In late December 2007 a depressed, writer’s-blocked, pill-popping, opiate-addicted Marshall Mathers, better known as the multimilllion-album 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 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. 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, 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 US, according 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,” 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 on-stage 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.
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.”
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