Eminem

About Proof's death ... When I say I went into a dark place, it feels like I literally crawled into a hole. There where days I'd sit around all day and take pills and try to numb myself. It was almost an excuse for me to take more pills, like I just lost Proof, so it's ok for me to take a couple of pills. I was spiralling out of control with my thoughts, with the drugs, with everything. When I would go into the studio, I kept trying to write songs about him. I think I might have wrote and recorded at least 5 or 6 songs about him. None of them came out the way I wanted them to, and all of them made me depressed. All of them made me go deeper into that hole... Nothing I wrote was good enough for him. Everything was like, self loathing. Did you ever take any personal responsibility for what happened to him? Yeah, I went through that kind of thing as well. I felt like "Well maybe if I would have been with him at the club that night... He knows I was trying to get him to chill out and stop going to the club so much". How much did you react to all the conflicting information that came out immediately following the incident? I got a bunch of conflicting stories, a bunch of conflicting things and none of them ever made sense to me. There were things that I"d heard that they were saying that Proof shot the dude first. It's so not his character to do that. There were other stories that matched what I knew Proof would have did. I had to go through the process in my head of like, regardless of what happened, it happened. It's not gonna bring him back. I don't know if I've accepted it is the right word but I'm dealing with it. Life for me will never be the same. With all the hype surrounding your comeback and with the terrible state of the record business, the hip hop business in particular, do you feel like you're coming back to save your label, or hip hop as a genre, or even the music industry as a whole? I don't know if I feel like I'm coming back to save anything like that. I mean obviously,if I can you know save the label and help generate more money for that, that's great too. But the truth is, i get bored just sitting around. I'm ready to be back out there. I love to be respected for the music that I make and that's what I'm in it for. The beautiful thing about this record is, I don't expect it to do anything... Money is not necessarily something that I need anymore, so I'm doing it because I want to do it. I'm doing it because I want people to hear the music and like the music.. if people like it, cool. If they don't they, don't. I certainly would like the benefits of what would come with it. If it could help generate more money for the label then that's good. But at the end of the day, it's just about the music. Pictures of you came out last year where it looked like you'd gained a lot of weight. You're back looking real chiseled now. What happened? I gained a bunch of weight in my time off. I got lazy. I was eating a lot, just because the pills make you feel hungry. Then just this past year, I got clean, I got sober, and I started running. I had a knee surgery last year but as soon as I could, I hit the treadmill. So I run every day. The last couple of weeks, I've been up to 10 miles a day. I've been trying to really push myself. Just to see how much I could actually run, but I don't know what the f**k I'm doing. At the end of the day, I'm an addict. So I have addictive behavior. So I'm obsessive compulsive about a lot of things. I'm obsessive compulsive about my music. I'm obsessive compulsive about working out. I can't do nothing in moderation. You'd think that the the signs like all the addiction runs in my family, I would have been a little more hip to that. But I just... I guess I wasn't. When did you know that it was time for you to go to rehab? There were a bunch of moments where I felt like, I want to do it, I want to do it. Ah, maybe now is not the time. Maybe I'll just do this for a little longer. I started realizing like I took a break from the spotlight and I felt like I wanted to be with my family and spend more time with my kids and stuff like that. But the whole time, I'm walking around the house high most of the time. So I'm missing out on the best parts of their lives. There were several moments. And it got to the point where the guilt that I started feeling inside for doing the s**t... I wasn't fooling anybody but myself. I had to come to that realization. At the time, I'm 35 years old, how long am I going to keep doing this? I felt like I needed to grow up, and if I didn't grow up, it was like now or never. Besides Dre, you've been working with 50 Cent again too. How is your relationship with 50? He's going through this whole battle with Rick Ross, with this Pimpin' Curly stuff. how do you view all of it? Mine and 50's relationship has always been the same. It's always been good. If anything, we've gotten closer in the last few years. 50 will just come to my house and stay the night. Stay the weekend in one of the bedrooms and just hang out. And we talk about s**t. I mean a lot of our talk is about music you know. But we just - we talk about s**t and we just make jokes and hang out. It doesn't always have to be about business. You know, he's going through this Rick Ross thing which is kinda his thing. I guess, you know, at the moment, it's just let 50 do 50. I think that the Pimpin' Curly s**t is f**kin' hilarious though. I'm sorry, to me that's when 50's at his best. When he's doing the funny s**t. In real life, 50's a f**kin' clown man. He's actually a really funny dude.

In an exclusive interview with Vibe magazine, Eminem
revealed that he almost died when he overdosed on pills he acquired
from an "acquaintance" and almost became one of music's greatest
casualties.



"My doctor told me those mysterious new pills were methadone, which is
used to wean heroin addicts off dope," Em told Vibe in its forthcoming
"Real Rap" issue.



"Had I known it was methadone, I probably wouldn't have taken it. But
as bad as I was back then, I can't even say 100 percent for sure. My
doctor told me the amount of methadone I'd taken was equivalent to
shooting up four bags of heroin. Even when they told me I almost died,
it didn't click."



Eminem confirmed the rumors that he was an addict and he began to identify with his mother during this time.



"It's no secret I had a drug problem," he said. "If I was to give you a
number of Vicodin I would actually take in a day? Anywhere between 10
to 20. Valium, Ambien, the numbers got so high I don't even know what I
was taking."



"I started looking around my house to see if I had a stash box of
Vicodin," he said. "I'm ransacking my house, finally find something in
the basement, in a little napkin, seven and a half Vicodin - the big
extra-strength ones - and a few Valium."



After Eminem relapsed, he finally admitted that he is an addict.



"It never once hit me that drug addiction runs in my family," he said.
"Now that I understand that I'm an addict, I definitely have compassion
for my mother. I get it."



Furthermore the rapper told Vibe that he has been sober for a year.



His highly anticipated album Relapse will hit stores on May 19.

La provocation a toujours été la marque de fabrique, pour ne pas dire
le fonds de commerce, d’Eminem. Des paroles explicitement sexuelles aux
remarques homophobes («The real Slim Shady») en passant par les
insultes envers son ex («Kim»), le rappeur américain est un habitué des
petites phrases créant l’émoi de la censure et des bonnes familles
américaines. Pourtant, celui qui s’est imposé au sein du club très
fermé des cadres du hip-hop par son ton mêlant efficacement humour
féroce et rage en équilibre instable est aujourd’hui épinglé par
plusieurs sites qui dénoncent une surenchère de violence dans son
dernier clip «3 am», deuxième extrait de son nouvel album «Relapse»
dont la sortie est prévue en mai prochain. Le rappeur y campe en effet
un tueur psychopathe dopé à l’hémoglobine. A voir ici:







Outre la vidéo, dont la réalisation est soignée et efficace, les
paroles de la chanson, dont certaines évoquent le dépeçage d’un homme
avant la dégustation de son sang, sont un peu trop explicites au goût
de certains. «L’histoire brutale de ''3 am'' rappelle celle de son hit
''Stan'', en 2000. Mais cette chanson est sans doute la plus sinistre
du rappeur car il y détaille soigneusement la façon dont il s’y prend
pour tuer tous ces gens», souligne le magazine britannique «NME». Une évolution de plus en plus sombre qui n’a pas échappé non plus au magazine américain «Rolling Stone».
«Lorsqu’Eminem a prévenu ses fans que ''3 am'' serait bien plus noir
que le sarcastique ''We Made You'' (premier extrait de son nouvel album
à venir, ndlr), il ne plaisantait pas. Et ''plus noir'' est un
euphémisme», note le magazine qui défend néanmoins le talent du
chanteur. «Malgré des paroles horribles, "3 am" bénéficie du beat
inspiré de Dr. Dre et la cadence infernale du flow de Slim Shady prouve
qu’il a passé du temps à expérimenter sa prose.»

«The Boston Globe»
n’est pas de cet avis. Pour le journal, cette «histoire d’horreur»,
bien que traversée «d’interludes lyriques», «est surtout une ''DOA''».
Soit «dead on arrival» qui signifie qu'une personne était déjà morte à
son arrivée à l'hôpital. «The Boston Globe» sous-entend ainsi que le
chanteur, en sommeillant si longtemps
depuis son dernier album «Encore» en 2004, aurait perdu son talent.
Réponse le 18 mai, date présumée (après plusieurs reports) de la sortie
de «Relapse».