Four years ago, Eminem, one of the best-selling rappers in history, released his last album of original material, Encore, and then essentially disappeared. The years since have been pockmarked with personal struggles. He entered rehab in 2005 for a dependency on sleep medication. In 2006 he remarried, and then redivorced, his ex-wife, Kim Scott, the subject of many of his most vitriolic songs. And that same year his closest friend, the rapper Proof, was killed in a shooting at a Detroit nightclub.
In his new book, The Way I Am, Eminem hopes to set the record straight. “I’m really just a normal guy. You can ask my neighbors,” he writes in the book. “I ride a bike. I walk the dog. I mow my lawn. I’m out there every Sunday, talking to myself, buck naked, mowing the lawn with a chain saw.”
Well, one out of three isn’t bad. “I do ride my bike, I don’t have a dog, I don’t mow my lawn,” Eminem, 36, admitted in a phone interview from a Detroit studio on Monday night last week. But otherwise he’s been living the life of a suburban father, taking care of three girls: Hailie, his daughter with Kim; Alaina, his niece; and Whitney, Kim’s daughter from another relationship.
And now Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, is tentatively re-entering public life with his book, published by Dutton this week. Part autobiography, part photo gallery, part ephemera collection, it’s a handsome midcareer (and midlife) roundup for an artist who has been notoriously reluctant to discuss his personal life anyplace but in his music.
“In a way this is the end of the first chapter of his career,” said Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager. “Em’s looking forward now. He’s very re-energized and refocused.”
Originally intended to be “a scrapbook for my fans,” Eminem said, the book grew to include large chunks of first-person narratives culled from interviews with the journalist Sacha Jenkins, and presented in a conversational style. “Rap is one big Fantasy Island,” Eminem writes. “It’s the place I always retreat to when things get too hectic in real time.”
In a section about his family and upbringing, he’s discomfitingly frank: “If you go back and look at the abuse that I took, it’s no surprise I became who I am. Someone I don’t really want to be.”
Jenkins said: “I think Em has an appeal that’s very everyman. That’s his natural voice in the book.” He added: “The guy has been out of the mix and not interacting with a lot of people, let alone a writer. But this was an opportunity for him to get a lot of stuff off his chest, especially in the wake of the death of his best friend.”
In fact Eminem’s memories of how Proof toughened him up as a young man are among the most vivid passages in The Way I Am. “As difficult as it was to talk about, I had to,” Eminem said. He also writes of how much his retreat from public life had to do with Proof’s death: “After he passed, it was a year before I could really do anything normally again. It was tough for me to even get out of bed, and I had days when I couldn’t walk, let alone write a rhyme. When I tried to put my thoughts together — well, I wasn’t making sense when I spoke, so everyone was trying to keep me off TV and away from the press.”
But while Eminem discusses some personal topics in the book — fatherhood gets especially lengthy treatment (“Being a dad makes me feel powerful in a way that I hadn’t known before, and it’s the kind of power I don’t want to abuse”) — he almost completely avoids other, more familiar subjects, like his exceedingly public battles with his ex-wife and his mother, Debbie. (Next month Eminem’s mother will release a memoir, My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem.)
“Everyone already knows how I feel about those situations,” Eminem said. “I don’t want to keep putting Kim and the kids in everything that I do, stuff where it’s not necessary.” The book, he said, is “more about Eminem and less about Marshall.”
MARSHALL MATHERS’ MEMENTOS
And so it’s the career artifacts, especially the handwritten lyrics, that receive a place of privilege.
For years Eminem would scribble down snatches of lyrics on whatever piece of paper was available — spiral notebooks, hotel memo pads — and carry them around in a backpack. When he wanted to put together a song, he’d riffle through the sheets, pick out some lines that might go together and head into the studio.
“I collect words and then I stack them up,” Eminem said of his songwriting process. Often he’d write lyrics in a sort of code, leaving key words out. His reasoning: “If you leave your rhyme pad laying around, no one can make sense of it but you.”
More than two dozen of the sheets are reproduced in the book, and they’re impressive in both content and appearance — lyrics scrawled at odd angles, in different ink colors, at lengths varying from a few words to complete verses. A few of them — ones that include lyrics from hits like My Name Is, Stan and Lose Yourself — are on perforated pages so that they can be easily removed.
“It reminds me of the sort of crazy scribbling and writing like Russell Crowe’s character in A Beautiful Mind,” said Rosenberg, referring to the Nobel Prize-winning economist John Nash. “It’s an organized chaos of thoughts.”
(As for any aspiring rappers thinking of appropriating the unused material, Eminem jokingly offered: “Whoever wants to use it, I guess, go ahead and use it. Take my scraps.”)
In an era when stars like Jay-Z famously do not write down their rhymes, instead constructing them in their head and committing them to memory, The Way I Am is a celebration of a sort of artisanal approach to rhyme.
“In the older hip-hop he has a connection to, lyric sheets have always played an important role,” Jenkins said. “He’s a traditionalist.”
In 2002 Eminem released the book Angry Blonde, largely a collection of lyrics — reprinted, not the original handwritten sheets — that sold about 77,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan. But that was near the height of his fame; this is a much less certain time for him. Still, “we never worried there wasn’t a market,” Rosenberg said. “He’s certainly done enough over his career to sustain interest, even with having stepped away for a couple of years.”
PROFANE AND PREPOSTEROUS
And now Eminem appears ready to return to the world of music. He has been recording with Dr. Dre, with whom he has made his biggest hits, working on songs for his next album, to be called Relapse. (There are rumors that the album will be released by Interscope before year’s end, but there has been no official word yet.) Last week he released a teaser freestyle, I’m Having a Relapse, on which he sounds vibrant and engaged, stacking characteristically profane and preposterous rhymes atop one another:
It seems like every day I get a little flakier
The medication is making my hands a little shakier
Hand me that 18-month-old baby to shake him up
It’ll only take me a
Second to choke his trachea
In one of the book’s most revealing sections, Eminem talks about how he happened upon his signature bottle-blond look, high on Ecstasy, around the time he was recording his first songs with Dr. Dre. It reads like a comic-book origin story, his new identity presaging a path of bad behavior to follow.
Now that he’s preparing to re-enter the music world, though, will the peroxide, and all that comes with it, return? “My hair is back to its natural color,” Eminem said. “I don’t think I’m going back to the dye.”
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