On April 20, a pop superstar credibly described as the best rapper of all time posted the above uncaptioned photo on Instagram, the “16” representing the number of years he’s now been sober.
I saw this recently and have to say it stopped me. Because, whenever I imagine Eminem being sober — just a dude, trying to stay clean one day at a time, being honest and accountable, carrying the message, practicing the principles — while somehow remaining Eminem, I think: Jesus, how does that work?
How does someone doing that recovery stuff still write and record the kind of vicious, speed-freak, free associative, internally rhyming, pressured-speech flights of ideas that are 85-percent assaults on people and institutions he doesn't like and 15-percent chaos magic? Why isn't he either dead or shitty on the mike? He’s made seven serious Eminem albums since he left rehab. I don’t get it.
I can see how first-wave sober rock stars like Eric Clapton and Elton John worked a program while remaining productive in their particular vein. I can see how James Hetfield, Steven Tyler, Anthony Kiedis, or Ozzy Osborne might live that lifestyle while shambling, romping, strutting, or belting it out in public appearances and recording studios. I can see how Trent Reznor could go from the obsessive, compulsive, self-harming behavior that drove Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral to the obsessive, compulsive, self-maintaining behavior that drove later NIN albums like the Ghost series and film scores with Atticus Ross. But dude: the raw computing power it must take to square Eminem's particular circle, to reconcile Marshall M with Slim Shady, would be enough to power several block-chain farms for years.
You can almost see it vibrating in his TV appearances: in the dark burning glare he directs at whoever he's talking to, in the measured way he speaks, his almost audible verbal restraint.
I interviewed Eminem at two different periods in his drama-filled rise to the top and while he was quick, thoughtful, and disarmingly honest, there was still this edgy Madonna vibe around him, where you felt you were always just one bad question away from getting kicked out of the moving car.
That vibe seemed like an inevitable side-effect of whatever neuroatypicality and mike-battle training generates track after track of head-smackingly dense, funny, virtuosic lyrics that all have a toxic center.
A la: My thoughts are sporadic/I act like I’m an addict/I rap like I’m addicted to smack/Like Kim Mathers" (Kim Mathers being the mother of his child).
Or: Cool, calm, just like my mom/With a couple of Valium up inside her palm/It's Mr. Mischief with a trick up his sleeve/Roll up on you like Christopher Reeves (in reference to his addiction-plagued mom and the quadriplegic actor).
At the time, the omnidirectional cruelty and bad taste read, to me at least, like genre fiction. It worked because Eminem was just so sick on the mike and because he encoded meta-awareness into his rhymes (Will Smith doesn’t have to sell records/Well I do, so fuck him and fuck you”; “I don’t got that bad of a mouth, do I?/Fuck-shit-ass-bitch-cunt, shoobitty-do-wah,” etc).
As a hip-hop fan in Em’s age demo, I never perceived much sincere animosity in these lyrics — the off-stage outbursts were different — because they all felt like increasingly surreal extensions of his foundational crazy-white-boy persona, word-mad variations on a theme that Eminem tweaked as he blew up, turning media outrage into part of his brand synergy. They made sense in context, a quality that today’s media has, shall we say, devalued.
Because, out of context, Eminem’s tactics look depressingly like "owning the libs,” and, as much as I hate to say this, the grudges, pointless beefs, cripple jokes, and asymmetric responses to every single perceived slight suggest no public figure more than the GOP's current candidate for president. A guy whose fans probably get a similar charge from the slower, wheezier, dumber, and more incoherent non-musical version President Shady gives them.
If Walter Benjamin was right in calling fascism an aestheticization of politics, the problem may be when we mistake shock-jock entertainers for political leaders and, God forbid, elect them. (btw: can you imagine what a drag it would be if Kid Rock could rap like Eminem?)
Anyway, we’ve still got another two decades of career to gloss here. Stay with me, there’s a point here.
After 8 Mile rebranded the bratty bleach-blonde imp of the perverse as a verbal Rocky Balboa, the dark-haired, hollow-eyed Eminem proceeded as a Detroit working-class hero, chose righteous political enemies (Bush 2, President Shady), lost a close friend to gun violence and four years to a downward pharmaceutical spiral. After which, newly sober, he put out Relapse, which sounded newly sober, though in "Deja Vu" it had one of the best — by which I mean, most vivid, truthful, real — accounts of addiction I've heard or seen in any medium. Like scenes from Under the Volcano, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and David Carr’s Night of the Gun in rap verse.
Then, Recovery set his undiminished mike skills against soaring anthemic pop tracks suitable for NBA intros and gaming, plus a great duet with Rhianna. And while he maintained exceptionally high standards over his next three albums — including the Guinness World Record-setting, 1,560-word song "Rap God," off The Marshall Mathers LP 2 — I have to confess that my favorite soundbite that emerged from last decade's Eminem was a guest spot on Big Sean's 2017 song "No Favors," wherein he called our then-president a "bitch" and expressed picturesque hostility towards commentator Ann Coulter, prompting her rebuttal.
"I think it's unfortunate that the left, from Berkeley to Eminem with his rap songs, has normalized violence against women, as Eminem has done,” she said. To which this Berkeley-grad Eminem fan can only say: Go Bears!
After this, the problem is less what happened to Eminem than what happened to the art form that made him. Instead of me pretending to understand why hip-hop fans like Drake, let me just say that it’s hard to see where an MC like the 51-year-old Eminem fits into today's rap world.
I’m by no means up on every hip-hop-designated artist coming out today — as I said, I’m in Eminem’s age demo — but the majority of youngish male rap artists I hear seem to exist in a state of dissociation if not active drug addiction. The top tier is dominated by 35-ish millionaires gossiping about one another, the rest seems filled with younger emo dudes rapping about the woozy misery of being depressed or blunted, slurring their numb and numbing rhymes through Autotune, expressing futility, hopelessness, nausea, and other symptomatology — composed not through writing, but through punching-in, with increasingly recognizable effects.
All of which makes Eminem's recent appearance, with benny blanco on the Chicago rapper Juice WRLD's "Lace It," hit different. And maybe as hard as anything I've heard from him.
I don't know the timeline, but I assume that Eminem got this track sometime after late 2019, which means that, like the rest of us, he first heard the chorus — "roll it up, lace it, pop a few to chase it" — as being sung by someone who died of an overdose at age 21. "Lace It" isn't Eminem's first posthumous collaboration — a plainly creepy endeavor hip-hop has made almost prosaic — but it's one of the starkest and most poignant.
Even if I weren't already allergic to this style of blunted emo rapping, Juice Wrld's slurred lyrics about being so stressed that he takes meds, pops Percocet etc. would be unlistenable to me. They are unlistenable to me. They have the same zombie aura as all these posthumous releases where flesh-and-blood vocalists are kept in suspended animation, talking to a world they never knew, except that this particular one already sounds dead on his feet.
But then comes Eminem's lyrics: 56 bars and 300 words that an addiction counselor I know called the truest portrait of addiction he's ever heard, all of it seemingly addressed to the other person on the track.
His first chorus charts a successful person’s slow, then quick, descent from casual use to self-medication to dependence to self-hatred, slavery, and living death. The second rhymingly names the specific drugs that likely killed seven or eight famous artists whose obits downplayed their cause of death despite everyone around them knowing it.
The verbal pharmacopia — fentanyl, oxycodone, lean, Xanax, valium, benzos, Demerol — has filled rap songs for the past fifteen years. And Eminem, who was apparently listening and sober throughout this time, finishes his message with the rhyme: "Juice, we will forever miss you/To the younger generation/I ain't lecturin' you/But man, just be careful when you...(roll it up, lace it, etc.)
So I guess the answer to how the hell that works — Eminem being sober while remaining Eminem — is in a song like that. Maybe it's also in an upcoming album I recently saw teased: The Death of Slim Shady. More will be revealed. A belated happy sweet sixteen to Marshall M.