he concluded: “Just follow me. I’ll get you there.” The positivity was echoed in this Recovery sleeve note: “THIS ALBUM IS DEDICATED 2 ANYONE WHO’S IN A DARK PLACE TRYIN’ 2 GET OUT. KEEP YOUR HEAD UP … IT DOES GET BETTER!” It was a far cry from ‘Kim’, but close to his heartfelt sentiment in The Way I Am: “I want to bring people together. I feel that can be my biggest contribution to hip-hop. [Slim’d] be like, ‘What the fuck? You got soft,’” he admitted to Spin. “[But], if I can make songs to inspire people and try and help them, fuck, why not?”

  Recovery‘s sentimentality was shameless. But it combined with Eminem’s harder-edged sense of himself as a rapper, as on the song which started the album’s climactic emotional payload, ‘Almost Famous’. This rehearsed the story of Eminem’s rise, putting himself back in the desperate mood of his Hip Hop Shop battles when everything was at stake. Irony missing from 8 Mile and ‘Lose Yourself’ saw singer Liz Rodriguez play fame’s siren voice, cackling, “Be careful what you wish for …” This was the mature perspective of a man who had found fame to be the glass-walled cage he was pictured in on a Detroit street in Recovery‘s booklet. ‘Almost Famous’ still remembered, and missed, the raw excitement of getting there.

  Recovery‘s second single, ‘Love The Way You Lie’, was another US number one. It returned to the theme of a mutually violent, passionate relationship, as explored on Encore‘s ‘Crazy In Love’. It gained a frisson from guest star Rihanna, recently in the news for being battered by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown, prettily singing she loved the pain. Her status as the year’s top R&B star equally helped the song’s crossover success, perhaps in spite of its theme.

  Relapse‘s most surprising disappointment had been its avoidance of Proof’s death. “I tried to write a song for you but nothing was good enough,” Eminem admitted in its sleeve notes. “It took me so long to get out of that place where I couldn’t even speak about it without crying,” he confessed to Vibe. Recovery put this right. ‘Going Through Changes’ followed his depression right onto the operating table after his overdose, where Hailie’s voice reaches him and pulls him back from death. ‘You’re Never Over’ imagined Proof as the guardian angel who made him think of his daughter in time. This song was a cry of love from Eminem, feeling old, alone and “insane” without his friend, but determined to “rise from these ashes” in his honour. He didn’t rap its choruses, but sang with naked feeling, as if with grieving friends at Proof’s wake. As fuzzed guitars and synths pounded the song home, a hard heart might think, not for the first time on Recovery, of some old Eighties Foreigner ballad. But the bombast was built around the most exposed vocals of Eminem’s life.

  Recovery was a startling success. It was a sustained transatlantic number one, selling 714,000 in its first week in the US. By October 2010, global sales already touched five million. Gavin Martin in the Mirror summed up the critical temperature: “Relapse offered gory imagery aplenty, but Recovery packs real emotional weight … he would be the first to admit that his Recovery is by no means complete. But at least it often connects with the rude health that helped make him great in the first place.”

/>   Eminem no longer really toured, preferring to put his family first. “It’s hard on the body,” he observed to the New York Times. “It used to be a big trigger for me with drinking and drugging.” He was content with four high-profile US gigs with Jay-Z, starting at Detroit’s Comerica Park on September 2. A three-night trip to Europe was caught by the NME when he headlined Scotland’s T in the Park festival. They saw him “bound” on stage, “his rapping tongue … sharp – every syllable arrowing through the chilly Scottish sky,” as T’s biggest crowd in years moshed before him.

  D12 shuffled on with him for a while. But the Shady empire they had been foot-soldiers for, once meant to rival Motown, had fallen in his absence. D12’s four other survivors had been equally distraught from Proof’s death. Their follow-up to 2004’s D12 World also had to wait in Shady parent Interscope’s corporate line for Eminem to surface. Kuniva spoke to the Detroit Free Press on their future in 2008. “I’ve read the blogs where people are so fucking cruel: ‘Why do they call it the Dozen when two members are dead?’” Bizarre put out three solo albums independently, telling XXL, “I’m trying to get away from the whole Eminem thing.” He added to Complex of their erstwhile star’s D12 involvement now: “He’s at the point in his career where he needs us to stand on our own, and he’ll come for the finishing touches … We can’t be on my man’s left nut sack.”