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. Mathers said that was him: watching documentaries and 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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