Parental Advisory: Shady Content

PARENTAL ADVISORY:

SHADY CONTENT

Book Design: Daniela Carusone Advanced Typography / October 2015 St. John’s University Oswald Bold / Helvetica Neue Light Size: 10 / 15 pt

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By Josh Eells, 2010 Upon arriving at Eminem’s recording studio – an anonymous gray hit factory in suburban Detroit – a first-time visitor will be met at his car by a large, possibly armed man named Big 8, who will have been watching from an alley across the street.

“Can I help you, sir?” he’ll ask, in a tone that does not suggest an eagerness to help. Only after you have proved to not be a threat will you be escorted past the security cameras and heavily reinforced metal door and into the place Eminem calls “my second home.”

Inside, Big 8 is all smiles. The studio is a grown-up play land: Punisher comic books, lucha libre masks, a popcorn machine.

A large painting of Biggie and 2Pac graces one wall, while a plaque leaning against another celebrates Eminem’s status as SoundScan’s Artist of the Decade: 32 million albums sold in the past 10 years, trouncing runners-up the Beatles. A dozen years into his career, he remains one of pop’s most bankable stars – a rare feat for any artist, and, for a rapper, almost unprecedented.

After half an hour, Eminem emerges from the vocal booth, where he’s working on tracks with Dr. Dre for Dre’s long-awaited Detox. He’s dressed in black cargo shorts and a gray T-shirt, and a diamond crucifix hangs from his neck. His features are delicate, nearly feminine, and his hair is a deep, natural shade of brown. He bears little resemblance to the foulmouthed, bleached-blond Slim Shady who once made it his mission to terrorize America.

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“What up, man,” he says softly by way of introduction.

“I’m Marshall.”

It’s a rainy afternoon in October, three days before Eminem’s 38th birthday. He sits in the cluttered studio office, at a desk strewn with over-the-counter pharmaceuticals – Aleve, 5-Hour Energy – and Ziploc bags of minipretzels. Much has been made of the rapper’s volatile temper, not least by Eminem himself (he once spent two years on probation for felony weapons charges after an altercation outside a bar), but in conversation he’s thoughtful and polite, albeit not in a way you’d mistake for friendliness. There’s little evidence of the prankster you hear on his records, and when discussing his personal life, he has a tendency to retreat, gazing at the floor and covering his mouth like a football coach hiding his plays.

Our conversation is interrupted by frequent bathroom breaks.

Eminem loves Diet Coke, which he guzzles obsessively from a soda fountain in the lobby. At one point, he fills a 16-ounce cup nearly to the brim, then sets it down next to another full cup he’d forgotten he had. He’s a chain drinker, in other words, and as a result he pees constantly. Asked why he prefers fountain drinks to cans, he turns serious. “There’s aspartame in the cans,” he says. “They say it’s been known to cause cancer, so I cut that shit out. There’s no aspartame in the fountain.”

A few years ago, an artificial sweetener would have been the least of Eminem’s worries. For much of the period from 2002 to 2008, he was addicted to a dangerous cocktail of prescription medication, including Ambien, Valium and extra-strength Vicodin. He tried rehab in 2005, then fell into an even deeper tailspin the next year, following the shooting death of his best friend, DeShaun “Proof” Holton. It wasn’t until he nearly died from an accidental methadone overdose at the end of 2007 that Eminem finally decided to get clean. Last month, he celebrated 8

two and a half years of sobriety.

His latest album, Recovery, deals with addiction and his struggles to conquer it. It is, by his standards, surprisingly positive.

Released in June, it sold 741,000 copies in its first week – Eminem’s sixth consecutive Number One – and will probably end up the bestselling album of 2010. It has also spawned two Number One singles, the inspirational “Not Afraid” and the Rihanna-featuring “Love the Way You Lie,” which topped the charts for four weeks straight. In September, he cemented his return with a series of shows with Jay-Z at baseball stadiums in Detroit and New York. All in all, it’s a remarkable comeback for a man who might not have lived to make another album.

Yet for all Eminem’s triumphs, it’s sometimes hard to tell if he’s enjoying himself. By his own account, he lives a pretty solitary existence. He has a 15,000-square-foot fortress in the Detroit suburbs that he bought from the former CEO of Kmart, where he lives with 14-year-old Hailie – his biological daughter with his two-time ex-wife, Kim – and two adopted daughters: eightyear-old Whitney, Kim’s daughter from a previous marriage, and 17-year-old Alaina, the daughter of Kim’s twin sister. Before our interview began, he made it clear that he preferred not to discuss his family. Still, from the few glimpses he offers, a picture emerges of a devoted, protective father trying to focus on the two things he loves most: his children and his work.

Well, that and video games. Eminem is a vintage video-game fiend. The studio lobby is filled with arcade classics: Donkey Kong, Frogger, Space Invaders. His interest grew after seeing a documentary called The King of Kong, about a mild-mannered

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engineer named Steve Wiebe and his quest to capture the world Donkey Kong record. (Two of Eminem’s machines are autographed by Wiebe.) He says he’s also trying to break Wiebe’s record, and on one of his Donkey Kong games, all six high scores belong to MBM – Marshall Bruce Mathers.

The bad guy in The King of Kong is named Billy Mitchell, a loudmouthed jerk not entirely unlike a certain white rapper. Cocky and snide, he’s an ideal dramatic foil for the sweet, modest family man Wiebe. “It’s a perfect contrast,” Eminem says of the pairing. “A hero and a villain.” Just which of those two he himself wants to be is one of the many things Eminem is trying to figure out.

Congratulations on your success with Recovery. Has it surprised you at all?

I’m a little surprised. I was certainly more confident in this album than the last one. It feels good to have your work respected again.

Winning awards is cool, but at this point, I’m in it for the sport.

What’s been the highlight so far?

The shows with Jay-Z. Just being onstage in front of that many people, being able to command the crowd but not having to fall back on old crutches like drugs and drinking. You do get nervous – anybody who says they don’t is lying. But hitting that stage now, I want to feel those nerves. To look out and actually see girls crying and shit, it’s overwhelming. But not like it used to be, where I felt like I needed to [mimes drinking from a bottle].

Does fame feel different this time?

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It feels like I have a better grasp on it. A lot of the problems I had with fame I was bringing on myself. A lot of self-loathing, a lot of woe-is-me. Now I’m learning to see the positive side of things, instead of, like, “I can’t go to Kmart. I can’t take my kids to the haunted house.”

Your past few albums were produced mainly by you and Dr. Dre. On this one you worked with several new producers.

It was just time for fresh blood. There’s so many talented producers I always wanted to work with, but I was never sure if it would gel. I think it was a fear of failure. Like, “What if I bring these guys out, and I don’t come up with anything?” So I just stayed in my element, where I was comfortable. But I was talking to my boy Denaun [Porter, of D12] one day, and he said, “Yo, man – you gotta get off your island.” I don’t mean to keep going back to it, but when I got clean, I started doing things I wouldn’t otherwise have done.

Your music also seems more serious now.

Around the tail end of [2004’s] Encore, the songs started getting really goofy. “Rain Man,” “Big Weenie,” “Ass Like That” – that’s when the wheels were coming off. Every day I had a pocketful of pills, and I would just go into the studio and goof off. When I went to Hawaii with Dre for [what became Recovery], there was a turning point lyrically. I was sitting in the car listening to these older songs of mine, trying to figure out, “Why doesn’t the new stuff hit me like it used to?” That’s when I started to get away from the funny shit and do songs that had some emotion and aggression to them again.

What are you working on now?

Right now me and Dre are busy with Detox. It’s really close – I 11

want to say we’re halfway done. I’m lending an ear, helping him write, laying hooks – whatever I can do. As for my stuff, I’m just doing guest verses for other people’s records. I try to stay recording, because if I don’t, I get rusty. I’m very paranoid about writer’s block – I had it for four years, and it drove me fucking crazy. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t think of shit. The pills had a lot to do with it. Just wiping out brain cells. I don’t know if it sounds like I’m making excuses, but the absolute truth is a lot of my memory is gone. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken Ambien, but it’s kind of a memory-eraser. That shit wiped out five years of my life. People will tell me stories, and it’s like, “I did that?” I saw myself doing this thing on BET recently, and I was like, “When was that?”

Did you save much of your writing from that time?

Yeah. It fucking creeps me out. Letters all down the page – it was like my hand weighed 400 pounds. I have all that shit in a box in my closet. As a reminder that I don’t ever want to go back.

When did you first get into drugs?

It didn’t really start until my career took off. I was probably in my early 20s before I even kicked back my first beer. But the bigger the shows got, the bigger the after-parties; drugs were always around. In the beginning it was recreational. I could come off tour and be able to shut it off. I’d spend time with the kids, and I’d be OK. 12

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It probably started to become a problem around the 8 Mile movie. We were doing 16 hours on the set, and you had a certain window where you had to sleep. One day somebody gave me an Ambien, and it knocked me the fuck out. I was like, “I need this all the time.” So I got a prescription. After four or five months, your tolerance starts building. You start breaking off another piece of the pill that’s supposed to be for tomorrow. Then, when I got off probation for my felonies [in 2003], and I didn’t have to drop urine anymore, the reins came off. On the Anger Management 3 tour [in 2005], I was fucked up every night.

How bad did it get?

I was taking so many pills that I wasn’t even taking them to get high anymore. I was taking them to feel normal. Not that I didn’t get high. I just had to take a ridiculous amount. I want to say in a day I could consume anywhere from 40 to 60 Valium. And Vicodin... maybe 20, 30? I don’t know. I was taking a lot of shit.

My everyday regimen would be, wake up in the morning and take an extra-strength Vicodin. I could never take more than one and a half, because it tore up my stomach lining. So I’d take the one and a half, and it’d kind of be Vicodin throughout the day. Then, as the evening crept up, around 5:00 or 6:00, I’d start with a Valium or two, or three, or four. And every hour on the hour, I’d pop four or five more. The Ambien would put me over the top to go to sleep.

Toward the end, I don’t think the shit ever put me to sleep for more than two hours. It’s very similar to what I’ve read about Michael [Jackson]. I don’t know exactly what he was doing, but I read that he kept getting up in the middle of the night, asking for more. That’s what I was doing – two, three times a night, I would get up and take more.

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Where were you getting it? Did you have a dealer?

When you’re an addict, you find ways. In the beginning, there were doctors who gave me prescriptions – even after I got out of rehab.

Any idea how much money you spent?

Nope. And I don’t want to know. A lot.

Then, in 2006, Proof was killed. Can you talk a bit about what he meant to you?

[Sighs] The best way to describe Proof would be a rock. Somebody to confide in, somebody who always had your back. At this point, it’s difficult to find people I know I can trust. I still have certain friends like that, but when you lose one, man... [trails off] It hit me pretty hard.

How much do you think his death had to do with your spiral?

It had a lot to do with it. I remember days I spent just taking fucking pills and crying. One day, I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t even want to get up to use the bathroom. I wasn’t the only person grieving – he left a wife and kids. But I was very much in my own grief. I was so high at his funeral. It disgusts me to say it, but I felt like it was about me. I hate myself for even thinking that. It was selfish.

What was happening to you physically?

I got up to between 220 and 230, about 80 pounds heavier than I am now. I was going to McDonald’s and Taco Bell every day. The kids behind the counter knew me – it wouldn’t even faze them. Or I’d sit up at Denny’s or Big Boy and just eat by myself. It was sad. I got so heavy that people started to not recognize me. I remember being somewhere and overhear16

ing these kids talking. One of them said, “That’s Eminem,” and the other said, “No it’s not, man – Eminem ain’t fat.” I was like, “Motherfucker.” That’s when I knew I was getting heavy.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people. I treated people around me shitty. Obviously I was hiding something. I was fucked up inside, and people with those kinds of problems tend to put up this false bravado – let me attack everyone else, so the focus is off me. But of course everybody knew. There were whispers, murmurs.

Did anyone ever say to you, “Em, you need help”?

They’d say it behind my back. They didn’t say it to my face, because I would fucking flip out. If I even sniffed the scent of somebody thinking they knew what I was doing, they were out of here. You’d never see them again.

And it peaked in December of 2007, when you were rushed to the hospital after overdosing on methadone.

Can you walk me through that night?

I can try. There are certain parts I have to leave out because they have to do with my kids. But I remember I got the methadone from somebody I’d gone to looking for Vicodin. This person said, “These are just like Vicodin, and they’re easier on your liver.” I thought, “It looks like Vicodin, it’s shaped like Vicodin – fuck it.” I remember taking one in the car on the way home, and thinking, “Oh, this is great.” Just that rush. I went through them in a couple of days, then went back and got more. But I got a lot more.

My whole month of December leading up to [the overdose], I don’t remember shit. All I remember is I was not able to get out of bed. At some point – I don’t know if it was the middle of the day, I don’t know if it was nighttime – I got up to use the 17

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bathroom. I was standing there, trying to take a piss, and I fell.

I hit the floor hard. I got back up, tried again – and boom, I fell again. And that time I couldn’t get up.

I’ve never really talked about it with anyone in detail, because I don’t want to know. They say I made it back to the bed somehow. I don’t remember that. All I remember was hitting the bathroom floor and waking up in the hospital.

What happened when you woke up?

The first thing I remember is trying to move, and I couldn’t. It’s like I was paralyzed – tubes in me and shit. I couldn’t speak.

The doctors told me I’d done the equivalent of four bags of heroin. They said I was about two hours from dying.

I think I’d been out for two days, and when I woke up, I didn’t realize it was Christmas. So the first thing I wanted to do was call my kids. I wanted to get home, and show them that Dad’s OK. So you missed Christmas morning? That must have been hard.

Definitely. Being a father, wanting to be there with your kids. It’s not a fun thing to deal with.

And they didn’t come visit? You didn’t get to see them at all?

No. [Long pause] I was in the hospital.

What happened next?

I checked myself out – I think I had been there a week – but I went home too soon. I wasn’t fully detoxed. It had zapped all my strength – I couldn’t lift the fucking salt-and-pepper shaker.

I remember lying on the couch, falling asleep for literally 10 minutes, and when I woke up, my knee was out of place. I’d some19

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how torn my meniscus. I’m just coming off Vicodin, my senses are coming back, and it’s hurting 10 million times worse than it had to. I had surgery a couple of days later, came home... and had a seizure. Because I wasn’t detoxed. Boom, ambulance, right back to the hospital.

I knew I had to change my life. But addiction is a fucking tricky thing. I think I relapsed within... three weeks? And within a month it had ramped right back to where it was before. That’s what really freaked me out. That’s when I knew: I either get help, or I am going to die.

As a father, I want to be here for things. I don’t want to miss anything else.

How did you get clean? Did you go to meetings?

I tried some meetings – a couple of churches and things. It tended to not do me much good. People tried to be cool, but I got asked for autographs a couple of times. It made me shut down. Instead, I called a rehab counselor who’d helped me the first time. Now I see him once a week.

I also started running like a fucking maniac. Seventeen miles a day, every day. Just replacing one addiction with another. I had days where I could hardly walk. In my mind I was trying to get down to – what’s his name, in The Machinist? Christian Bale.

Which was really fucking stupid. But I’d get a number of calories in my head I needed to burn, and no matter what, I would do it.

I have a slight bit of OCD, I think. I’m not walking around flipping light switches. But when I say I’m going to do something, I have to do it.

Who else do you talk to?

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I speak to Elton [John]. He’s like my sponsor. He usually calls me once a week to check on me, just to make sure I’m on the up-and-up. He was actually one of the first people I called when I wanted to get clean. He was hipping me to things, like, “You’re going to see nature that you never noticed before.” Shit you’d normally think was corny but that you haven’t seen in so long that you just go, “Wow! Look at that fucking rainbow!” Or even little things – trees, the color of leaves. I fucking love leaves now, man. I feel like I’ve been neglecting leaves for a long time.

Are you ever tempted to use again?

Honestly, no. For one thing, I try not to be in a position where I could be tempted. I’ve performed in a few clubs where there is drinking and shit, but I think even if I’d never had a drug problem, at the age I’m at, I wouldn’t want to [use] anyway. I feel like this is the time in your life where you stop doing that stuff. Time to grow up.

What’s your sober date?

4/20. Ironically.

Let’s talk about rapping some. Do you remember your first rhyme?

Shit, I think I do. I was at my great-aunt Edna’s house in St. Joseph, Missouri. I was 12, maybe 13 at the most, and I wrote a rhyme that sounded exactly like LL Cool J. Something like, “...da da da da, ‘cause before you can blink/I’ll have a hundred million rhymes and like a ship you will sink!” [Laughs] Not bad!

I was proud of it. And I didn’t think it sounded like LL at all. In my head, it was me [laughs]. It’s weird, man. There’s certain little landmarks in your life that you just don’t forget. I remember 22

walking back and forth between my little room there and the kitchen, just like I do today. I even remember the kind of paper I wrote it on. It was small, like from a notepad, and beige. And it had blue writing at the top.

And you still write on a notepad now – no laptop, no BlackBerry...

I’ve seen a lot of rappers stack their ideas in BlackBerries, but it wouldn’t work for me. I’d have to, you know – scroll, scroll, scroll. If it’s on the pad, I can look at everything at once.

Do you still write in the bathroom?

Sometimes. I think we do most of our best thinking on the shitter. What else do you have to do in there besides think?

How do you go about putting together a verse?

Even as a kid, I always wanted the most words to rhyme. Say I saw a word like “transcendalistic tendencies.” I would write it out on a piece of paper – trans-cend-a-lis-tic ten-den-cies – and underneath, I’d line a word up with each syllable: and bend all mystic sentence trees. Even if it didn’t make sense, that’s the kind of drill I would do to practice. To this day, I still want as many words as possible in a sentence to rhyme.

Can you give another example? Maybe write a few bars about this interview?

About this interview? How much money you got? [Laughs] I can spit a hot 16 real quick!

I don’t think I can afford you.

Yeah, probably not [laughs]. Let me think about it. [At our meeting the next day, Eminem flips open his notebook to a page near the back. “I wrote it right after you left,” he says. “Just 23

some dumb shit.” I ask to read it, and he says he’d rather rap it.

It goes like this: This dude doin’ this interview wants me to spin a few Lyrics while I tie my fuckin’ tennis shoes in the nude A romantic interlude in a livin’ room In an inner tube with a dude with a bit of lube Fuck that, I’m sniffin’ glue, sippin’ gin and juice And a little bit of paint thinner with my dinner too You better pay me for my bars like your rent is due Now hurry up and finish, dude, before I finish you Every line rhymes with the word “interview” – some twice, and one even three times. I ask him how long it took to write. “About two minutes,” he says.]

Where do you think you get your love of words from? Are you a big reader?

The only book I ever read from front to back was LL’s [1998 autobiography I Make My Own Rules]. I just never really got into books. My great-aunt Edna, she would read to me sometimes, like The Little Engine That Could. And I was into comic books heavy. But as far as book-books? Nah. I think it’s just listening, being a sponge. I suck at math. I’m terrible at social studies.

But I’ve always been good at English, and I always had a lot of words in my vocabulary. Even now, I might not know what a word means, but if I hear you say it and it’s an interesting word, I’ll go look it up.

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What’s a typical day like for Marshall Mathers these days?

I’ll get up around 7:30 or 8:00 and work out. I was working with a boxing trainer for a while, but now I just run, bike, hit the heavy bag. I eat breakfast – low-fat waffles with sugar-free syrup and a Red Bull – and then just get to the studio as early as I can, try to put in a full day’s work so I can get home early enough to see the kids.

And in the evenings?

I watch a lot of TV. The First 48 – that show is incredible. South Park. Tosh.0 is a funny dude. Intervention, Celebrity Rehab – those are good because I can relate to what they’re going through. And sports – the NFL Channel and SportsCenter are on in my house 24/7. Football is my main shit – I like the Lions and the Cowboys. And I play fantasy football with some friends.

I’m in third place right now, out of eight or nine teams. Not bad.

Who do you hang out with?

I’ve got a few close friends. The guys in D12. Royce Da 5’9”.

50 [Cent] is one of my good friends – there’s an extra bedroom in the house that he’ll stay in when he comes to town. But for the most part they just come hang here [at the studio]. Basically I work five days a week, and then weekends and as many evenings as I can with the kids.

In your song “Going Through Changes,” you talk about living “like a recluse.” Do you feel disconnected from the world sometimes?

Well, that song is about my addiction, and my mind frame at the time. I don’t feel like a recluse now. I do go out and do things – it’s just hard. You’ve got to take an entourage. It’s a pain in the ass. When I didn’t have a record out for four or five years, I was 25

taking little trips down to see my great-aunt Edna, before she passed. I knew it was getting close – she was in her 90s – and I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could. Not having a record out, I could stop at a gas station, go places and not get recognized. That was actually a pretty good feeling.

It might sound weird, given that I’m always trying to get people’s attention with my music, but I’m not an attention-seeker.

When I’m not Eminem, and I’m just Marshall – it’s hard.

What about your love life? Do you date?

Not really. As far as going out, like dinner and a movie – I just can’t. Going out in public is just too crazy. I mean, I’d like to be in a relationship again someday. Who doesn’t? It’s just hard to meet new people, in my position.

You mean being famous?

No, I mean being gay [laughs]. Kidding.

I wonder how much your problems with your mom and ex-wife have to do with it. Do you think it’s hard for you to trust women?

I have trust issues. With women, friends, whatever. You always wonder what their real motives are. I’ve got a small circle of friends, and it’s a lot of the same friends I’ve known forever.

Right now, that works for me.

I came out of some difficult things these past couple of years.

I kind of feel like I’m just now finding my footing. So I want to make sure that’s secure before I go out and do anything else. I need to keep working on myself for a while.

Has your dad ever tried to get in touch with you?

No. Well... I heard there was one instance. He had a baby book 26

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of mine, and he wanted to give it back. He was around until I was about six months old, so I guess he had pictures from then. But I didn’t even know what my father looked like until I was 18 or 19, and my mother showed me a picture. I remember being a little kid, coloring in front of the TV at my aunt and uncle’s house, and he would call on the phone. I would say, “Was that my dad?” And my aunt would change the subject.

He had to know I was there. But I never even got so much as a “Brucie, your dad says hi.”

Did that hurt?

I don’t know if it hurt back then. But the older you get, you start to realize, “Fuck. I would never do that to my kids.” You start getting a chip on your shoulder, getting bitter. At this point – look, I’m a grown man. I’m not gonna sit here and bicker about it. But at the end of the day, it’s fucked up.

And now you have kids. What does being a good father mean to you?

Just being there. Not missing things. If there’s anything important going on, regardless of what it is, I’m there. Helping them with homework when you can. At the grades my older ones are in, it’s hard [laughs]. I never even passed ninth grade. They’re already way smarter than me.

Why do you think you’ve never left Detroit?

A lot of it might have to do with moving around so much as a kid, never having stability. My kids are comfortable here – I want them to have the stability I didn’t. And it’s also nostalgic. Being a few miles from where I grew up, being used to the people, the mentality. I’m a creature of habit. I know one way to get downtown. I still get lost driving places and shit.

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You’ve made your comeback. Where do you go from here?

If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have said I’d probably quit rapping by 30. Now I think I’ll keep doing it as long as I have the spark. But I do worry about when the time comes that I need to do something else. Because it’s going to be hard. What else do I know? Hip-hop is the only thing I was ever good at. What am I going to do?

More acting? Maybe go back to school?

Well, I did go back and get my GED. I don’t know if that counts, but I’m proud of it.

I’ve never really had a plan. When I was younger, I just wanted to be a rapper. If I didn’t make it, I had no plan B. Now that I am a rapper, I don’t know. I’d like to refocus on rebuilding our label.

Maybe doing a little producing. Other than that, I’m not sure.

Do you think about aging? In your song “Without Me” – the one where you called Moby a fag and told him to blow you – you also said he was “too old” and to “let go, it’s over.”

He was 36 at the time. You’re about to turn 38.

At the time that I wrote that, it seemed so far away. I do feel like I’ve grown up a lot. There’s always going to be that part of me that reverts back to immaturity, but I think that’s just my warped sense of humor.

“Not Afraid” has a positive message for people trying to overcome obstacles. Are you more comfortable now with the idea of being a role model?

Whatever I can be to people is fine. Some people may look up to me. Some people may consider me a fucking menace. But I’m grateful for every fan letter I get, and for every person who says I helped save them.

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I don’t know, man. I feel like I took a lot of time off. Not doing shit for those four or five years, how lazy I got – it’s time to get back to doing what I love. I feel like I’ve got a lot of gas in the tank. I just want to make up for letting people down.

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Anthony Bozza, 1999 The Michigan rapper, who calls himself Eminem — and whose debut, The Slim Shady LP, sold 480,000 copies in its first two weeks — was a $5.50-an-hour cook in a Detroit grill before his obscenity-strewn, gleefully violent, spastic, hilarious and demented rhymes landed him in the studio with rap honcho Dr. Dre. The blue-eyed MC is dealing with the instant fame and simultaneous criticism well enough — much better, actually, than he is dealing with the fifth of Bacardi he downed an hour ago. On a chilly Friday night in New York, he emerges bleary-eyed from the bathroom in his manager’s office. “I just threw up everything I had,” he says in his slow-roll drawl, which is a bit slower at the moment. “All I ate today was that slice of pisza. Feel good now, though.”

His manager exhales slowly in relief. Eminem has three club gigs tonight, and the first one starts in less than an hour. The crew (nine, including DJ Stretch Armstrong and Dennis the security guard) ambles toward the elevator. Downstairs awaits Eminem’s partner in rap, Royce the 5’9”, who looks to be about that and has seven people of his own in tow. Em hops into a giant white limo as fellow honky Armstrong cops a rhyme from Eric Clapton’s Cream. “In the white room, with white people and white rappers,” he bellows. A minute later there’s a knock on the window and one of Royce’s posse gives Em the first of the three hits of ecstasy he will consume over the course of the night. Down it goes in a swallow of ginger ale as the car zooms off toward Staten Island.

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Out on New Dorp Lane, there is a crowd of kids, a mere fraction of the number already inside the Lane Theater. The all-ages show is packed, and Eminem is the evening’s main course. The mob is being controlled by the club’s security, but when the rapper moves inside, the burly dudes are no match for the crush of shouting teens. “You look good!” one girl shouts. “Oh, my God, he looks better in person,” shrieks another. Everywhere, kids have tiny glow sticks in their mouths, which, here in the dark, look like neon braces. At the back of the club, up a ladder, is the minute dressing room, where the very proud owner of the club is waiting. “Hey, nice to meet ya,” he says. “My daughter told me to get Eminem, so I got Eminem. It’s her fourteenth birthday. Hey, say hi to her and her friends.”

Eminem soon grabs four bottles of water and heads to the stage. He owns this audience. These predominantly white kids know every word, every nuance, and can’t get enough. If Slim Shady’s rhymes about sex with underage girls (“Yo, look at her bush, does it got hait?/Fuck this bitch right here on the spot bare/Till she passes out and she forgot how she got there”) bother them any, they don’t show it. In fact, the filthier the material, the louder the cheers.

On The Slim Shady LP, Eminem says, “God sent me to piss the world off.” Interscope Records is Em’s label — a perfect fit for a company that’s home to controversial artists like the late Tupac Shakur and Marilyn Manson. Eminem has been condemned as a misogynist, a nihilist and an advocate of domestic violence, principally in an editorial by Billboard editor in chief Timothy White, who attacked The Slim Shady LP as “making money by exploiting the world’s misery.” “My album isn’t for younger kids to hear,” Eminem says. “It has an advisory sticker, and you must be eighteen to get it. That doesn’t mean younger kids won’t

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get it, but I’m not responsible for every kid out there. I’m not a role model, and I don’t claim to be.” On the album, his alias, Slim Shady, hangs himself from a tree by his penis, dumps the girlfriend he’s murdered in a lake with the help of their baby daughter, takes every drug at once, rips “Pamela Lee’s tits off” and heads out into the night yelling, “To all the people I’ve offended, yeah, fuck you, too!”

This hard-core attitude has won him acceptance not just from teenagers taken with his video but also from the hip-hop community. Later on, at Manhattan’s Sound Factory, Em will win over a mostly black audience. He will be greeted with indifferent stares that will melt into smiles, then rump-shaking abandon by the end of his four-song set. The rapper will top off the evening — well, the morning by that point — entertaining doelike women and spiky-haired guys at the trendy mecca called Life, where a table often model types will be evicted so that Em and his friends may kick back.

Right about now, though, a roomful of Staten Islanders is going berserk. In the silence between songs, a young girl in the front row who’s wearing a white baby T screams, “I love you!” Eminem walks over. “I love you, too,” he says and bends down to give her a hug. Big mistake. The girl lays a kiss on his lips and sets off the girl next to her, who tears Eminem’s head away and kisses him full on the mouth. “Oh, shit,” he laughs. “I’m going to jail tonight!” He launches into “Scary Movies,” the B side to the independently released “Bad Meets Evil” single, and the audience raps right along. When he sits at the front of the stage, his pants are pulled at and his crotch is grabbed. “I touched his dick!” one girl boasts to her friend.

Eminem is already a bona fide star, the type not likely to play a club this small again. The only reason he is here at all is that this 35

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date was booked before his debut album entered the charts at Number Two. The demand for the record at stores around the country was so great that Interscope shipped more than I million copies — extraordinarily rare for a first record. Eminem has similarly conquered MTV: Since the January release of the wiseass video for “My Name Is,” he has been on the network more than Carson Daly. And now, three months later, despite the fact that he’s never headlined for any length of time, the rapper has been offered slots on every summer tour except CSNY’s.

Eminem empties a water bottle on the heads of the audience, drops his pants, waves his middle finger around, and the show is over. He is whisked into a waiting car through a back alley.

The police have been called to keep things orderly as the limo moves off into the night. At the curb, a girl who looks no more than fourteen shouts, “I want to fuck you,” tugging suggestively at the top of her shirt and revealing her pierced tongue. “I want to fuck you, too,” Eminem says aloud to himself. “But I won’t.”

Eminem is a White Boy in a Black Medium. He has been booed on the mike and told repeatedly by black hip-hoppers that he should stop rapping and go into rock & roll. “It’s some very awkward shit,” says Em’s mentor, Dr. Dre, about the race card. “It’s like seeing a black guy doing country & western, know what I’m saying?” Even Dre’s judgment was suspect when he signed Em to his Interscope imprint, Aftermath. “I got a couple of questions from people around me,” he says. “You know, ‘He’s got blue eyes, he’s a white kid.’ But I don’t give a fuck if you’re purple: If you can kick it, I’m working with you.” Indeed, talent will overcome, and Em is having the last laugh. “A lot of the people who disrespected me are coming out of the woodwork now for collaborations,” he says. “But I like doing my own shit. If there were too many other voices, the stories wouldn’t go right.”

True enough — slipping a verse into a song about a New Wave 37

blondbabe nurse’s aide who overdoses on mushrooms and relives her father’s sexual abuse, all over a partyhearty tempo, isn’t exactly the same as freestyling on the “Money, Cash, Hoes” remix.

For anyone expecting more of the naughty, pop-culture-obsessed blond kid in the clean version of “My Name Is,” proffered on MTV, The Slim Shady LP is some bad-trip nether world. But that world is exactly why the hip-hop underground loves Em. His off-the-beat flow, way-off-the-beat lyrics and loony-tunes presentation place him in a class by himself. Em isn’t trying to be Jay-Z, DMX or 2Pac; he’s trying to be the Roadrunner, turning his enemies’ anvils back on themselves with split-second trickery. He’s also probably the only MC in 1999 who boasts low self-esteem. His rhymes are jaw-droppingly perverse, bespeaking a minimum-wage life devoid of hope, flushed with rage and weaned on sci-fi and slasher flicks.

And in the midst of the splatter is Marshall Mathers. Songs like “As the World Turns,” in which Shady “fucks a divorced slut” to death with his “go-go gadget dick,” are adolescent fantasies that indicate how Em spells revenge. But songs like “If I Had” and “Rock Bottom” are where the cartoons fade away, the bravado drops and the frustrated kid of his not-too-distant past appears, fed up with life, dead-end jobs and the poverty that has made him “mad enough to scream but sad enough to tear.”

“I couldn’t even get into a motherfucking club just being Eminem, before the video,” Mathers says, walking through Newark Airport the day after his New York club shows. “Last night they had people clearing tables for me. It’s fucking bananas. Scary shit, too, ‘cause you can fall just as quick as you went to the top.” He is a smallish guy who walks with a subdued swagger.

Em is like a class clown with a lot on his mind: When he’s on, 38

nothing escapes the cross hairs of his snottiness, but when he’s off, no one is included in his thoughts. He keeps the world at bay with humor and an ever-growing list of character voices, including a roguish Scotsman, a Middle Eastern cab driver and a sleazy lech. He slips into these voices constantly, even in the midst of heart-wrenching stories about his childhood. Today he is chipper and apparently no worse for wear after just two hours of sleep and no breakfast. He is bound for his hometown of Detroit for three days off before heading to Mexico to perform on MTV’s Spring Break ‘99, then on to Chicago for more album promotion.

The rapper is no stranger to moving around. He and his mother shuttled between Missouri and Michigan, rarely staying in one house for more than a year or two, and finally settled down when Marshall was eleven. It was the start of a life full of enough screaming fights and sordid dramas that, at the tender age of twenty-four, Eminem is ready for his own Behind the Music. But what happened depends on whom you ask. To hear him tell it, his life up until now has been nonstop hard knocks, beatings from bullies and brawls “Fuck that motherfucker, man. Fuck him.”

The single mother and her sons (Em’s younger half-brother, Nathan, was born in 1986) were one of three white households on their block. “I’m colorblind — it wasn’t an issue,” Em’s mom says. “But the younger people in the area gave us trouble.

Marshall got jumped a lot.” When he was sixteen, his ass was kicked fiercely. “I was walking home from my boy’s house, through the Bel-Air Shopping Center,” he recalls. “All these black dudes rode by in a car, flippin’ me off. I flipped them off back, they drove away, and I didn’t think nothin’ of it.” Evidently they parked the car. “One dude came up, hit me in the face and knocked me down. Then he pulled out a gun. I ran right out of 39

my shoes, dog. I thought that’s what they wanted.” But they didn’t — when Mathers returned the next day, his shoes were still stuck in the mud. “That’s how I knew it was racial.” Em was saved by a white guy who pulled over, took out a gun and drove him home. “He came in wearing just his socks and with his pill-popping, lawsuit-happy mom. His mother, Debbie MathersBriggs, on the other hand, denies both of these characterizations, claiming that her unending love and financial support got Eminem through the dog days. It’s a story that would make Jerry Springer salivate, but let’s just stick to the facts: (1) Eminem has never met his father; (2) he spent his formative years living in a largely black lower-middle-class Detroit neighborhood; (3) he dropped out of high school in the ninth grade; (4) he and his baby’s mother have been breaking up and making up for the past eight years; and (5) he loves their three-year-old daughter, Hailie Jade, more than anybody else in the world.

Eminem’s parents were married, his mother says, when she was fifteen and his father was twenty-two. Marshall III was born two years later. His parents were in a band called Daddy Warbucks, playing Ramada Inns along the Dakota-Montana border. But their relationship went sour. The couple split up, and Debbie and her son lived with family members for a few years before settling on the east side of Detroit. Marshall’s father moved to California. As a teen, the future Eminem sent his dad a few letters, all of which, his mother claims, came back “return to sender.” “I heard he’s trying to get in touch with me now,” the rapper says. underwear,” his mother says woefully. “They had taken his jogging suit off him, taken his boombox. They would have taken him out, too.”

Eminem heard his first rap song when he was nine years old. It was “Reckless,” a track featuring Ice-T on the Breakin’ soundtrack, which his Uncle Ronnie had given him. Ten years 40

Eminem has never met his father; He spent his formative years living in a largely black lower-middle-class Detroit neighborhood; He dropped out of high school in the ninth grade; He and his baby’s mother have been breaking up and making up for the past eight years; and He loves their three-year-old daughter, Hailie Jade, more than anybody else in the world.

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later, when Ronnie committed suicide, Eminem was devastated. “I didn’t talk for days,” he says. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral.”

He dropped out of high school after failing the ninth grade for the third time. “As soon as I turned fifteen,” he says, “my mother was like, ‘Get a fucking job and help me with these bills, or your ass is out.’ Then she would fucking kick me out anyway, half the time right after she took most of my paycheck.” His mom says none of this is true: “A friend told me, ‘Debbie, he’s saying this stuff for publicity.’ He was always well provided for.”

Either way, his salvation was rap and the rhymes he had begun to write. “As soon as my mom would leave to go play bingo, I would blast the stereo,” he says. Soon enough he was ready to test his skills by sneaking into neighboring Osborne High School with his friend and fellow MC, Proof, for lunchroom rap throw-downs. “It was like White Men Can’t Jump,” says Proof, now an account executive for hip-hop clothier Maurice Malone.

“Everybody thought he’d be easy to beat, and they got smoked every time.”

On Saturdays, the two friends went to open-mike contests at the Hip-Hop Shop, on West 7 Mile, ground zero for the Detroit scene. “As soon as I grabbed the mike, I’d get booed,” Eminem recalls. “Once motherfuckers heard me rhyme, though, they’d shut up.” With four other rappers, Em and Proof formed a crew called the Dirty Dozen before Em released his own album, Infinite, on a local label in 1996 — an effort devoid of Shady’s whacked-out humor and pent-up rage. “It was right before my daughter was born, so having a future for her was all I talked about,” he says. “It was way hip-hopped out, like Nas and AZ — that rhyme style that was real in at the time. I’ve always been a smartass comedian, and that’s why it wasn’t a good album.”

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Detroit DJs and radio folks seemed to agree, leaving Infinite well enough alone. “After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier,” Eminem says. “A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. Motherfuckers was like, ‘You’re a white boy, what the fuck are you rapping for? Why don’t you go into rock & roll?’ All that type of shit started pissing me off.” It didn’t help that days before his daughter’s first birthday, Eminem got fired from his cooking job at Gilbert’s Lodge. “That was the worst time ever, dog,” he says. “It was, like, five days before Christmas, which is Hailie’s birthday. I had, like, forty dollars to get her something. I wrote ‘Rock Bottom’ right after that.”

This downward spiral ended one day on the John when Em met Slim Shady. “Boom, the name hit me, and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it,” he says. “So I wiped my ass, got up off the pot and, ah, went and called everybody I knew.”

Shady became Em’s vengeful gremlin, his knight in smarmy armor, an Inspector Gadget Incredible Hulk with a taste for a bit of the ultra-violence. It was high time for Em to write some of the wrongs in his life, and Slim Shady was just the cat to right them. At the top of the shit list was his grade-school nemesis, D’Angelo Bailey. Yes, the bully who gets it with a broomstick in “Brain Damage” was entirely real. “Motherfucker used to beat the shit out of me,” Eminem says. “I was in fourth grade and he was in sixth. Everything in the song is true: One day he came in the bathroom, I was pissing, and he beat the shit out of me.

Pissed all over myself. But that’s not how I got really fucked up.” During recess one winter, Em taunted a smallish friend of Bailey’s. “D’Angelo Bailey — no one called him D’Angelo — came running from across the yard and hit me so hard into this snowbank that I blacked out.” Em was sent home, his ear started bleeding, and he was taken to the hospital. “He had a 43

Shady became Em’s vengeful gremlin, his knight in smarmy armor, Incredible Hulk with a taste for a bit of the ultra-violence.

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cerebral hemorrhage and was in and out of consciousness for five days,” his mother reports. “The doctors had given up on him, but I wouldn’t give up on my son.”

“I remember waking up and saying, ‘I can spell elephant,’” Em recalls with a laugh. “D’Angelo Bailey — I’ll never forget that kid.”

Old D’Angelo won’t forget you, either. “He was the one we used to pick on,” says Bailey, now married with kids and living in Detroit. “There was a bunch of us that used to mess with him.

You know, bully-type things. We was having fun. Sometimes he’d fight back — depended on what mood he’d be in.” As for Eminem’s recollection of the event that put him in the hospital, Bailey boasts, “Yeah, we flipped him right on his head at recess.

When we didn’t see him moving, we took off running. We lied and said he slipped on the ice. He was a wild kid, but back then we thought it was stupid. Hey, you have his phone number?”

In the spring of 1997, Eminem recorded the eight-son Slim Shady EP — the demo that earned him his deal with Interscope. At the time, he was scrounging more than ever. He and his girlfriend, Kim, had been living with their baby in crackinfested neighborhoods. A stray bullet flying through the kitchen window and lodging in the wall while Kim was doing dishes wasn’t the worst of it — they had been adopted by a crackhead. “The neighborhoods we lived in fucking sucked,” Kim says. “I went through four TVs and five VCRs in two years.”

After cleaning out the first of those TVs and VCRs, plus a clock radio, the guy came back one night to make a sandwich. “He left the peanut butter, jelly — all the shit — out and didn’t steal nothing,” Em says. “Ain’t this about a mother-fucking bitch. But then he came back again and took everything but the couches and beds. The pillows, clothes, silverware — everything. We 45

were fuckin’ fucked.”.

The young parents moved in with Em’s mom for a while, which wasn’t much better. “My mother did a lot of dope and shit — a lot of pills — so she had mood swings,” Em says. “She’d go to bed cool, then wake up like, ‘Motherfuckers, get out!’” Em’s mom denies all of the above. “I’ve never done drugs,” she says.

“Marshall was raised in a drug- and alcohol-free environment.”

He moved in with friends, and Kim and the baby lived with her mother. “I didn’t have a job that whole summer,” Em recalls.

“Then we got evicted, because my friends and me were paying rent to the guy on the lease, and he screwed us over.” The night before he headed to the Rap Olympics, an annual nationwide MC battle in L.A., he came home to a locked door and an eviction notice. “I had to break in,” he says. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go. There was no heat, no water, no electricity. I slept on the floor, woke up, went to L.A. I was so pissed.”

“Oh, my God,” recalls Paul “Bunyan” Rosenberg, the beefy lawyer who manages Eminem. “There was this big black guy sitting next to me in the crowd at the Olympics. After the first round, he yells, ‘Just give it to the white boy. It’s over. Give it to the white boy.’”

They didn’t, and Em was crushed. Not only could he have used the first-place prize, 500 bucks and a Rolex, but he wasn’t used to taking second. “He really looked like he was going to cry,” Rosenberg says, nodding thoughtfully. Well, Eminem lost the battle, but he won the war. A Shady EP given to a few Interscope staffers soon made it into the hands of co-head Jimmy Iovine. While Em was in L.A., Iovine and Dr. Dre took a listen. “In my entire career in the music industry,” Dre says, “I have never found anything from a demo tape or a CD. When Jimmy played this, I said, ‘Find him. Now.’” 46

Their first day in the studio, the pair knocked off “My Name Is” in about an hour, and as much as that song proved that Em is a brother from another planet, they were just warming up. “I wrote two songs for the next album on ecstasy,” Eminem says. “Shit about bouncing off walls, going straight through ‘em, falling down twenty stories. Crazy. That’s what we do when I’m in the studio with Dre.” Dr. Dre on E? “Ha ha,” Dre laughs. “He didn’t say that! It’s true, though. We get in there, get bugged out, stay in the studio for fuckin’ two days. Then you’re dead for three days. Then you wake up, pop the tape in, like, ‘Let me see what I’ve done.’”

HEY, TURN HERE,” EMINEM SAYS to the driver of the big white van currently crunching through the snow-covered streets of east Detroit. “Stop. That was our house. My room was upstairs, in the back.” The small two-story homes on the gridlike streets are identical — square patch of grass in the front, a short driveway on the side — differentiable only by their brick face or shingles. The van turns off 8 Mile, passing Em’s high school, then the field next to the Bel-Air Shopping Center, where Em lost his boombox and nearly his life. Em is looking out of the window like a kid at Disneyland, pointing, recalling happy and heartbreaking memories with equal excitement. “I like living in Detroit, making it my home,” he says as the van heads toward the highway. “I like working out in L.A., but I wouldn’t want to live there. My little girl is here.”

The van pulls up to Gilbert’s Lodge, the every food family restaurant in suburban St. Clair Shores where Em worked on and 47

off for three years. Inside there are antler chandeliers, a couple of appetite-suppressing mounted moose heads and a “trophy room,” containing the jerseys of various local teams. The restaurant’s staff scurries about, unaware of Em, who has virtually walked into the kitchen without being greeted. “Yo, Pete, whassup?” Em calls to a mustached man checking on orders.

“Hi, Marshall,” answers his former manager, Pete Karagiaouris.

“Coming in to buy the place?” A few heads turn, and apronclad folks say quick hellos.

“Hi, Marshall,” says a forties-ish waitress with a sticky-sweet voice and a Midwestern accent. “You know, I watch MTV and I never see you.”

“Oh, yeah?” he replies coolly.

Em takes a table toward the back. After a very silent twenty minutes, he stops a passing waitress: “Can we get some beers here?”

“Yeah, but I need to see your ID,” she says.

“I don’t have my wallet, but I used to work here — ask Pete. I’m over twenty-one.”

Less than twenty-four hours ago, in Staten Island, security guards had kept a frothing crowd from tearing Em to shreds while he earned five grand for rapping four songs. In his own hometown, in the place he spent forty to sixty hours a week for three years, he’s a stranger, and one without silverware, water or a menu. Either Gilbert’s issued a memo about keeping Em real or the staff is having trouble coming to terms with Marshall’s success. “Why did that bitch have to say that?” he says about the MTV jab. “Fucking bitch. I never liked her.” It’s a theme he returns to for the rest of the night. Em’s shot of Bacardi arrives; he slams it, gets another and goes off to talk to the Gilbert’s 48

former co-workers. “Man, everything can be going so right,” Rosenberg says, sipping his beer. “But a comment like that will stick with him for days. This is his reality — he came from this, and after everything is over, this is the reality he has to go back to.”

The manager heads over, offering to make Eminem a special garlic-chicken pizza. “He was a good worker,” Karagiaouris recalls. “But he’d be in the back rapping all the orders, and sometimes I had to tell him to tone it down.” Em demonstrates, freestyling the ingredients of most of the appetizers in his herkyjerky whine. “Music was always the most important thing to him,” Karagiaouris says. “But I never knew if he was any good at it — I listen to Greek music.”

“You know what, Paulie?” Em says, smiling mischievously. “I want to do a clothing line. Fat Fuck Clothing, for the Big Pun in you. What do you think?”

It’s getting late, and Em’s daughter is waiting for him. He has four days here at home to spend with her and her mother.

The van winds back through Detroit, stopping at a modest home. Kim, a pretty blonde, hops in holding Hailie, a groggy but smiley blue-eyed beauty who immediately dives onto Em’s lap and wraps her arms around his neck. The van whisks off, Hailie falls back to sleep, and Em tells Kim about the New York shows. Forty minutes later, the van turns into the trailer park — more of a village, really — that Em calls home. “After I got my record deal, my mother moved back to Kansas City,” he says.

“I took over the payments on her trailer, but I’m never here.”

Indeed, the eviction notice on the door is proof enough. “Don’t worry, we took care of that one,” Rosenberg says as Em rips it off and goes inside.

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The double-wide mobile home houses Em’s possessions, which, after all the robberies and the moving around, have been acquired in the last six months. An autographed glossy of Dre that reads, “Thanks for the support, asshole” (mirroring Shady’s autograph in “My Name Is”) is on a wall, as is the album art from the Shady EP. Above the TV are two shots of Em and Dre from the video shoot, along with pictures of Hailie. A small rack holds CDs by 2Pac, Mase, Babyface, Luther Vandross, Esthero and Snoop Dogg. A baby couch for Hailie sits in front of the TV. On a wall near the kitchen is a flyer titled “Commitments for Parents,” which lists directives like “I will give my child space to grow, dream, succeed and sometimes fail.”

Hailie settles down on the floor with a stuffed polar bear as Kim prepares her bed. The couple are happy to see each other tonight, but songs like “’97 Bonnie and Clyde” make it clear that times are not always this tranquil. Their relationship has been volatile — all the more so since their daughter’s birth. At one point two years ago, when they were on the outs and dating other people, Kim, according to Eminem, made it difficult for him to see his daughter and even threatened to file a restraining order. Em wrote “Just the 2 of Us,” on the Shady EP, to tell the tale of a father killing his baby’s mother and cleaning up the mess with the help of his daughter: “Here, you wanna help Dada tie a rope around this rock?/Then we’ll tie it to her footsie, then we’ll roll her off the dock/Here we go, count of three. One, two, three, wee!/There goes Mama, splashing in the water/No more fighting with Dad, no more restraining order.”

The original had a slightly different beat and a less monied production than “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” the version on the Interscope album, but on the Shady LP, Hailie chillingly plays herself (she is also on the album cover and liner notes). “I lied to Kim and told her I was taking Hailie to Chuck E. Cheese that day,” 50

Em recalls. “But I took her to the studio. When she found out I used our daughter to write a song about killing her, she fucking blew. We had just got back together for a couple of weeks.

Then I played her the song, and she bugged the fuck out.”

Kim declines to comment on that song or any of the others about her, including a track slated for Em’s next album called “Kim.” The song is the prelude to “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” with Em acting out the screaming fight that ends in murder. Em has played it for her already and claims that now she is truly convinced that he is insane. “If I was her, I would have ran when I heard that shit,” Dre says. “It’s over the top — the whole song is him screaming. It’s good, though. Kim gives him a concept.”

Em’s friend Proof has been around the couple from the beginning. “This is what I love about Em,” he says. “One time we came home and Kim had thrown all his clothes on the lawn — which was, like, two pairs of pants and some gym shoes. So we stayed at my grandmother’s, and Em’s like, ‘I’m leaving her; I’m never going back.’ Next day, he’s back with her. The love they got is so genuine, it’s ridiculous. He gonna end up marrying her. But there’s always gonna be conflict there.”

Em says Hailie has heard his record and loves it, but he knows she’s too young still to get much more than the beats. “When she gets old enough, I’m going to explain it to her,” Em says.

“I’ll let her know that Mommy and Daddy weren’t getting along at the time. None of it was to be taken literally.” He shakes his head ruefully. “Although at the time, I wanted to fucking do it.”

Em is the first to admit he’s got a bad temper, which he has harnessed into a career. “My thoughts are so fucking evil when I’m writing shit,” he says. “If I’m mad at my girl, I’m gonna sit down and write the most misogynistic fucking rhyme in the world. It’s not how I feel in general, it’s how I feel at that moment. Like, say 51

today, earlier, I might think something like, ‘Coming through the airport sluggish, walking on crutches, hit a pregnant bitch in the stomach with luggage.’”

Slim Shady is Marshall Mathers’ way of taking revenge on the world, and he’s also a defense mechanism. On the one hand, a lot of Slim Shady’s cartoonish fantasies are offensive; on the other, they’re better than Mathers re-creating the kind of abuse the world heaped upon him while growing up. “I dealt with a lot of shit coming up, a lot of shit,” he says. “When it’s like that, you learn to live day to day. When all this happened, I took a deep breath, just like, ‘I did it.’ “ The magnitude of what he’s done in such a short time doesn’t seem to have sunk in. Em hasn’t sipped the bubbly or smelled the roses — and if he allots time for that in the next few months, it will have to be at the drivethrough. As for the future, he won’t even wager a guess.

“If he remains the same person that walked into the studio with me that first day, he will be fucking larger than Michael Jackson,” says a confident Dre. “There are a lot of ifs and buts, but my man, he’s dope and very humble.” As Em closes the door, with Hailie’s blanket in his hands, he looks humble, a little tired and pretty happy. For now.

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Rick Moore Albert Einstein allegedly said,“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” And while the word “genius” is liberally bandied about in the music world, the truth is that most of us are just imitating and rearranging something we heard growing up, and seldom really make any significant improvement upon.

One person who took what he heard as a kid to another level, though, is Eminem. While some have used the word “genius” where he is concerned, it’s obvious to me that his work is the result of years he spent not necessarily developing a craft, but dealing with an obsession with words until the obsession became artistry. Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” is one great example of this, but my favorite is “Stan.”

The story of an obsessed fan whose insane hero-worship and probable mental illness lead him to an early death, “Stan” combines the vocal from Dido’s song “Thank You” with a new background track to bring the story in, and also uses basically uses “Thank You” as the chorus. In the verses in between, Eminem tells the tale from the point of view of Stan, the self-proclaimed biggest fan of Eminem’s alter-ego “Slim Shady.” Stan’s idolatry becomes a sick obsession that even escalates to a desire for intimacy with the rapper.

The final product is a memorable piece of work; Eminem’s sense of time and syllabic accent, and his emotional delivery, make this song remarkable. But the words also stand on their own on paper, with a sense of rhyme and meter that put him among the greats of both music and straight poetry. To wit: 55

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Dear Slim, I wrote you but you still ain’t callin’/I left my cell, my pager and my home phone at the bottom/I sent two letters back in autumn/You must not have got ’em/It probably was a problem at the post office or somethin’/Sometimes I scribble addresses too sloppy when I jot ’em. Writer Giles Foden compared him to legendary English poet Robert Browning in The Guardian of London, a comparison that would no doubt freak out some 19th century Browning fans.

“Stan” spawned an award-winning video that is now legendary.

Featuring Dido, the eight-minute video was heavily edited by most outlets for both length and language. The video helped make “Stan” a worldwide hit that changed the face of pop music and hip-hop. Eminem’s lyrical artistry here transcends any genre; this is more than hip-hop or alternative hip-hop, and more than just pop. And it’s still relevant 15 years later.

These accolades might be a little hard for some people to take.

From those who consider Eminem vulgar and tasteless, to people who think he’s a homophobic misogynistic jerk at heart, there’s always going to be a critic. But the lyric of “Stan” isn’t just the work of somebody who managed to get in the zone for a couple hours or just had a good day or is even channeling something from an unseen source. Art like this comes from somebody who clearly has given his life to his pursuit, and has walked the walk while others talk the talk. A piece of work like this, where every syllable and nuance is as perfect as it can be, is rare and inspirational and doesn’t come often or easy. Ninetynine percent perspiration, indeed.

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By Shaheem Reid Eminem’s Roots-backed rendition of “Lose Yourself” was a highlight of last year’s Grammy Awards. Clad in the “Free Yayo” T-shirt he might have to pull out of the closet again, Em broke out his fiercest mic swashbuckling for the affair.

The performance was so pure, honest and invincible, who would have guessed it had taken a year and a half to record the track nominated for Record of the Year at this year’s Grammy Awards?

“It was an old idea we kept banging away at, trying to make it a song,” recalled Jeff Bass, one half of Eminem’s longtime production team, the Bass Brothers. Em and J knew almost immediately they had the makings of a potential hit on their hands, but they didn’t know it would take so long to complete.

Bass claims to have “no idea” how he devised the track’s signature opening guitar riffs. “To be honest, we were in the studio with Royce da 5′ 9″. We’d just done ’Detroit Rock City.’ I picked up the guitar and started playing that little chord progression, not knowing if it was a song or not. Typically, I’ll come up with the music part. Em may have a drum beat going, and I’ll pick up a guitar or keyboard and put some chords together, see what’s feeling good and lay a bass line down. A lot of the tunes on The Eminem Show started like that.”

“Lose Yourself” slowly came together over the ensuing months.

Em built a drum track. Bass wrote a bass line and more guitar licks. But a lot was still missing.

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“We kept pulling it out of the computer and saying, ’We gotta do something with this,’ ” Bass said. “But we were stuck. It took a long time for him to write the lyrics. But the rhymes weren’t flowing easily. Em would come up with words, but they wouldn’t be right for the beat. It took him months to author the perfect lyrics.

“I don’t think Em throws his rhymes away,” Bass said. “I think he puts them aside so he can draw from them later on. He jots things down on everything. Whatever paper is around, he’ll write on it. He’s got his own system of writing lyrics, so if somebody picks them up, they really couldn’t tell what it was. There might be a verse to one song and a line from another song in the same paragraph.”

Slim Shady was still looking for a muse after many trials and errors. Then he read the script for “8 Mile.” Although he was working on The Eminem Show at the time, he remembered Bass’ guitar-laden beat and decided to give it another crack.

“The ’8 Mile’ soundtrack was different because it forced me to step into Rabbit, the character I play in the film, and write from his point of view,” Em stated in October.

Three homemade mixtapes filled with rap music popular in 1993-95 helped fuel Em’s writing.

“We pulled the beat out and worked on it again between scenes on the movie set,” Bass recalled. “It really developed in the little studio we set up in his trailer.”

Luis Resto played most of the song’s keys, replacing some of Bass’ guitar lines. And Shady sharpened his verses once the soundscape was to everyone’s liking.

“It flowed pretty easily once he got a grip on it,” Bass said. “He had the beat together and could sit down and concentrate on 60

building the best song he could.”

Bass thinks it’s Em’s best recording. “To be honest, it’s the best rhyme he’s ever written,” he declared. “The lyrical content and delivery are so intense. The first time I heard it, I sh– in my pants. That’s the tune we were doing for the last year and a half!

We knew the track was good, but it was a matter of writing the right song. A musician comes up with a ton of ideas. Some you use, some you don’t. Some you use and say, ’I wish I’d done something else with that.’ ” “Lose Yourself,” recorded around the same time as The Eminem Show’s ” ’Till I Collapse,” became the lead single from the “8 Mile” soundtrack, spurring it to multiplatinum heights and helping the movie earn $100 million. And it may once again be a Grammy Awards highlight.

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With The Eminem Show, Eminem just may have made the best rap-rock album in history. And that’s not only because he reworks Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” on “Sing for the Moment.”

The Eminem Show is a hybrid theory of Jay-Z’s hyperconfident The Blueprint, Staind’s pained Dysfunction and Tupac’s antihero masterpiece All Eyez On Me. The Eminem Show has the self-assurance of an artist at the top of his game and the game, the understanding that the music world is hanging on his every word and the willingness to shock even the most jaded ears.

Appropriately enough for a man closing in on thirty, The Eminem Show finds Eminem more mature and focused, if not kinder and gentler. “Without Me” — like his “The Real Slim Shady,” the leadoff single from 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP — is a funloving, barb-laden romp on which he flits from one topic to the next like a bumblebee with ADD. But Em isn’t saying things just to get you mad here. This time he’s rapping because the world has pissed him off, not the other way around. “If y’all leave me alone, this wouldn’t be my M.O.,” he says on “My Dad’s Gone Crazy.”

On The Eminem Show, Eminem is no longer pulling the race card just for laughs. “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley,” he raps. “To do black music so selfishly/And use it to get myself wealthy.” He’s being a little harsh on himself: After all, the only white folks really doing white music are strumming harps and blowing bagpipes. But as always, Em’s most potent weapon is his ability to counter his critics by accepting his vulnerabilities and turning them into song fodder.

Em produced or co-produced most of the album, and he’s 64

quickly becoming an expert beatmaker. Every track has some sort of melodic edge; songs such as “White America” and “Cleanin Out My Closet” feature electric-guitar rhythms fraternizing with hip-hop-sensible drum patterns. “Soldier” and “ ‘Till I Collapse” are all paranoid horror-movie instrumentation bottomed with arena-rock grandeur. He’s learned so much so well as a producer that Dr. Dre’s three contributions (“Business,” “Say What You Say,” “My Dad’s Gone Crazy”) are hard to pick out without production credits.

On the rock-fueled “White America,” he confesses that “if I was black, I woulda sold half.” But even as he remains acutely aware of his position as a big-time white rapper, Eminem fully enters the fray of mainstream hip-hop on The Eminem Show.

He’s moved on from dissing Everlast and Britney Spears and is unafraid to take on credible black MCs now, dissing Canibus on “Square Dance” and egging on Dr. Dre against Jermaine Dupri on “Say What You Say.” On “Business,” Em names himself the gatekeeper of hip-hop and obliquely claims to be the best rapper alive: “The flow’s too wet/Nobody close to it/Nobody says it, but everybody knows the shit.” His way with words and his sheer honesty can make topics that would otherwise seem so last week sound new. “Say Goodbye Hollywood” is the standard mo’ money, mo’ problems fare given new life; “Drips” is hip-hop’s most poignant visit to the STD clinic since Ice Cube’s 1991 song “Look Who’s Burnin’.”

Predictably, the three women in Eminem’s life figure big on The Eminem Show. His divorce from Kim Mathers fuels the slow Southern bounce of the hypermisogynist “Superman,” and his 65

relationship with his estranged mother creates “Cleanin Out My Closet,” possibly the record’s most powerful moment. Amid a list of atrocities and venomous threats, he shows glimmers of remorse before delving back into unchecked anger, much as he did on 2000’s “Kim.” “See, what hurts me the most is you won’t admit you was wrong,” he raps before blasting, “but how dare you try to take what you didn’t help me to get?/You selfish bitch, I hope you fuckin’ burn in hell for this shit.”

Em’s love for his daughter, Hailie, produces his singing debut, the tender “Hailie’s Song.” The tune’s sweet message is stronger than the music, as Em reaches for notes that don’t exist. A more effective moment comes when Hailie herself shows up to kick-start the chorus of the ridiculously catchy “My Dad’s Gone Crazy.” It’s a guilty pleasure, knowing that Hailie’s participation in the song is probably going to earn her a couple of years of therapy: The song begins with Hailie walking in on her dad as he inhales lines of coke.

As unlikely a role model as Em is, he has decided to take on the U.S. government — more proof, during this era of post9/11 patriotism, that he truly follows his own course. On “White America,” Em threatens to march on Capitol Hill, urinate on the White House grass and burn the star-spangled banner, and he attacks current and former vice-presidential wives Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore. On “Square Dance,” he announces, “Yeah, the man’s back/With a plan to ambush this Bush administration/Mush the Senate’s face in/Push this generation of kids to stand and fight/For the right to say something you might not like.” Finally, in his own scattered way, in his own mind, at least, Eminem is fighting for something a little bigger than himself. The Eminem Show makes it clear that Mr. Just-Don’t-Give-a-Fuck still won’t leave. He can’t leave rap alone. The game needs him.

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THEY CAN TRIGGER ME BUT THEY’LL NEVER FIGURE ME OUT

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Jon Caramanica, 2010 Maybe there should never have been room for Eminem in the first place.

Just over a decade ago he emerged as an unlikely worldbeater: a white rapper from Detroit with a vexatious obsession with violence and social dysfunction. His pop megasuccess was serendipitous, explicable by no common measuring sticks.

Certainly, in the rear view, it’s tempting to see Eminem’s ascendance as a fluke, never more so than now, several years past his commercial peak. On Monday he released “Recovery” (Aftermath/Interscope), his sixth solo album on a major label, his first album as a sober man and the most insular of all his releases.

In many ways, the Eminem captured on “Recovery” is reminiscent of the artist he once was, before the world got hold of him. He still has the familiar preoccupations: cartoonish gore, sexual aggression, astonishingly intricate rapping. He sounds far more invigorated than on anything he’s released since 2002, the year of his last strong album, “The Eminem Show,” and the soundtrack to the quasi-biopic “8 Mile.”

For the first few years of his fame Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, exerted a gravitational pull on pop and was impossible to emulate, making him only more powerful. But over the last few years, as he retreated into drug-fueled isolation, Eminem — one of the most crucial figures in pop culture in the last 20 years, who pushed hip-hop over the final hump to mainstream acceptance — has been a nonentity.

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In 2010 he’s a true anomaly, neither an integral part of the pop landscape nor of the rap landscape. He’s become a multimillion-selling cult figure, trafficking in a peculiar style that once transfixed the world but now feels anachronistic.

“Recovery” could have been an opportunity for re-evaluation or redefinition, a record that would steer Eminem into new, possibly difficult topical terrain. But instead he’s used it as a platform to reassert his core values, stripped clean of the self-induced trauma of recent years.

Even he knows how much damage he’s done to his reputation. “Them last two albums didn’t count,” he raps on “Talkin’ 2 Myself.” “ ‘Encore’ I was on drugs, ‘Relapse’ I was flushing them out.”

What’s left behind is the same petulant child he’s always been, the one that was rescued and polished up by Dr. Dre and subsequently sustained by critical adulation, financial success and self-medication.

Were this same album to come from a new artist, it would be met with head scratching and possibly derision, but for Eminem it’s merely charmingly bare-bones.

First and foremost Eminem’s rapping has survived largely intact, still a wondrous thicket of internal and complex rhymes that come off as feats of athleticism as much as language. Take this tightly packed run from “No Love”: Cold hearted, from the day I Bogarted the game, my soul started to rot, fellow When I’m not even at my harshest, you can still get roasted cause Marsh is not mellow.

Throughout “Recovery” he is practically panting from rapping 72

at such a frenzied clip. This is redolent of Eminem circa 199798 — before the whimsical accents and cadences — just as his Slim Shady alter ego was being formed, when wordplay mattered far more than subject or tone.

That propensity can be a liability too. Just because words rhyme doesn’t mean they should. On “Not Afraid,” the first single, he catalogs his climb back to sobriety but doesn’t know when to duck a shoddy double entendre: “The way I feel, I’m strong enough, to go to the club or the corner pub And lift the whole liquor counter up ‘Cause I’m raising the bar.”

Thankfully, there are just a handful of his quickly outmoded pop-culture references on this album: — Michael Vick, Brooke Hogan, David Carradine, David Cook. (What, nothing rhymed with Kris Allen?) A decade ago they marked Eminem as a provocateur willing to take on enemies. Now they suggest he’s become a passive and sluggish consumer of pop culture. Even the tongue-in-cheek infomercial spots for “Recovery,” starring ShamWow/ Slap Chop spokesman Vince Shlomi, feel like shtick.

What Eminem hasn’t let go of is his taste for melancholic bombast in production. The beats here, especially the rock-tinged ones by DJ Khalil and a pair from Boi 1da, who brought serrated textures to Drake’s recent debut album, feel no more vibrant than anything Eminem has rapped over since Dr. Dre was supplying him with ornate, swinging production early in his career.

And that’s for the worse, especially given how notably different he sounds when the beat beneath him is optimistic. “W.T.P.,” produced by Supa Dups, is out of place here, a slinky, up73

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tempo number, but it forces Eminem into lighter, more flexible rhyme structures. It’s the most alive he sounds on this album.

Still, even here he’s frustratingly limited in his topical range. And given all his life changes in the last few years, it’s notable how few new shades of personality he shows on “Recovery.” Postrehab Eminem isn’t that different from pre-rehab Eminem. He’s always been quick to eviscerate himself, so hearing him say on “Going Through Changes,” “I walk around the house trying to fight mirrors/I can’t stand what I look like,” isn’t much of a surprise.

Where Eminem goes one step deeper is on “Talkin’ 2 Myself,” recounting how his reliance on drugs led him to consider taking shots at Lil Wayne and Kanye West and took away the one thing that his rapping had never lacked for: confidence.

I’ve turned into a hater I put up a false bravado But Marshall is not an egomaniac, that’s not his motto He’s not a desperado, he’s desperate His thoughts are bottled.

Otherwise the only moments of stretching here come on a pair of songs — “So Bad,” “Seduction” — on which he takes a crack at flirtatiousness, with awkward results. Listening to them makes it clear that Eminem, at 37 one of the most freakishly gifted technicians in rap history, still has almost no sense of how to age gracefully.

And in less competitive waters that might be less of a problem.

But today in hip-hop, the most popular rappers are also the best: Lil Wayne, who appears on this album; Jay-Z, with whom Eminem will share a pair of concert bills in September; even 75

lesser stars like Cam’ron, Fabolous and Rick Ross When Eminem first appeared, he was a curio, inspiring both fierce culture wars and fawning notice from critics eager to call him something greater than a mere rap star. He was more than happy to oblige, even if it meant getting lost along the way.

But today more than ever being a mere rap star is multilayered, complicated work. It’s just the type of thing this fiery white rapper from Detroit might eventually be great at.

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By Toure, 2004 Eminem has become a family man. During two long conversation over two days in Detroit in October, he constantly mentions the kids he’s raising, as any proud father would: His daughter, Hailie Jade, will soon be nine, his niece Alaina is eight, and his half brother, Nate, is eighteen. In October, Marshall Mathers turned thirty-two. He grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and Detroit without a father figure, but he has grown into a committed parent who goes to school plays and everything. He schedules most of his recording in Detroit and has put his movie career on hold so he can be home with the kids at night.

He has slowed down his drinking and his durg use since two 2000 gun charges that he feared would take him away from Hailie, but his ex, Kim Mathers, has slogged through her own legal morass. In June 2003 she was arrested for possession of cocaine, then failed to show up in court and for a short while hid from the police. Eminem says that explaning the situation to Hailie and Alaina “was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through.” At the time of our first interview, Kim was in jail. At the time of our last interview, she had been released. “She’s out right now,” he said. “We’re hoping that stays kosher.”

Encore is Eminem’s fifth solo album, and he remains one of the most skilled, compelling, audacious, obnoxious and imporant MCs in hip-hop. He thanks his mother for the troubled childhood that still fuels his anger in “Never Enough”; he tells Kim that he hates her in “Puke” and that he still loves her in “Crazy in

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Love”; and he declares his devotion to Hailie on “Mockingbird,” which he calls his most emotional song ever. He also attacks President Bush for the Iraq War in “Mosh” and says, “Strap him with an AK...Let him impress Daddy that way.”

On Encore, Eminem referes to himself as “Rain Man” because, he says, he doesn’t know how to do anything besides hiphop. He doesn’t consider himself “a good talker” because his conversation is rarely as direct as his rhymes, but for two days when he sat for the Rolling Stone Interview he was open and introspective. We started out in a dank little room at a photo studio and continued in the recording studio where he does most of his work. The first day he lounged on a small black couch, wearing Nike gear and Jordans and picking at white-chocolatecovered nuts. Ever the fifteen-year-old, he said, “What’s up?” and then asked, “Would you like to eat my white nuts?” He laughed. “C’mon, put my white nuts in your mouth.”

Who in your family loved you? Did any of the adults make you feel special?

My Aunt Edna, which would be my great-aunt Edna, and my Uncle Charles, my great-uncle Charles. This was in Missouri.

They’re from my dad’s side. They took care of me a lot. My Uncle Charles passed in ‘92 or ‘93, and Aunt Edna passed away just six months ago. She was, like, eighty-six. They were older, but they did things with me; they let me stay the weekends there, took me to school, bought me things, let me stay and watch TV, let me cut the grass to get five dollars, took me to the mall. Between them and my Uncle Ronnie, they were my solidity.

Did they connect you with your dad?

They’d tell me he was a good guy: “We don’t know what your

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mother’s told you, but he was a good guy.” But a lot of times he’d call, and I’d be there -- maybe I’d be on the floor coloring or watching TV -- and it wouldn’t have been nothing for him to say, “Put him on the phone.” He coulda talked to me, let me know something. ‘Cause as far as father figures, I didn’t have any in my life. My mother had a lot of boyfriends. Some of ‘em I didn’t like; some of ‘em were cool. But a lot would come and go. My little brother’s dad was probably the closest thing I had to a father figure. He was around off and on for about five years.

He was the dude who’d play catch, take us bowling, just do stuff that dads would do.

When I saw you playing with Hailie back in February, you were so respectful. A lot of people talk down to little kids, but you talk to her like she’s intelligent.

Thank you for seeing that. I just want her and my immediate family -- my daughter, my niece and my little brother -- to have things I didn’t have: love and material things. But I can’t just buy them things. I have to be there. That’s a cop-out if I just popped up once in a while, didn’t have custody of my daughter and my niece.

Do you have full custody?

I have full custody of my niece and joint custody of Hailie. It’s no secret what’s been going on over the past year with my ex-wife.

I wouldn’t down-talk her, but with her bein’ on the run from the cops I really had no choice but to just step up to the plate. I was always there for Hailie, and my niece has been a part of my life ever since she was born. Me and Kim pretty much had her, she’d live with us wherever we was at.

And your little brother lives with you.

I’ve seen my little brother bounce around a lot from foster home 81

to foster home. My little brother was taken away by the state when he was eight, nine.

You were how old?

I was twenty-three. But when he was taken away I always said if I ever get in a position to take him, I would take him. I tried to apply for full custody when I was twenty, but I didn’t have the means. I couldn’t support him. I watched him when he was in the foster home. He was so confused. I mean, I cried just goin’ to see him at the foster home. The day he was taken away I was the only one allowed to see him. They had come and got him out of school. He didn’t know what the fuck was goin’ on.

The same thing that had happened in my life was happening in his. I had a job and a car, and me and Kim, we bounced around from house to house, tryin’ to pay rent and make ends meet.

And then Kim’s niece was born, which is my niece now through marriage. Watched her bounce around from house to house -- just watchin’ the cycle of dysfunction, it was like, “Man, if I get in position, I’m gonna stop all this shit.” And I got in position and did.

So you have joint custody of Hailie, but she lives with you and spends most of her time with you and not with Kim. I don’t know if I’m inclined, or allowed, to say more than what is fact. In the last year, Kim has been in and out of jail and on house arrest, cut her tether off, had been on the run from the cops for quite a while. Tryin’ to explain that to my niece and my daughter was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through. You can never let a child feel like it’s her fault for what’s goin’ on. You just gotta let her know: “Mom has a problem, she’s sick, and it’s not because she doesn’t love you. She loves you, but she’s sick right now, and until she gets better, you’ve got Daddy. And I’m here.”

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What are your goals and principles as a dad? I’m sure there are boundaries.

Bein’ a dad is definitely living a double life. As far back as I can remember, even before Hailie was born, I was a firm believer in freedom of speech. I never wanted to compromise that, my artistic integrity, but once I hit them gates where I live, that’s when I’m Dad. Takin’ the kids to school, pickin’ ‘em up, teachin’ ‘em rules. I’m not sayin’ I’m the perfect father, but the most important thing is to be there for my kids and raise them the right way.

What are your biggest rules as a parent?

Teach them right from wrong as best I can, try not to lose my temper, try to set guidelines and rules and boundaries. Never lay a hand on them. Let them know it’s not right for a man to ever lay his hands on a female. Despite what people may think of me and what I say in my songs -- you know, me and Kim have had our moments -- I’m tryin’ to teach them and make them learn from my mistakes. It’s almost like juggling -- juggling the rap life and fatherhood.

Well, in the nexus of that juggling is Hailie, who’s in some of your songs, like “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” from “The Eminem Show.” Does she get to hear the songs she’s in?

Most of the time I’ll make clean versions of the songs and play them in the car. When she made “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” it’s a crazy little story. If I feel like I’m working too much, I let the kids come up to the studio. I get this little guilt trip inside, so I would have Kim just bring her up and let her hang around the studio.

So me and Dre were working together, and Hailie was running around the studio and she was like [in Hailie’s high voice], “Somebody please help me! I think my dad’s gone crazy!”

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Instantly that locked in with a beat we’d made the day before.

I went to my house, and I had her go in the booth and say it.

When she opens up, she’s just like her dad in a lot of aspects.

I just told her what to say and she nailed it, the first take. It almost was scary, to where I had to slow it down. I don’t know if I wanna put her on any more songs. I don’t wanna make her any more famous. She can live a life. She didn’t choose to have her father become a rap star. Nor my niece, nor my brother. So they’re able to go outside and live a normal life, go to stores and do things normally that I can’t do. Which is why, a lot of times, certain things I can’t be there for.

What about school events?

School is different. In school, when they have plays, field trips, all that stuff, I don’t miss them, even if I gotta deal with the craziness. And the teachers are really good about telling the kids, “When Hailie’s dad comes in, he’s Hailie’s dad, Mr. Mathers.”

Last year I went and read to the class. Two books. It was reading month or something.

There’s a Hailie love song on this album.

Yeah, a song called “Mockingbird,” to Hailie and Alaina. When Mom was on the run they didn’t understand it, and I’m not the greatest talker in the world, especially when I’m trying to explain to two little girls what’s goin’ on with someone who’s always been a part of their life and just disappeared. So that was my song to explain to them what was goin on, probably the most emotional song I ever wrote.

Michael Jackson called your mocking of him in the “Just Lose It” video “demeaning and insensitive.” Are you picking on Mike?

I didn’t do anything in the video that he hasn’t said himself 85

he does. With the little boys jumping on the bed and all that -- they’re just jumping on the bed. People can take what they wanna take, decipher it how they wanna decipher it. But it’s not actually Michael Jackson, it’s me playing Michael Jackson, studying the moves and doing the impressions. I don’t have an opinion, really, neither here nor there, against Michael Jackson.

When Thriller came out, you couldn’t tell me nothin’ about Michael: Dude was the ultimate, dude is a legend. But the allegations that are thrown at him and the seriousness of the case -- the guy’s jumping on top of his van dancing?

And showing up to court late.

I showed up to that motherfucker an hour early every morning.

I’m not playing with court. And now I think my fans should rally around me for making fun of myself.

Paris Hilton is in the “Just Lose It” video. She seems like the sort of person you’d normally be dissing, not doing a video with.

Well, when I was on MTV with La La it kinda slipped out. La La said, “How did you manage to get Paris?” I said: “Well, I love Paris. I love her almost as much as she loves herself.” Then I was like, “Damn, that was fucked up.” I try not to attack people who haven’t attacked me first. As far as the image she portrays right now, as far as the way my girls look at her, do I want them to grow up to be like that? No. But for a video, for entertainment, that’s a different thing. The song is about goin’ to the club and losin’ it, and you get so drunk you say the wrong thing. And we needed somebody to punch me, slap me and pull my hair.

Our first candidate was Jessica Alba. We couldn’t get Jessica, and Paris happened to be in town.

There are two songs about Kim on Encore. In “Puke,” you hate her so much she makes you want to vomit. Then in 86

“Crazy in Love,” you’re like, “I hate you, yet I can’t live without you.”

It’s a love-hate relationship, and it will always be that. We’re talking about a woman who’s been a part of my life since I can remember. She was thirteen when I met her. I was fifteen.

What was it like the first time you saw her?

I met her the day she got out of the youth home. I was at a friend’s house, and his sister was friends with her, but she hadn’t seen Kim in a while ‘cause she was in the youth home.

And I’m standing on the table with my shirt off, on top of their coffee table with a Kangol on, mocking the words to LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad.” And I turn around and she’s at the door. Her friend hands her a cigarette. She’s thirteen, she’s taller than me, and she didn’t look that young. She easily coulda been mistaken for sixteen, seventeen. I said to my friend’s sister, “Yo, who was that? She’s kinda hot.” And the saga began. Now there’s the constant struggle of “will I ever meet somebody else that’s gonna be real with me, as real as I can say she’s been with me?”

There’s a song on Encore called “Like Toy Soldiers” where you get into issues around the battles you’ve had recently.

It made me think about how you’re a battle rapper who came up in an era where battling was pure, and now it’s like, “Damn, if I really go too hard, somebody might get shot.” Someone might die.

It’s gotta be ill to not be able to just battle out like you want to.

Battling has been such a great part of hip-hop history.

It’s sad. But I’m not gonna sit back and watch my people be hurt. It’s like a Bush thing: You’re just sending your troops off to war and you ain’t in it. You’re fuckin’ playing golf and you 87

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sent your soldiers over to get killed. As you get older, you start to think that if you’re just beefin’ to be beefin’ or tryin’ to sell records, that’s not the way to go. Because what usually ends up happening is somebody’s entourage gets hurt. And it’s not worth it. Battling always started out like a mind game: who could psych who out, who could look the scariest. Then it became people saying, “This is my life you’re fucking with. This is everything I stand for, this is my career. If my career is gone tomorrow, then my life is gone tomorrow.” That’s how people end up losing lives.

Last year, “The Source” uncovered a tape that you made when you were sixteen where you said “nigger.” What was that about?

This is what we used to do. I’d go in my man’s basement and do goofy freestyles, and we’d call ‘em sucker rhymes, and the whole point of the rap was to be as wack as possible and warm up before we actually did songs that we wrote. And that ended up just happening to be the topic that day. I just broke up with a black girl, and the rest of the story I address on the album. I’ve got a song called “Yellow Brick Road,” and it basically explains the whole story from beginning to end, how the tape derived.

How did “The Source” get it?

I don’t know. The tapes kinda floated loosely. I never had control of them. It was something we just did and forgot about.

When it came out, were you pissed?

I was angry at myself. I couldn’t believe that I said it. The tone that I’m using, you can almost tell that I’m joking, but the words are coming out of my mouth. If there was never no Eminem, it wouldn’t be so shocking, but given who I am and what I stand 89

for today, then what else could be Eminem’s Achilles’ heel?

When the shit came out I owned up to it. I apologized for it.

But I can’t keep apologizing for something I said when I was sixteen years old. If you wanna ask me about something I said during my career when I got signed as a rapper and knew that I was speaking to a lot of people, then we can talk about that.

But until then, shit that I did as a fucking kid -- I mean, we’ve all done stupid shit. Shit that you and your friends might have known was a joke, but had anybody else outside of that heard it, they might have taken it a different way.

In our generation the word “nigga” is used by black and white kids as an expression of love, but even now you won’t say it.

Yeah, it’s just a word I don’t feel comfortable with. It wouldn’t sound right coming out of my mouth.

Do you see a similarity between “nigger” and “faggot”?

Aren’t they the same?

I’ve never really seen it that way. Growing up, the word faggot was thrown around. The two words were thrown around, they were always thrown around. But growing up, when you said faggot to somebody it didn’t necessarily mean they were gay. It was in the sense of, “You fuckin’ dick.”

But you don’t see these two words doing the same thing?

I guess it depends on if you’re using it in a derogatory way.

Like, if you’re using the word faggot like I just said, in the way of calling them a name, that’s different than a racial slur to me.

Some people may feel different. Some white kids feel comfortable throwing the word around all day. I don’t. I’m not saying I’ve never said the word in my entire life. But now, I just don’t say it in casual conversation. It doesn’t feel right to come out of 90

my mouth.

Does it bother you when a black man says, “Eminem is my nigga?”

No. If a white kid came up to me and said it, I probably would look at him funny. And if given the time to sit down with him I’d say, “Look, just don’t say the word. It’s not meant to be used by us. ‘Specially if you want something to do with hip-hop.”

You’ve sobered up some. Has that changed your music at all?

Nah. I feel like I still got the same passion for what I do. BD -Before Drugs -- and AD -- After Drugs.

You used to talk a lot about drugs, and you had a druggie manicness, and I wonder if you’ll become more cleareyed.

Well, I definitely feel more wide-eyed and more aware of my surroundings and what’s going on. Going through them days and experimenting and mentioning different drugs, the way that I put it out there, like I got mushrooms and acid and weed, people automatically assumed I was on drugs every time they saw me. Kids would come up to me like, “Yo, Shady, I know you got them ‘shrooms!” And I’d be like, “Yo, I’m chillin’.” I mean, I went through my little phase, and I just realized it wasn’t the thing for me. It wasn’t the thing for me before fame, and there’s no reason for it to be the thing for me now. Especially since I’ve reached a certain level of maturity that hopefully includes a happy medium of immaturity.

Let’s talk about your process as a writer. How do you come up with hooks?

I think the beat should talk to you and tell you what the hook 91

is. The hook for “Just Lose It” I probably wrote in about thirty seconds as soon as the beat came on. It was the last record we made for the album. We didn’t feel like we had the single yet. That was a song that doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just what the beat was telling me to do. Beats run through my head -- and rhymes and lyrics and wordplay and catchphrases.

When you’re a rapper, rhymes are just gonna come at you.

Those words are usually inside that beat, and you gotta find them.

Have you ever tried the Jay-Z method of not writing the rhymes out, just coming up with them in your head?

Yeah, I’ve done that. If you’ve ever seen my rhyme pads, my shit is all over the paper, because it’s a lot of random thoughts.

But a lot of times I’ll be short a couple of bars, and I’ll have a couple of lines wrote down and then I just go in the booth and try shit, and see what I’ll say. I’ll lose my space on the paper and just start blurting out, and it’ll just come out. Music for me is an addiction. If I don’t make music I feel like shit. If I don’t spend enough time at home with my kids I feel like shit. Music is my outlet, my kids are my life, so there’s a balance in my life right now that couldn’t be better.

So you were a teenager when you first heard the Beastie Boys, and they allowed you to feel like, “Oh, I could be part of hip-hop.” 3rd Bass probably gave you more of that sense.

Yeah, but then along came the X-Clan. I loved the X-Clan’s first album [To the East, Blackwards, 1990]. Brother J was an MC that I was afraid of lyrically. His delivery was so confident. But he also made me feel like an outcast. Callin’ us polar bears.

Even as militant as Public Enemy were, they never made me feel like, “You’re white, you cannot do this rap, this is our 92

music.” The X-Clan kinda made you feel like that, talking [on “Grand Verbalizer, What Time Is It?”] about “How could polar bears swing on vines of the gorillas?” It was a slap in the face.

It was like, you’re loving and supporting the music, you’re buying the artist and supporting the artist, you love it and live it and breathe it, then who’s to say that you can’t do it? If you’re good at it and you wanna do it, then why are you allowed to buy the records but not allowed to do the music? That was the pro-black era -- and there was that sense of pride where it was like, if you weren’t black, you shouldn’t listen to hip-hop, you shouldn’t touch the mike. And we used to wear the black and green.

You wore an Africa medallion?

Me and a couple of my other white friends. And we would go to the mall.

Whoa.

I remember I had the Flavor Flav clock. The clock was so big and ridiculous, it was the perfect Flavor Flav clock. It was fuckin’ huge. And me and my boy are in matching Nike suits and our hair in high-top fades, and we went to the mall and got laughed at so bad. And kinda got rushed out the mall. I remember this dude jumpin’ in front of my boy’s face and bein’ like, “Yeah, boyyyeee! What you know about hip-hop, white boyyyeee?!”

You must’ve had drama with the Africa medallion.

I’d be tryin’ to explain to my black friends who didn’t really feel like I should be wearin’ it, like, “Look, I love this culture, I’m down with this.” But you’re a kid, so you’re not really sure of anything, you haven’t really experienced life yet, so you don’t really know how to explain yourself to the fullest. You’re tryin’ 93

to find your own identity and you’re stuck in that whole thing of, who am I as a person? Walkin’ through the suburbs and I’m getting called the N-word, and walkin’ through Detroit I’m getting jumped for being white. And goin’ through that identity crisis of, “Am I really not meant to touch the mike? Is this really not meant for me?”

And all this is inside you as you’re coming up as a white rapper trying to enter this black culture.

Even growing up as a kid, being the new kid in school and getting bullied, getting jumped. Kids are fucked up, kids are mean to other kids. School is a tough thing to go through. Anybody will tell you that. I didn’t really learn how to fight back till seventeen, eighteen. I reached my peak around nineteen, where people would call me and say, “Yo, I got beef with such and such -- can you come help me out?” They knew I’d fight. I had a friend named Goofy Gary. He’d call me and say, “Yo, I just got jumped up at Burger King.” And I’d say, “All right, Proof, we gotta go fight for Goofy Gary. Let’s get in the car. C’mon.” Then I found myself being the aggressor, which was a little strange from the few years prior to that being the loner kid who didn’t fuck with nobody, wasn’t lookin’ for trouble.

When was the last time you got into a physical confrontation with anyone?

It’s been a while. There’s been a couple little push-and-shove incidents but nothing really recently. Nothing since catchin’ them gun cases and standing before that judge. That changed me a lot. I realized that this dude controls my life, and he can take me away from my little girl. It slowed me the fuck down.

Used to be Eminem was in the police blotter from time to time, but since that case you’ve made a conscious change.

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Yeah. When I got off probation I remember sayin’ to myself, “I’m never fuckin’ up again. I’m-a learn to turn the other cheek.”

I took on boxing just to get the stress out. Plus I chilled out a lot as far as the drinking and the drugs and all that stuff. Just chillin’ out on that made me see things a lot clearer and learn to rationalize a lot more. Sobering up, becoming an adult and trying to just become a businessman. Not sayin’ that I don’t still got it in me. Not sayin’ I’m not still down for mine. But things changed.

What I want to do is make records, get respect, have fun, enjoy life and see my daughter grow up. I don’t feel like I portray myself as a gangster; I feel like I portray myself as somebody who won’t be bullied or punked. If I feel like I’m being attacked and somebody comes at me sideways with something I didn’t start, then that’s a different story. But I just try to do what I do, get respect, and that’s it. If I can make people laugh and spark some controversy, good. It is entertainment.

Sparking controversy is key to you being who you are.

It kinda is. It’s part of the whole mystique and the freedom of speech.

I see a lot of similarities between you and Madonna in the first phase of her career, because you both work with the idea that “if I make some people hate me, then that will make those who like me love me that much more intensely.”

Yeah, definitely. You can’t cater to every fan. Everyone’s not gonna love you. Imagine how many people are on the planet.

How can everybody love you?

But if some people hate you . . .

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It’s gonna make people who love you, love you more. I remember when 8 Mile came out and suddenly I was the good guy, and I was being appreciated for what I do. That was a little strange to me. I was like, “Oh, shit, I got old people comin’ up to me sayin’ they love my music and I got them into hip-hop.”

Do you want to do more movies?

I kind of want to finish my music thing first. There was a point in time with 8 Mile, doin’ the soundtrack, the score to the movie and The Eminem Show that I felt like I was really neglecting life at home. I’m busy, and I stay busy, but I want to remain in control of things where I can stay in the city and go home at night to my kids. I’m a father before anything else, and anybody who knows me knows that that’s the most important thing to me, that I can be close to my kids and be there.

Where’s your relationship with Kim now?

Neutral at best.

Romantic side is over?

Yeah, that seems to be pretty much out the window, but we’ve still gotta show each other that mutual respect. I can’t walk around the house tryin’ to mess with Hailie’s head, saying, “Your mom’s wrong.” I used to get caught up with that with my mother, as far as saying bad things about any boyfriend she had that I liked. I don’t wanna get them caught up in “Your mom’s wrong,” and then Hailie goes to see her mother, who says, “Your dad’s an asshole.” We don’t do that. It’s about raising these kids. She’s out now. And hopefully she can get her life back in order. Before anything, it’s gotta be for these kids. She knows it, I know it.

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Jon Pareles, 2009 IN late December 2007 a depressed, writer’s-blocked, pill-popping, opiate-addicted Marshall Mathers, better known as the multimilllion-selling rapper Eminem, overdosed on some new blue pills someone gave him — they were methadone — and collapsed on his bathroom floor. Public statements covered up the reason for his emergency hospitalization and detox, claiming the problem was pneumonia. A month later Mr. Mathers had ramped up his habit again.

But the overdose scared him. Early last year he hospitalized himself, went through rehab and started the full 12-step program of a recovering addict, complete with meetings, a sponsor and a therapist. Mr. Mathers, 36, says he has stayed sober since April 20, 2008.

Far from concealing his addiction battle, he’s making it the center of his comeback. The cover of “Relapse” (Shady/Aftermath/ Interscope), the first new Eminem album since 2004, builds his face out of pills, and in some songs he raps, as directly as a rhymer can, about how drugs nearly destroyed him. Elsewhere on the album Eminem resumes — or relapses into — his main alter ego, Slim Shady: the sneering, clownish, paranoid, homophobic, celebrity-stalking compulsive rapist and serial killer who plays his exploits for queasy laughs and mass popularity.

Eminem’s four previous major-label albums of new material — “The Slim Shady LP” in 1999, “The Marshall Mathers LP” in 2000, “The Eminem Show” in 2002 and “Encore” in 2004 — have sold about 30 million copies in the United States, accord99

ing to Nielsen SoundScan. “Relapse” clings to the formula of its predecessors: it’s partly truth and partly fiction, with personal revelations and sociopathic farce side by side.

“It’s hard core, it’s dark comedy, it’s what Eminem has always been,” said Dr. Dre, his longtime producer, by telephone from his studio in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California.

Eminem had been missed; the album’s first single, “Crack a Bottle” — with 50 Cent and Dr. Dre trading verses — went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in February, selling 418,000 downloads in its first week.

“Relapse” is the latest episode in a soap-opera career that has always mingled confession, melodrama, comedy, horror, media baiting, craftsmanship and tabloid-scale hyperbole on every front.

“I don’t know if I’m exposing myself,” Mr. Mathers said by telephone from his studio in Detroit. “I’m kind of just coming clean and exhaling.”

He speaks amiably and coherently, without defensiveness, chatting with the zeal of a recovering addict about both his old excesses and his new clarity and productivity, sounding like someone relieved of a burden. “I was the worst kind of addict, a functioning addict,” he said. “I was so deep into my addiction at one point that I couldn’t picture myself being able to do anything without some kind of drug.”

He has been watching videos of himself onstage and in interviews from his drug days, including one from Black Entertainment Television that he said he has no memory of doing, when Ambien made him so befuddled he couldn’t even respond to simple questions. “I want to see what I looked like when I was on drugs, so I never go back to it,” he said.

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In the five years between his own albums, he worked as a producer, making beats for other rappers, and occasionally showed up as a guest rapper; he now calls his verse on “Touch Down,” with the Atlanta rapper T.I., “horrible.”

But last year, just two months out of rehab, Eminem met Dr. Dre met in Orlando, Fla., to try recording. Eminem had been doing what he called “mind exercises” to get himself writing. “I’d stack a bunch of words and just go down the line and try to fill in the blanks and make sense out of them,” he said. “For three or four years I couldn’t do it any more.”

When he was sober, he said, “the wheels started turning again.”

Working in Orlando and then in Detroit, Eminem and Dr. Dre recorded hundreds of tracks and finished enough new songs for three albums. They have culled them to two; Eminem plans to release “Relapse 2” before the end of this year. “The deeper I got into my addiction, the tighter the lid got on my creativity,” he said. “When I got sober the lid just came off. In seven months I accomplished more than I could accomplish in three or four years doing drugs.”

From the beginning Mr. Mathers has smeared the boundary between Eminem and Slim Shady. In “97 Bonnie & Clyde” from the 1999 “Slim Shady LP,” the rapper takes along his gurgly baby daughter — named Hailie, like Mr. Mathers’s real daughter (who lives with him in Detroit) — while disposing of her mother’s murdered corpse. The new album traces Eminem’s addictive tendencies to one of his earliest and most frequent targets: “My Mom,” who, the song says, used to mix Valium into his food to make him manageable.

But the music for songs like those is reassuring, even perky. Dr. Dre has long provided clean, crisp tracks that are far from ominous. Often they have the bouncy beat and singsong choruses 101

of kiddie music. That smiley-faced nastiness was enough to make Eminem a target for the censorious, which in turn gave him a new bunch of antagonists to provoke. “It ended up pushing my buttons,” he said. “You’re only going to make me worse now.”

Now, a decade into his major-label career, “I’m done explaining it,” he said. “Here’s my music. Here’s what it is. Get what you get from it. I didn’t get in this game to be a role model.”

Eminem was always an anomaly in hip-hop, not only because he’s white but also because he presents himself as multiple personas — rarely ingratiating, often belligerent or psychotic — rather than a single heroic face. Yet he was accepted within Detroit hip-hop, where he made his reputation in battle raps that were later depicted in the quasi-autobiographical 2002 movie “8 Mile.” (The rapper Proof — his mentor, best friend and “ghetto pass,” as Eminem called him in his 2008 memoir, “The Way I Am” — was shot dead in 2006, and the grief was a factor in Eminem’s addiction.) And he was abetted by the leading hip-hop producer of the ’90s, Dr. Dre, who also helped establish Snoop Dogg.

From the beginning Eminem was perfectly attuned to MTV: making videos full of snide pop-culture sendups and catchy pop hooks as well as news headlines with his marital and legal troubles. (Mr. Mathers has divorced, remarried and re-divorced Kim Scott. His mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, sued him in 1999 for defamation for $10 million but later said it was her lawyer’s idea and settled out of court for $25,000, most of it legal fees.)

As Slim Shady, in a tight white T-shirt with his hair bleached blonde, Eminem quickly became an offensive scourge to those who took Shady’s fantasies literally, or worried that others 102

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might; that made him a surly antihero to some fans. At the same time he was a pop pinup who made girls squeal. But he stayed in his hometown, Detroit, and never joined the celebrity culture. Although he has a local hip-hop posse, D12, that he remained loyal to (and produced) when he grew famous, he hardly raps about friends or community; Eminem and Slim Shady are loners, estranged from virtually everyone. “Relapse” plays like the work of someone who’s been long isolated, seeing only his family, his pills and a TV; it’s not as funny as past albums.

Both Eminem and Dr. Dre thought hard about how Eminem should re-emerge. And both concluded that the world wanted more Slim Shady. “I talked to my son about it,” said Dr. Dre, “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.’ ” “Relapse” sets out to recapture the audience for his previous studio albums by presenting the familiar Eminem, which is to say, a ruckus of multiple personalities. “The album walks a fine line,” Mr. Mathers said. “My fans, and people who genuinely listen to hip-hop and love it for the art form, they know what’s Eminem, what’s Marshall and what’s Shady.”

On the album Eminem is self-consciously autobiographical when he rhymes about himself — sometimes painfully frank, sometimes self-mocking. “Not only is honesty one of the biggest parts of recovery,” Mr. Mathers said. “I’m blessed enough to be able to have an outlet.”

The rapper Proof, Eminem’s mentor, who was killed in 2006.

Credit Jeff Kowalsky/European Pressphoto Agency The song “Deja Vu” chronicles that night in December 2007 and the escalating drug habit that led up to it, with Eminem of104

fering and then demolishing his old excuses; he rhymes “pneumonia” with “bologna.” In “Beautiful,” a grudgingly self-affirming song built on a power ballad, he wonders aloud whether he’ll ever rap again; he started writing it during the first day of one attempt at rehab, alone with a pen in a hospital room.

The album revisits Slim Shady’s usual obsessions so thoroughly that it sometimes threatens to become a rerun. It isn’t the first time he’s rapped about abducting women, or used the sound effect of duct tape peeling off the roll. Eminem once again mocks Christopher Reeve, who died in 2004; he has lines about slightly stale targets like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian and Sarah Palin. “Once he makes a painting, once he lays a lyric down, it’s impossible to get him to change it,” Dr. Dre said. “If there’s a couple of lines he says on a record that’s not relevant today, it’s, ‘No, that was that painting. That was for that moment.’ “ After five years’ absence Eminem still looms over hip-hop; the rapper Asher Roth devotes a song, “As I Em,” to complaining about being compared to Eminem because both are white. But “We Made You,” the second single from “Relapse,” had middling success on Top 40 radio; some references were dated.

Dom Theodore, vice-president for Top 40 pop programming at CBS Radio, had mixed expectations for “Relapse” because Eminem’s hits had always been his humorous ones. “This album tends to be a little darker,” he said. “It’s still edgy, but not in a fun way. But I’d never write him off. You’d be hard pressed to find someone more talented.”

Despite his nine Grammy Awards, many MTV appearances and tens of millions of albums sold, Eminem hasn’t put himself on the celebrity circuit. “If it could just be about the music, I would only do the music,” he said. “I don’t hate the limelight, but I don’t like it.”

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In the songs Slim Shady still reacts to celebrities not like a fellow star but like a consumer stoking his crushes and fantasies from images on the airwaves. He just happens to be more extreme.

Confessions and broken taboos aren’t Eminem’s only concerns; he’s also a virtuoso of phonetics. His raps rhyme internal vowel sounds along with the syllables that end words, and he’ll let a chain of sounds take him wherever free-association might lead.

“I’m taking celebrity names just out of the air, or just putting them in a hat and mixing them up and drawing a name,” he said. “If your name happens to rhyme with something good, then you might get it too.”

Word sounds are the genesis of “Insane,” a song on “Relapse” that accuses a stepfather of raping him as a child. “It’s pretty much all fiction,” he said. “It’s a perfect example of a rhyme gone bad.”

There are so many references to prescription drugs on “Relapse” that Eminem could have earned product-placement deals from pharmaceutical companies. One reason, he said, is that the trademarked names are memorable words. “In my experience through rehab and the hospital and the overdose with the methadone, I learned so many different names of medications,” he said.

“At the end of the day, it’s just words,” he added. “That’s all it is to me.”

But he also admits that he’s inseparable even from Slim Shady’s darker fantasies or, “obviously, I wouldn’t be able to think of this.” In one song, “Must be the Ganja” — which rhymes “dilemma,” “Dalai Lama” and “Jeffrey Dahmer” — he boasts about being able to name “every serial killer who ever existed” in chronological order along with all the details of their murders.

Mr. Mathers said that was him: watching documentaries and 106

writing down information, “dates and times and places.” He was fascinated by “serial killers and their psyche and their mind states.”

He continued, “You listen to these people talk, or you see them, they look so regular. What does a serial killer look like? He don’t look like anything. He looks like you. You could be living next door to one. If I lived next door to you, you could be.”

Was that Slim, or Eminem, or Marshall? “That was Marshall,” he said. “Uh-oh, I mean, that was Shady.”

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Brian Hiatt, 2013

Maybe it’s the hair. You can’t really see it under the plain black military scout’s cap he’s wearing this afternoon, but for the first time in half a decade or so, Eminem has reclaimed the Slim Shady platinum-blond look that he cast aside after beating a near-fatal pill addiction. Post-rehab, his emotional dial seemed slightly stuck on “grim determination,” but now, despite looming, beyond-final deadlines for his eighth studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2, he’s in a disarmingly playful mood. In the course of a long conversation, he breaks into a Yoda impression, raps part of “My Name Is,” laughs, smiles, makes fun of himself — all stuff that people assumed was behind him.

He’s taking a break from mixing the album in his warehouselike studio complex in a Detroit suburb, where old-school video games line one wall (Mortal Kombat is the only one that actually seems to be in operation), TMZ and Judge Judy play on the front-lounge TV, and compilations of current Marvel comic books are supplied for in-bathroom reading.

Eminem sprawls on an ergonomic chair in manager Paul Rosenberg’s office, with a bottle of water and a can of diet Red Bull at his feet. He’s wearing a crisp white T-shirt, below-theknee cargo shorts, and blue and white low-top Nike Air Max Is with tags still on them. There’s a silver chain around his neck.

He’s crazily fit, with huge biceps that almost don’t match his thin, still-unlined face — he’s 41, but doesn’t look it. On the wall above his head is a huge print of the Paul’s Boutique album cover; a life-size, giant-tongued bust of the head of Venom, the Spider-Man villain, has a place of honor at Rosenberg’s desk.

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After a couple of hours, Rosenberg comes in with six different mixes of the new song “Rap God” for Eminem to choose among. A look of genuine agitation crosses his face — he thought he was almost done for the day. Then Eminem throws his hands up in mock exasperation and bolts from his chair.

“That’s it,” he says, offering an evil smile. “I’m going back on drugs!”

What did it feel like to look in the mirror and see that blond hair again?

Like I relapsed on drugs. It was a little creepy. I certainly had some dark times with that shit, mostly due to taking a lot of pills and fucking drooling on myself. It was a shitty time, and I think getting sober and putting my hair back to its regular color was me washing my hands of it. Dyeing it back probably would have been bad for me a year or two after that. But I’m more comfortable in sobriety now. It made sense once the songs started coming together, so I just said, “Fuck it.”

You sound less intense on this record than you did on Recovery, maybe happier, maybe more your old self.

I feel like maybe I got too happy or too jokey or too giddy on Relapse [the 2009 album before Recovery]. Everything was a joke: accents, funny shit, shock-value shit, all that shit I just kind of ran into the ground. And then Recovery was, “Let me try to get serious for a minute, let me get back to making songs that actually feel something.” But afterward, doing the Bad Meets Evil EP [a collaboration with Royce da 5’9”] really started to open my mind up. It gave me the feeling again of making music with no restraints. I’m hoping that that’s what this new album is, having fun with the music. Not to say there’s going to be no serious moments, but trying to find the right balance.

And presumably your recent life has been a lot less dra110

matic than the period before Relapse and Recovery.

On this record, I’m not coming off of an overdose, you know?

And I didn’t just lose Proof, one of my best friends that I’ve ever had. Those periods of time were pretty fuckin’ brutal, and those were things on Recovery that I needed to address that I think were probably therapeutic for me. You know, I miss Proof every day and love him and wish he was here all the time. But that was just a different time period.

And are you actually happy these days?

I’m as happy as I can be, I guess.

One of the first times we saw you back with the hair was Brent Musburger’s interview on ESPN in September. You acted spaced-out, and people didn’t get that you were screwing around.

I knew we were about to show the “Berzerk” video, so I was doing what I call the Berzerk face. The whole song to me feels like vintage Beastie Boys. And you know the “Pass the Mic” video where Ad-Rock is making that face, kind of not looking in the camera? I was doing my own version. So I thought it would be funnier because maybe no one would know what I’m doing.

I’ve only heard you talk about Licensed to Ill before — did you follow the Beasties to Paul’s Boutique and beyond?

When Paul’s Boutique came out, I was one of the fans who didn’t get it. It took me years to realize how fucking genius it is.

I felt bad for sleeping on it. Obviously, yes, there was something about Licensed to Ill — you had the Zeppelin samples and their vibe. You had Run-DMC, who were so cool, with the attitude of “Fuck you if you don’t like us.” Same as the Beastie Boys.

“Fuck you. We fucking curse. We spit beer. We throw it on our fucking fans.” And obviously as they got older their views and 111

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things changed, as all of ours do. You can be mad at their shit for not sounding like their last shit, but if it did, then they didn’t grow as artists. Same with me.

You worked with Rick Rubin on parts of the new album, and there’s some throwback hip-hop production on there. What’s that about for you?

One of my favorite new things to do is experiment with older break beats and sounds, retro shit, and try to make it current.

I was headed in that direction before Rick got involved. It’s the nostalgia of it, when hip-hop was fresh and new..

It was being invented on a day-to-day basis, basically.

Yeah. Damn near every new song that came out was groundbreaking. Listen to LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells” — some of them sounds, man! When you bring it back now, some kids might be, “What the fuck is that? Where did that come from?”

The first hip-hop song that you got into, Ice-T’s “Reckless,” is nearly 30 years old but its beat still sounds insane.

You could take that beat today and probably throw Drake on it and it would be fucking crazy.

On the new song “Legacy,” you set up your early story almost as a superhero origin: You got your powers from hip-hop.

Absolutely! Hip-hop saved my life, man. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been even decent at. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known how to do. I don’t know how to do anything else. I think they have a word for that — what do they call it? Idiot savant?

I mean, you’re too good at too many things to really be an idiot savant.

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Thanks, man. I mean, that’s open to interpretation.

Besides LL Cool J’s autobiography, you never really read books, but comic books were a big deal for you growing up.

It’s more about admiring comic-book art. I liked that fantasy world, fuckin’ bizarre shit. Some people say that some of my songs have been cartoonish. My problem is when I read something, unless I wrote it — and half the time when I did write it — I can’t process it. I don’t know if I have the attention span to sit and read a sentence. As I get into that sentence, that might trigger a thought, and I go off and start thinking about something else and then I’ll read the next sentence, and then I have to go back because, wait, what did I just read? And then I have to read one paragraph 10 fucking times. So I don’t read.

You keep referencing Thor on this album. Is he your favorite superhero?

Spider-Man is still my favorite. But Thor was on my mind because he had a movie coming out. And he has all sorts of weird hang-ups and language barriers. Thor seems like he feels out of place in this world, and I can relate to that.

“Survival” suggests that you’re never retiring. Is that your current thinking?

As far as hip-hop goes, part of me feels like I could keep going as long as I wanted. Eventually I might want to get into just producing. Part of me feels like one day I would want to be behind the scenes, just making music. So regardless, whenever I set the mic down, I always want to have something to do with music. It passes the time [laughs]. That’s an understatement.

Kinda takes up all of it. But everybody gets days where you’re “Fuck, man, I don’t even want to do this anymore.”

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You almost died from your methadone overdose. Do you have lasting physical effects from the drug stuff and the overdose? Is there anything that persists or anything to worry about?

I don’t think so. I know I probably shaved a few years off my life. I was definitely lucky. I think my OCD is getting worse, though.

Is that a self-diagnosed OCD, or has a doctor actually said you have OCD? It’s self-diagnosed. I could cop out and say it’s from music, but it’s not that. Once I got sober, I started noticing shit about myself. Like, if I ran on the treadmill, if I had it in my mind that I needed to burn 500 calories, I hit that exact number. Part of me wonders, “Do I do it because I’m OCD or because I don’t want to be a quitter?” But then I sit there fucking with the drums on the mixing board for two hours, going, “Fuck, that snare is not right.” Now, I don’t know if it was always there and it was just always repressed with drugs.

Are you OCD about cleanliness? You need your house to be just right?

Not really.

So maybe you don’t have it.

I don’t know if any other rapper is going, “Yo, we need a .1 dB up on that high hat” — that’s, like, the least amount of decibels you can go. Most people probably would not even hear a dB. But I’m sitting there: “No, it’s gotta have the exact right relationship with the snare and vocals.” That’s where I get carried away. Someone’s gotta literally come pry the fucking album from my fingers, because I’m still tweaking. And probably no one hears the difference.

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Do you think you’ll ever do a full-blown tour again?

It’s a good question. I’ve been doing dates here and there, and that seems to be working out well. It gives me time to, obviously, be a dad but at the same time record. I just don’t know if the tour life is for me anymore. I’m not going to say definitely I’ll never tour again. It’s still fun for me to be onstage and shit, but for the most part, I’d rather be in the studio making new music.

You’ve made it clear again and again that you don’t actually have a problem with gay people — so why, in 2013, use the word “faggot”? Why use “gay-looking”as an insult on “Rap God”?

I don’t know how to say this without saying it how I’ve said it a million times. But that word, those kind of words, when I came up battle-rappin’ or whatever, I never really equated those words...

To actually mean “homosexual”?

Yeah. It was more like calling someone a bitch or a punk or asshole. So that word was just thrown around so freely back then. It goes back to that battle, back and forth in my head, of wanting to feel free to say what I want to say, and then [worrying about] what may or may not affect people. And, not saying it’s wrong or it’s right, but at this point in my career — man, I say so much shit that’s tongue-in-cheek. I poke fun at other people, myself. But the real me sitting here right now talking to you has no issues with gay, straight, transgender, at all. I’m glad we live in a time where it’s really starting to feel like people can live their lives and express themselves. And I don’t know how else to say this, I still look at myself the same way that I did when I was battling and broke.

I kind of thought you were doing it because when you’re 116

rapping as Slim Shady, part of your mission is to annoy people.

Well, look, I’ve been doing this shit for, what, 14 years now?

And I think people know my personal stance on things and the personas that I create in my music. And if someone doesn’t understand that by now, I don’t think there’s anything I can do to change their mind about it.

Have you heard “Same Love”?

Have I heard what?

“Same Love,” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis?

What song is that?

It’s, um, the gay-marriage song.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard Macklemore’s whole album.

What do you think of it? He’s probably the most successful white rapper since you.

Uh, he’s really dope. Macklemore is, yeah, he’s dope.

You won respect in part by being technically amazing — I’m not sure everyone in hip-hop sees him that way yet.

I think there’s very technical shit that he does. He’s a really good songwriter, too. Conceptually, the shit he does is pretty fuckin’ incredible.

How did you end up pushing your flow on “Rap God” as far as you did?

If I feel I’ve pushed myself to the furthest extent that I can, then it’s done. But if it’s not, here’s more. And nothing ever sounds as good as it does in my head. So when I say a rhyme or whatever, you should hear it in my head! If it was up to me and I was 117

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just recording demos, I’d tell a story here and there, but mostly it’d be just technical all the time. If I put a record out and it’s got some kind of hook on it but there’s no lyrical aspect to it, that’s fucking terrible. That’s corny, to me.

Is that why you hate “My Name Is” so much? You feel you weren’t really being an MC on that?

I feel there were some technical aspects to that record. I don’t want to toot my own horn or anything like that.

I think you recorded it your first day, ever, with Dre. Yeah, it was spur-of-the-moment, it came together so fast, and it was organic, I guess — I hate that word. The rhymes were funny, but there was still some kind of MC’ing aspect to it.

So you don’t hate it anymore.

I ended up hating the record in the early days, because I always looked at myself as an underground MC. I remember having conversations with Royce before we made it: “Yo, man, we’re not the type of artists to go gold.” All I wanted to do was make enough money to not have to work a regular job, have a decent house, be able to support my family. So I was shocked that “My Name Is” was successful. I probably felt, “I’m just rapping on there!” I’m just going [raps], “Hi, my name is — my name is — my name is — chika chika Slim Shady. Hi — “ That’s it!

That’s it. It was an introduction to the world, but I didn’t know it was an introduction to the world.

On the other hand, that opening — “Hi, kids” — shows a kind of awareness of what you were aiming for.

I mean, I knew who I was aiming at. With D12, the whole con-

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cept was to say the illest shit you can think of. So on the record I’m saying pretty much the same shit, but now I know that I’m a bad influence: “Hi, kids!” I’m aiming right at your kids, but never in a million years fathoming that it could even actually happen.

You were actually experiencing poverty when you wrote the Slim Shady EP and LP. You were in that place. And then, within a year, you were what you were.

It didn’t make any sense.

They should make a movie about it.

[Smiles] Be a good movie, wouldn’t it?

How early did the substance abuse start?

Early in my career, when shit started happening so fast. I think it was more liquor than anything. I was using it as a crutch more for anxiety to go onstage. I never used to need it when I would perform in clubs around Detroit — it’d be a couple hundred people at most. But now you’re going to fucking 10,000 people — “Holy shit! What the fuck is this?” It was to take those feelings away. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have become an addict if I never got famous. I obviously have those addictive traits. But it was more about “I need this to go onstage — I can’t handle this many people looking at me.” Then what happens is you’re doing that fucking six, seven days a week. Now your body is starting to become dependent on the chemical, and you’re getting even more anxiety at the thought of not having it. It was just too much at once. Dragged around from this place to that place and I’m signing autographs and shit. I didn’t understand it.

You didn’t like being stared at even before you were famous.

It’s more about “Does this person want to fight me?” The 121

paranoia of it. I always joke that it’s a hell of a career choice for somebody who doesn’t really like attention.

In the face of all that, you managed to make a second major-label album, The Marshall Mathers LP, that was a pure classic. What was your mindset at that time?

I remember the frustration of people at the label feeling that I didn’t have the right first song. I would feel like, “What do you mean this ain’t the right record? How many people I gotta appeal to?” And then there was all this negative attention for the same rhymes that I said when I was an underground artist, when I was nobody. Now that I’m somebody, I’m getting flak, so...

I’m gonna say worse shit on purpose.

Yeah! I don’t understand what the fuck all this shit is, so now I’m gonna say it more. Fuck you. Because you’re trying to destroy me and you’re trying to take away my livelihood, so I’m going to destroy you. I’m going to do everything I can in my fucking power to piss you off and insult you and make you feel how you’re making me feel right now. So fuck everybody! But at the same time, I wanted to make my music feel right.

And I learned a lot of that shit from Biggie and Tupac. Being a student of hip-hop in general, you take technical aspects from places. You may take a rhyme pattern or flow from Big Daddy Kane or Kool G Rap. But then you go to Tupac, and he made songs. His fucking songs felt like something — “Holy shit! I want to fucking punch someone in the face when I put this CD in.” Biggie told stories. I wanted to do all that shit. My goal in my head is to be technically able to satisfy every underground or every great rapper there is and also be able to try to incorporate it into a song, and make the song feel like something.

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You revisit “Stan” on this LP with “Bad Guy.” The original was a leap forward, both on a storytelling level and

because you come out from behind the curtain and show you’re not really Slim Shady.

That was tripped out for me too, because in the beginning you’d meet people that would think, “Yo! You’re Slim Shady, man! Do something crazy! Cut a bitch’s head off! Where’s your chain saw, dog?” But also it was fun for me to be able to interpret Dido’s words. I thought it was a perfect opportunity to let people know that you need to sift through what’s on this record. Because there is truth to a lot of this shit — but there’s a lot of shit that is so fucking ridiculous, how can you really get mad at it?

You know “Stan” has long since entered the lexicon?

People say, “I’m an Eminem Stan” or “I Stan for Katy Perry.”

Wow, that’s crazy. Oh, that’s funny.

It’s a little scary because Stan is insane.

Right....And Stan’s dead! He actually died on that record. But I always had his little brother in the back of my mind. He just needed time to grow up. And come and kill me.

There’s a lot of intense self-examination and self-criticism on this album — and it continues the battling-personas game from the original Marshall Mathers LP. What led you along that path?

Look, I know what people say and how they feel about some of the language I use, topics I rap about and stuff I present.

Sometimes I’d rather just say something about myself that I already know you are thinking and get the jump on you. Anyway, the lines between the personas are getting blurred. The 123

other day Slim Shady burnt my breakfast. He totally did it on purpose.

One of your addictions was to sleeping pills. Did you have a lifelong problem with sleeping at night?

I don’t think it happened until my career started, till I got signed with Dre. I was just thinking about one night when I was out in California, and I’m not sleeping because I’m writing, I want to do my best and impress Dre. It was in the beginning stages of developing a drug problem and probably a drinking problem, because had I not went to pills I know I would have been a fullblown alcoholic. I started to get the sleep problem in the first place when I was feeling the pressures of having to be places at a certain time to perform — and be up to par on every single thing that I did, because everyone is watching. And in my fucked-up head was, “They want you to fail, Marshall. They’re watching you. They’re waiting for you to fail.”

Do you sleep well now?

For the most part, I think so. I have nights every now and again where I’m just laying there in the bed and thinking, “I gotta get up. I gotta get this idea down for a song.” I still use a pen and a pad because if I get an idea I gotta write it down right away.

And I don’t trust a phone — what if I lose the phone or if it fucking deletes on accident or whatever? For this entire couple of years that I was working on this album I was walking around with a pen and pad, whether I needed it or not.

The new song “Rhyme or Reason” — which samples the Zombies’ “Time of the Season”- suggests that the real problem in your life was that your dad wasn’t around.

At this point it’s a little more tongue-in-cheek than that. It’s more in keeping with the idea of going back to old themes and 124

topics. It’s just saying, “Maybe if my parents would’ve been a certain way I wouldn’t have been so fucked up.”

At the same time, wasn’t some of that anger you had directed at this huge missing thing in your life?

I think it was more about bouncing around a lot [between neighborhoods]. I was probably more angry about that, always feeling shitty cause of that. But I don’t know if it’s necessarily still anger at this point. It’s more thinking, “The hook is saying, ‘What’s your name? Who’s your daddy?’” Obviously I gotta say something.

You’ve never spoken to your dad. Wouldn’t it give you closure to at least tell him to his face what you think of him?

Part of me maybe sometimes feels that. But it’s not really anything that I think about a whole lot. And, I mean, I’m OK. You rap about forgiving your mom on “Headlights.” Is some of that just getting older and seeing things differently?

Yeah, you start getting different perspectives on certain things.

Lots of people go through lots of things and don’t have this or don’t have that in their lives — and I guess it’s just what you do with it. Um, I will say this. I love her because she’s my mom. I will always love her because of that.

Kendrick Lamar, who has a feature on the album, called out practically everyone in hip-hop on his “Control” verse.

It would be weird for you to do that now, right?

The type of career I’ve had, would I seem like a bully or something trying to do that? Or would I just sound like an idiot if I said it? Back in the day I was certainly very much where he is as far as “Let me say this, and I don’t give a fuck what happens.” I 125

was quite a bit more reckless.

You’re intensely protective of your kids’ privacy. Do you regret making the world curious about all of that by making Hailie and Kim and your mom characters in your songs for so many years?

Shit, hindsight is 20/20. At that time, that was how I dealt with things. I didn’t really think about the consequences or what was right or wrong or whatever. Sometimes I feel, yeah, maybe I did give people too much, let people in too much, said so much personal shit that I wish I didn’t. But you never know how many people you’re going to reach. Obviously, now I know I’m famous. In my head, those are the kind of demons that I fight against, like, “Fuck, man, how famous am I? I shouldn’t say this, I shouldn’t say that.”

You’ve said you don’t think you’ll ever fall in love again.

Isn’t that kind of sad?

Well, I don’t know, man. I mean, I don’t know if I can or can’t or whatever. Right now all I do is rap, and between that and just being focused on my career and being a dad, I’m pretty much just a lab rat. But maybe one day I’ll figure that part out.

You said earlier that you’re as happy “as you can be.” You have this intense, productive but somewhat enclosed life.

You work, you’re a parent, and that’s basically it. Is that enough?

I’m not gonna just be, “Oh, I’m so fuckin’ happy, I’m this happy guy!” But I’m able to do what I love doing. There’s some parts I don’t love, but I’m living the dream I tried to fulfill, as far as being able to do hip-hop. I’m content for right now. I know the perception is that I don’t go out much or I don’t do things. But I am able to do some regular, everyday things. It’s not what 126

I’d like it to be. But if I do something or go somewhere, I just don’t announce it. I’m not in this for attention — and I know that probably sounds ridiculous — but all I ever really wanted to do, my ultimate dream, was to be respected by other MCs, my peers, to have KRS-One go, “Yo, that’s crazy.”

Mia Farrow, for some reason, tweeted not long ago, “I’m OVER Eminem.” Would you care to respond to that?

[Pauses] I’m over me too.

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“To the people I forgot, you weren’t on my mind for some reason and you probably don’t deserve any thanks anyway.”

- Eminem

THE POETIC GENIUS

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