
Frank Micelotta/Getty ImagesĮminem 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. “You’re only going to make me worse now.”Įminem with 50 Cent, center, and Dr. “It ended up pushing my buttons,” he said. 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. Often they have the bouncy beat and singsong choruses of kiddie music. Dre has long provided clean, crisp tracks that are far from ominous. 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.īut the music for songs like those is reassuring, even perky. Mathers’s real daughter (who lives with him in Detroit) while disposing of her mother’s murdered corpse. In “97 Bonnie & Clyde” from the 1999 “Slim Shady LP,” the rapper takes along his gurgly baby daughter named Hailie, like Mr.

Mathers has smeared the boundary between Eminem and Slim Shady. In seven months I accomplished more than I could accomplish in three or four years doing drugs.”įrom the beginning Mr.

“The deeper I got into my addiction, the tighter the lid got on my creativity,” he said. They have culled them to two Eminem plans to release “Relapse 2” before the end of this year. Dre recorded hundreds of tracks and finished enough new songs for three albums. When he was sober, he said, “the wheels started turning again.” Working in Orlando and then in Detroit, Eminem and Dr. “For three or four years I couldn’t do it any more.” “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. Eminem had been doing what he called “mind exercises” to get himself writing. Dre met in Orlando, Fla., to try recording. 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.”īut last year, just two months out of rehab, Eminem met Dr. “I want to see what I looked like when I was on drugs, so I never go back to it,” he said. 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.

“Relapse” clings to the formula of its predecessors: it’s partly truth and partly fiction, with personal revelations and sociopathic farce side by side.
Legal eminem discography serial#
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.Įminem’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, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 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. Mathers, 36, says he has stayed sober since April 20, 2008.įar from concealing his addiction battle, he’s making it the center of his comeback.
Legal eminem discography full#
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. Mathers had ramped up his habit again.īut the overdose scared him. Public statements covered up the reason for his emergency hospitalization and detox, claiming the problem was pneumonia. 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.
