White Rage and the Riffing Cure: An Analysis of Eminem’s Relapse

This is the second of a two-part series on Eminem by Lisa Aslanian. For the first part, see White Rage: Eminem, the Bad Boy from Detroit. -Jeff

Eminem’s Relapse does not deliver a clean rise from the ashes, a smooth transition from high to sober — far from it. The album, which Eminem released after he came out of rehab for the second time, resolutely off drugs, challenges our assumptions about therapy, creativity and what exactly it means to be cured.

Eminem’s sobriety does not blunt the dark and dank isolation that characterizes the artist and his work (there is very little collaboration on the album), it sharpens it. The music and Eminem himself seem looser. The rhymes are still agile and dense, but the subject matter — child molestation, serial murder and exhausting digressions on being high — is even more profane and harder to take.

Critics tore the album apart. Many accused Eminem of trading in shock value and playing for laughs. A few called the work forgettable, the latest in nasty, a summer blockbuster. A critic for the LA Times expressed dismay that the rapper’s critique of therapy was not explicit enough (I have no idea what it means to accuse an artist of not delivering an obvious enough critique) but all critics conceded that Eminem remains an unparalleled linguistic contortionist, bending and twisting words (see reviews here, here, here, and here). He used his skill to chronicle addiction and beating addiction, including all of the filthy phantasms that haunt him along the way.

Relapse showcases his talent and his feel for unbridled truth, and — here is where you should pay attention — the album is linked to his past (immaturity, self-absorption and fear of failure) and gestures, briefly, toward his future, or a sense that maybe Eminem is, even outside of stardom, worthwhile.

As critics and listeners, we ought to say first what the album is, before we can consider what it is not. To get at (and get) the work, three concepts from the great grandfather of therapy, Sigmund Freud are useful: therapy, the self, and repetition. Freud argued that therapy, or the talking cure — in Eminem’s case, the riffing cure — could achieve, at its best, a conscious relationship between our consciousness (or our ego) and our unconscious desires (or our id).

He explained further that self and culture are founded on the sacrifice of our deepest pleasures, killing and fucking. Therapy offers not a cure (we don’t get to go out and kill and fuck and even if we did, hedonism also leads to despair) but a way of dealing with loss — if we talk about our longings and our pain, we have a shot of living a moral life — put in layman’s terms — of not acting out. The Freudian worldview is bleak: civilization and civilized pleasures, such as art, pale next to our base and blood thirsty satisfactions, and therein lies the rub. (For where I get my vision of Freud and old school moralism, see Freud: The Mind of the Moralist by Philip Rieff, Love’s Body and Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown, and Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle,)

On Relapse, the opening dialogue between an earnest Eminem, leaving rehabilitation and undermined by the guard letting him out is an incisive and carnivalesque (a touch of Clockwork Orange and Pink Floyd) commentary on a genre of authority that gleefully and cynically sabotages, as if to say see you back here; the whole process is a joke (on you).

But note — we have a sincere Eminem, taking a deep breath as he steps out into the world that originally landed him in the facility. The next two songs detail drug use, imagined serial murder and love/hate/merging with his mother. “3 a.m.” brings us Eminem high. He is “Swallowing the Calotapin/While I’m nodding in and out on the ottoman/ At the Ramada Inn holding onto the pill bottle then/ lick my finger and swirl it round the bottom.” The stanza captures the lonely to the bone hell of the user, and Eminem is paranoid, envisioning himself in the “horror corridor” as he tries to get away from the coroner who wants to kill him “in front of an audience.” Then, the black out and the dead bodies littering his floor — rage, paranoia and addiction, riffed as ugly and a painful as they are.

In the next tune, he tells us that he got his taste for valium from his mother. The refrain says it all: “My mom loved valium and lots of drugs/ That’s why I am like I am ‘cause ‘m like her/ Because my mom loved valium and lots of drugs/ That’s why I’m on what I’m on because I’m my mom.” He later launches into an aching ode to the drug: “My valium, my valium.” Here he adores his drugs, hates and loves and identifies (fully) with his mother — but he remains slightly stuck, blaming her. The song conveys the inescapability of his pill addiction; it is his inheritance.

In the next few songs, Eminem raps about raping and killing starlets Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears and jerking off in front of the TV to Miley Cyrus. His sadistic longing to further debase two troubled women who already do an excellent job of degrading themselves is hard to listen to — the sadism is pure, uncut. He wants to kill women who are killing themselves — women who go in and out of rehab, women who fully and publicly display their pain, as the (sadistic) public turns away or adds more injury to insult.

First, the songs document Eminem’s deep tedium, his depression. His song about Lohan is thus titled “Same Song and Dance.” It (life) is all the same blank nothing for him. Second, the songs are as much about his desire to torture pathetic women as they are about his deep fear of being like them — in and out of rehab, in agony, unable to hide his pain and defenseless (limp) in the face of his childhood demons.

Eminem wrote Replase after his second round of rehab. He knows, as all addicts do, that he will never lose the desire for the drugs. When Eminem writes: “Hello Lindsay, you’re lookin’ a little thin, hun/ How ‘bout a ride to rehab, get in, cunt/ It’s starting’ off on the wrong foot is what I didn’t wan’t/ Girl, I’m just kiddin’, let me start over again, hun’/ See what I meant was, we should have a little intervention/ Come with me to Brighton, let me relieve your tension,” he is also talking to himself and fending off (via art and confession) his suicidal longings, which eventually overwhelm him — same song and dance.

The songs and parts of songs wherein Eminem imagines being raped by his mom’s boyfriend as his mother did nothing are meaningless if we approach them for a literal truth. These are stories of how it felt to feel neglected, overlooked and punished for being alive. Again, therapy does not offer a cure — no panacea, nothing to dull the pain. What we get instead — Eminem’s riffs make this clear — is a trip through our unconscious, unaided and unfettered. On offer in Eminem’s rehab album is his experience of rehab, of therapy — his tense and productive (he does make music of it) relationship to the musings and desires that drove him to use.

To the critics who say he plays this for laughs, I ask where the joke is –none of it is funny. To the critics who insist that he dishes out shock, that he is just upping the ante, I ask where they were when he sang “Bonnie and Clyde,” and I ask if they have ever been honest with themselves in therapy or — and I assume everyone has had this experience –woken from a dream so terrifying they could barely breathe.

Let me lodge one final complaint in the form of a rhetorical question: why go out of your way to tease out the rapper’s motive instead of looking at what stares you dead in the face. The rehab album is full of songs about dope, withdrawal and therapy — shocking, the rehab album is about rehab.

One song, “Beautiful” (music video below) — just one, but the difference between none and one is infinite — is Eminem’s break through song, wherein he starts to riff his way out of repetition. The refrain “Don’t let ‘em say you ain’t beautiful/ They can all get fucked, just stay true to you/ So don’t let them say you ain’t beautiful/ They can all get fucked, just stay true to you,” is sung to the audience, himself and I think his child.

In the remainder of the song, he talks about being under it, lonely, cold, dark and unable to shake it off. He talks about reaching out and empathy as well as the adolescent and pedestrian desire to fit in, to be free of the hell that leaves him so ash bellied, so lonely. Not only are the lyrics brutally honest, they mark the first step, the creation out of nowhere, of something new — first, a new relationship between self and self, and second a new relationship between self and other, a relationship wherein Eminem is able to love. If he can see himself as beautiful (he knows it is “corny”) then he can see others that way, too. It is the only ballad written and executed solely by Eminem — no Dre.

The album ends as it begins, with a staged conversation. This time Eminem visits his producer or lawyer, who greets him with fury for dropping out of the music scene for five years, and Eminem, again almost childlike in his honesty, apologizes and says he had a drug problem. The producer, like Eminem’s critics, interprets his drug problem as just another infantile cry for attention.

Really, why not just a drug problem? A living hell that Eminem lived through and refused to lie about, or buffer — instead he made moving music of it.

Relapse is about the relentless relapse that is therapy and that is his art — he intended to return by paradoxically relapsing into his former talent as he sharpened his edge and (starts to) open his heart to less bitter truths.