Smartarse rap royalty Eminem has ditched the drugs and emerged from his hip-hop hibernation
You haven’t put out an album since 2004. What the f–k have you been up to?
Not much. To make
a long story short,
I guess I wanted to step away from the spotlight for a while. I wanted to produce records. I battled a pretty serious [drug] addiction problem and I just wanted to reassess and re-evaluate my life, and I guess where I wanted to be
in my career. I spent three or four years out of that time battling
my drug addiction, and I’ve spent
a little over a year sober now.
Sober? Enough of the scary talk.
Did you ever think that, after all that time away, your audience might not give a shit anymore?
Yeah. There were several times within that break that I questioned myself. I didn’t know whether
I still had it. The case of writer’s block that I had was pretty bad, so
I started to question myself – "Can I do it again?" Also, I was trying to take input from different places. I’d ask [album producer Dr] Dre, "What do you think people wanna hear from me?" and the best advice he gave me was, "People wanna hear you lose your f–king mind again."
I was like, "OK". You know, I heard things like, "He should reinvent himself. He should come back completely different," and I thought to myself, "No, I don’t. I just need to go back to what made me in the first place."
Your music switches around a lot. Sometimes you take the piss, then you tell dark stories. Do you reckon you have to balance that shit?
Yeah. I mean, kind of. When I make records, I’m human, so there’s different sides to me, naturally,
in real life. When you’re making
a record, you don’t want to make
it too dark, but you don’t wanna make it too light – you wanna have a balance between everything.
On your new song "3am", and in the film clip, you cast yourself as a serial killer. You know punters are going to say you’ve gone too far again.
That’s great – I hope they do.
Do you reckon you can go too far with your lyrics?
I don’t think I can. I haven’t gone far enough yet. I’ve just begun.
Do you push the smartarse crap for the hell of it, or just for chuckles?
It’s both – it’s my sense of humour, it’s the way I think. It’s just all different sides. When I sit down to write, there’s no formula that I go in with and say, "I’m gonna make this kind of song or I’m gonna talk about this." It’s whatever the beat’s telling me to do, ya know what I mean?
Sasha Perer
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