Relapse by Eminem
Relapse is the sixth studio album by American rapper Eminem, released on May 15, 2009 by Interscope Records. It was his first album of original material since Encore (2004), following a four-year hiatus from recording due to his writer's block and an addiction to prescription sleeping medication. Recording sessions for the album took place during 2007 to 2009 at several recording studios, and Dr. Dre, Mark Batson, and Eminem handled production. Conceptually, Relapse concerns the ending of his drug rehabilitation, rapping after a non-fictional relapse, and the return of his Slim Shady alter-ego. One of the most anticipated album releases of 2009, Relapse debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling 608,000 copies in its first week. It produced three singles that attained chart success and has been certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. The album received generally mixed reviews from most music critics, who were mostly divided in their responses towards Eminem's lyrics. It earned him two Grammy Awards and has sold 2.2 million copies in the United States and 5 million copies worldwide.
The first verse on 2009’s <i>Relapse</i> starts with the line, “You’re walkin’ down a horror corridor/It’s almost four in the mornin’ and you’re in a/Nightmare, it’s horrible.” Typical Eminem scenario. But students of rap history might also hear it as a sly allusion to horrorcore, a short-lived subgenre characterised by rappers saying the most extreme, violent and generally unpalatable stuff possible. An artist with this many murder fantasies under his belt has a high bar to clear here, and Eminem does so energetically, whether it’s the image of him playing ping-pong with his own eyeball on “Insane”, or the unprintable details of his plans for the “two brain-dead lesbian vegetables” on “Bagpipes From Bagdad”. He’s sick—sick, he tells ya! However ugly Eminem’s thoughts, they had nothing on real life. He later said his pill addiction had gotten so severe that, in the months following a 2007 overdose, he had to relearn how to rap the way, say, a stroke victim might have to relearn how to talk. (His manager, Paul Rosenberg, went a step further, asking doctors if he’d suffered permanent brain damage.) A grim image. But on the other hand, a strangely hopeful one: “I remember when I first got sober and all the shit was out of my system,” he told Rosenberg on a podcast several years later. “I remember just being, like, really happy. And everything was fucking new to me again.” With <i>Relapse</i>, the sweeping societal indictments and grave self-examinations were paused to make room for strangling Lindsay Lohan with an extension cord (“Same Song & Dance”) and venting yet more hatred for the mother that, according to Em, got him interested in drugs in the first place (“My Mom”). The relapse wasn’t the pills—it was Slim Shady.
