an article in the NY Times about Relapse
I love this article because it explains almost exactly how and why Relapse.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/arts/ ... wanted=allif you have forgotten what was in this article, it's very interesting.
for lazy people
but you should read all.
it speaks about Insane, Beautiful and others..
Far from concealing his addiction battle, he’s making it the center of his comeback. The cover of “Relapse” (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope), 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.
“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.
Now, a decade into his major-label career, “I’m done explaining it,” he said. “Here’s my music. Here’s what it is. Get what you get from it. I didn’t get in this game to be a role model.”
Both Eminem and Dr. Dre thought hard about how Eminem should re-emerge. And both concluded that the world wanted more Slim Shady. “I talked to my son about it,” said Dr. Dre, “and he was like: ‘The kids want to hear him act the fool. We want to hear him be crazy, we want to hear him be Slim Shady and nothing else.’ ”
“Once he makes a painting, once he lays a lyric down, it’s impossible to get him to change it,” Dr. Dre said. “If there’s a couple of lines he says on a record that’s not relevant today, it’s, ‘No, that was that painting. That was for that moment.’ “
Dom Theodore, vice-president for Top 40 pop programming at CBS Radio, had mixed expectations for “Relapse” because Eminem’s hits had always been his humorous ones. “This album tends to be a little darker,” he said. “It’s still edgy, but not in a fun way. But I’d never write him off. You’d be hard pressed to find someone more talented.”