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.

Eminem’s rise from the rubble is well known. A shy white boy from East Detroit, Eminem was trailer park trash raised by a single mother who was often too high to mother. He regularly changed schools, repeated the ninth grade three times and was constantly bullied. By retreating inward — he read the dictionary and riffed rhymes at the floor — Marshal Mathers (M&M) found his way around ridicule and attack.

Like most rappers, words were Eminem’s weapon and escape. Unlike most rappers, however, Eminem is white. He stands out like a sore thumb. The lyrics that express his deep sense of isolation and vulnerability otherwise absent from rap are twice born — first, he uses rap to talk about growing up “white trash, broke and always poor” and second, he is a white dude in a nearly all black art form, and he believes he is isolated, rejected and often singled out because of the color of his skin.

Eminem does boast but what he brags about having, and having in spades, is unbeatable talent. His linguistic prowess is undeniable, but what separates him is not really his skill — I am not here to say who the best rapper is, though most claim the title — it is what he uses his skill to express: anxiety, timidity, envy and rage. When Eminem digresses on the many shades of depression, he extends rap’s emotional range beyond its hyper-macho comfort zone.

On the debut album 8 Mile, in “Lose Yourself,” Eminem says he cannot:

Stay in one spot, another day of monotony

Has gotten to me, to the point I’m like a snail I’ve got

To formulate a plot, or end up in jail or shot

Success is my only motherfuckin’option, failure’s not

Mom I love you, but this trailer’s got to go

I cannot grow old in Salem’s Lot

So here I go it’s my shot, feet fail me not

This may be the only opportunity that I got

The stanzas stack tricky syncopations, bury rhymes mid-sentence and trade on illusions of life outside of “Salem’s Lot.” But the young punk trapped in a dead-end life agonizes over his cowardice — he fears undermining self sabotage (feet fail me not) and rues that this may be it, his only shot.

The writing is airtight. Even the seeming throw-away “motherfuckin’” has meaning.  Eminem is terrified of repeating his mother’s blighted fate.

All three Eminem songs on the first album are about performance anxiety (listen to “Run Rabbit Run” with lyrics below). He says he is “nervous,” and, continuing to speak of himself in the third person, describes his feelings as follows “his arms are heavy,” and his “palms are sweaty” and reassures himself “I got all the ingredients/ all I need is the courage.” Ultimately, he triumphs and his talent rips and reigns.

Eminem is white trash. His whiteness alienates him. He writes: “But I’m still white, sometimes I just hate life/ Somethin ain’t right, hit the brake lights.” Being white is a source of despair, or hating life, and makes him feel off, like something is not right.

On The Slim Shady LP, race is introduced in the title with Slim Shady, Eminem’s nickname. Slim refers to his frame and shady to his color. The resonance of the word shady goes beyond the obvious double entendre into the limbo Eminem feels because shady, in so far as it connotes neither white nor black, conjures up a racial purgatory. Eminem raps a charged anomie:

Some people only see that I’m white, ignoring skill

Cause I stand out like a green hat with a orange bill

But I don’t get pissed, y’all don’t see through the mist

How the fuck can I be white

I don’t even exist

I get a clean shave, bathe, go to a rave

Die from an overdose and dig myself up out of my grave

My middle finger won’t go down, how do I wave?

And this is how I’m supposed to teach kids how to behave?

Initially, Eminem’s verbal agility went unnoticed. His color made him a target, a sitting duck. Not at home in his skin — “How the fuck can I be white” he feels invisible, non-existent. Anger becomes indifference, and finally he proves resilient: “dig(ging) myself out of my grave.”

Eminem feels isolated, and I take this very seriously, but it would be unfair of me not to note that, once his skill was noted, major talents threw their weight behind him, from Jay Z to 50 Cent. Throughout his battle with drugs, black rappers have been there to help him, to the extent that anyone can help someone who wrestles with addiction. And, Eminem has collaborated with most major rap artists and gets many of his beats from his creative partner Dr Dre.

The Slim Shady LP is nearly all rage, with songs about robbery, murder and rape. In his perversion of the outlaw love story “Bonnie and Clyde 97,” Eminem riffs about murdering his wife and dumping her body. He flees the law with his daughter, who he shields from the crime as he details it in, by turns, deadpan and lavish rhyme. Fantasies this dark usually remain buried, scenting a way out of the corners of our consciousness in our dreams. For Eminem, however, dreams this dark — he wrote the song when he was angry with his wife — are the stuff of art.

Murderous rage shares the stage with suicidal desire. Consider the opening lines of the first tune: “since age 12, I felt like I was someone else because I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt.” In his dance number with the crassly loaded title “Cum on Everybody” (get down tonight), he sings “I tried suicide once and I’ll try it again/that’s why I always write songs where I die in the end” — and then the suicidal urge flips to indifference “but I don’t give a fuck/like my middle finger was stuck” and returns to suicide later in the song, “if you ever see a video for this shit/ I’ll probably be dressed up like a mummy with my wrists slit.” And he confesses he wants “to murder all the rich rappers that I’m jealous of.” With breathless rhymes, Eminem’s songs oscillate between tales of murder and imaginings of suicide.

The mobile home was no home. Eminem was white trash, tossed out and left to rot. He articulates his feelings of apathy, rejection and being stuck:

I’m tired of jobs startin off at five fifty an hour

then this boss wonders why I’m smartin off

I’m tired of being fired everytime I fart and cough

Tired of having to work as a gas station clerk

for this jerk breathing down my neck driving me bezerk

I’m tired of using plastic silverware

Tired of working in Building Square

Tired of not being a millionaire….

The repetition of the word tired mimics tedium. The first line alone has five short is — in fact, the entire stanza has several short is of the first person singular — most lines, grouped in twos or threes, house several internal rhymes — startin and smartin or off and cough— or work, clerk, jerk, beserk. Eminem’s scabby reality is figured metonymically. Using plastic silverware, working at Builder’s Square and working as a gas station clerk serve as glib verbal shorthand for lower-middle class drudgery.

We know how the story ends. Eminem scribbled and spit his way out of hell. Yet he never seemed less lonely. He prayed “god understand,” rapped his rage and finally tried to fill or kill the void with enough drugs to land him in the hospital once and re-hab twice.

His second act, which we treat in the next post, opens like the first. With a Phoenix-like rise from the ashes, Eminem dropped Relapse, wherein he raps about his not very macho cry for help and his painful struggle for sobriety. Relapse returns us to (it relapses) the heart of the skittish and skinny misfit.

In The Atlantic, several prominent music critics reviewed “Watch the Throne,” the fabulous collaboration between Kanye West and Jay Z. Again, critics are angry about the subject matter. The song “That’s My Bitch” met with this reaction — it is the only song where Jay sings about B, and in the song, he does not adequately sing the praises of monogamy. First, he does more than sing about B (his wife, Beyoncé Knowles) — he enters her, as a black woman, into the pantheon of women men dream about (like Marilyn Monroe) and second, yes, he is “crass” and “protective” because he is saying, with cheek and guile, “that’s my girl.”

A host of questions ensue. Do we really associate musical maturity with our image of a monogamous family man? Do we ask our artists to promote social constraints, or do we want our art to articulate fantasy and felt experience? Does the egregiously simple image of maturity= monogamy play on a host of stereotypes about black men — not being monogamous, leaving their families, etc. and even if these stereotypes are partially true — is it the place of music and its’ critics to address them?

Jay Z has assumed enormous social responsibility. He openly discusses his early years dealing crack, cautioning young people not to do it by saying “you will end up in jail or dead.” He is philanthropic. Must we ask that his music, his fantasy, his creativity — his art — be as pedestrian and unambiguous as his politics?

Here is another loopy bit from the monogamy-happy review — another reviewer decided that the rapper in a steady marriage (Jay) sounded happier than the rapper who has yet to wed (Kanye). Huh? I have gone back repeatedly in search of this happiness (because the reviewer does not ground the comment) and for the life of me I cannot figure out what the hell she means — they both sound happy — at the top of their games.

***

Two years ago, young Jeezy and Jay sang a euphoric song about Obama, wherein they brag about their diamonds and lambos. Another critic for The Atlantic was offended by their lack of sensitivity to the recession. Again, an odd content based criticism that seems designed to avoid the song as a song. What is left out of the review is central to the song’s power and political relevance. The song goes from bling to racially charged politics and celebratory verse:

My president is black, in fact, he’s half white, so even in a racist mind, he’s half right, if you have a racist mind, you be light, my president is black, but is  house is all WHITE, Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk, Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run, Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly, So Ima spread my wings and you can meet me in the sky.

The opening is noise — or boys being boys — then the song takes off, veering into rap’s real home, the tortured story of race in America.

***

Rap is forever political.

Back to Reagan’s America.  Rodney King was mercilessly beaten beyond repair by white cops. The cops walked and riots ensued — blacks destroyed their own neighborhood in fits of impotent rage as ghetto birds (helicopters) hovered above the scene. N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” was an artistic retort to the King beating — in the tune, the tables are turned and the rappers restage the courtroom drama with themselves in charge. The real issue — racist cops and racial profiling — are put on trial.

The album dropped in 1988 — and from Reagan to Bush and early Clinton, little changed. In 1995, OJ was acquitted.  Whites were horrified and blacks were thrilled. Finally, a black man got away with murder. The reaction to OJ’s acquittal reveals that, in 1995, race relations were as tense as ever and blacks still felt held under the spell of the Rodney King travesty.

During the 80s and 90s, racial profiling on the highways was out of control. Blacks coined the phrase “driving while black” to nab the violation they routinely committed. Jay’s “99 Problems and the Bitch Ain’t One” is a complex tale wherein some black guys are driving on the highway (with drugs in the car, locked in the glove compartment and the trunk) and the cops pull them over for no reason, or “doing 55 in a 54” — an absurdity. As the story unfolds, the guys running drugs assert their rights and the cops call the canine unit and while waiting for the “bitches” to come, the cops get another call so they have to release the guys running drugs. Both sides are in the wrong, but we are not on the side of the police; we are on the side of the guys being harassed.

L’il Wayne spins a tawdry melody of power and its reversal, wherein a female cop pulls him over but wants him to “fuck the police.” (The music video is below.) His allusion to N.W.A. is completed in the lyrics with a shout-out to Rodney King. He writes of the lady cop: ” I make her wear nothing but handcuffs & heels/ And I beat it like a cop/ Rodney King baby yeah I beat it like a cop…” — it is a sexy play on fucking power, and before we see it as too simple, the video features Wayne tied up, in a submissive position while the officer does her thing — she, too, beats it like a cop.

We are in the here and now and the issue of police brutality and racial profiling are alive and kicking. “Watch the Throne” has a song about black on black murder “Murder to Excellence” with lyrics that decry “314 soldiers dies in Iraq; 509 died in Chicago,” and also celebrates blackness: “it is all black, I love us.”   The tune “Who Gon Stop Me” reaches back into imagery of whippings (“black strap, you know what that is for”….). Frank Ocean opens “Made in America” with a lush melody that puts rappers in the context of Martin and Malcom. The rap punctuating Ocean’s ribbony voice addresses coming up, dealing, bad manners learned on the streets and driving hummers.

It makes no sense to discuss songs about police brutality as mature or immature. I cannot see how addressing black on black murder is something an artist grows into or out of — we won’t say anything real if we attack the question of maturity from this angle.

Some rappers talk more about bitches than others but none of the rappers who are winning Grammys have failed to grow. The question of maturity, it seems, is radically complex because we need to start with an interrogation of what we mean by maturity.

Let’s end with an example. Kanye went to New Orleans with other black musicians. On live TV he went off-script — typical Kanye — and said “Bush does not care about black people.” If this line were in his music, would we call it immature? (It more or less is when he sings about making his son Republican so everyone will know “that he love white people.”) And, outside of his music, in the realm of politics, was it immature or was it mature? Is it childlike or is it adult to call a racist a racist?

Rap began — Chuck D nailed it — as news from the streets. Rap riffed ghetto life, syncopated in hard rhymes and dense metaphor the raw reality of the ghetto. In Ronald Reagan’s America, blacks in the ghettos from Harlem to Bed Stuy to South Central formed what George Bataille called the heterogeneous element of society — or the unassimable byproduct of a culture, born of that culture, upon which the culture rests. In plain English, rap was the art of the dispossessed, and as the art of the dispossessed, it tells us the truth of the trickle-down economic era from the mouths of those who were held far beneath the place where the trickle dried up.

Rap began as a linguistic pissing contest — and it has been always more than news. It is also poetry, entertainment and resistance. As news, it is largely unwelcome. As poetry, it is mad rich and ripping angry. As entertainment, the joke is always right-on the money, and as resistance, it is unbeatable because, instead of setting the ghetto on fire, it creates from the ashes — the shit and the garbage — the nothing, going nowhere despair of the reviled and the forgotten.

Much has been made of rap then and rap now. Rap, the argument goes, has been mainstreamed, even atomized. In this process, it has lost its political edge and anger. At the same time, critics ask rappers to grow up, to mature, to stop singing about bitches and hoes. Unsurprisingly, these tendencies contradict each other — and instead of choosing between the two lines of thinking, we note that the paradoxical attitude is a way of still not knowing quite what to do with rap.

Consider two themes that still dominate rap — swagger (and all that comes with it) and brutality. Rap still deals in race and racism, and, I believe, its critical reception is still racist. Mainstream reviews tend to focus on the content (the lyrics) and to turn on the implied assumption that art is not the place for unapologetic black rage.

From the outset, critics railed against rap’s filthy fury. In 1990, 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be became the first album to be deemed legally obscene. Critics took issue with what they called “self-assertion” and “anger” and suggested that this music that “boiled up” from the streets should be sent back to from where it came, left to speak to itself. Defenders of rap quickly spat back — anger and self-assertion are not bad things. And the moral outrage directed at rap would be better fired at the institutions and attitudes that create the conditions of the ghetto in the first place. And there was praise, even pure admiration, for some of rap’s most talented musicians. A critic from Rolling Stone described Biggie Smalls’s gifts thus: “he paints a sonic picture so vibrant that you’re transported right to the scene.”

Both sides were right. Early rap (most of Biggie’s tunes, even) bragged about banging bitches and hoes — and if rape was not glorified, the question of consent seemed irrelevant next to the pleasure celebrated.  But the vivid beat hypnotized.

Two things matter here. First, rap is not more misogynistic than a lot of rock and roll. Before you protest, go back and listen to the Rolling Stones’ “Stray Cat Blues” — remember she is 15, the issue of consent is neither here nor there, and the pleasure is lauded and flaunted — all to a beat that we move with, that we dig. Second, as Jay Z observed, rap has been a young man’s game and the challenge now is to mature it, to fit the music and the lyrics to life after 40. I believe rappers have done that — but they still sound angry and we don’t know how to square the anger with the maturity. Maturity later in another post, for now we turn to rap as art.

Rap is art and art qua does not reduce to the reality it represents. The assertion that “rap music is rape music” should be denied thus:  rap is music; it is sounds and words; it is not and cannot be rape. Even if rappers freestyle about rape, they are not raping. Once we lose this distinction, we extinguish art, lock up fantasy and kill the imagination. The irony cannot be overstated — we have guys from the streets who could have turned to real rape, drugs, dealing (and yes, some dealt and do plenty of drugs) — guys that could have gone criminal, becoming real gangstas and instead they used their vicious and fertile imaginations to crawl out from under the desert dry thug life.

The criticism of an affectation becomes a stand-in for thinking through the complicated reality presented in the music and how that reality relates to the music. Do critics really want to dictate musical content?   Are there places art should not go? And when rappers fantasize about their sexual prowess and insatiable women, remember early rap is the fantasy of the powerless and even when the musicians blew up, they carry the legacy of the ghetto in their bones and in their rhymes. Is the criticism “grow up” a real response or a gross oversimplification?

And consider real maturation: note something about the rap world that has not been noted. In less than one generation rap went from being a murderous game to a genre of music. This is an incredible shift — in response to the turf wars that killed Biggie and Tupac, Sean Combs responded by saying into a microphone for the world to hear, there is enough room for everyone. The killing stopped — to refuse to return like with like is the hallmark of (much more than) maturity. It’s a model for change (I hesitate to use the word revolution) — a model for the creation of something truly new.