Eminem’s revival is for self and country
>> The release date for his new album,
Revival, was a busy day for Eminem. The rapper helped launch his ninth studio album by opening a pop-up shop in his native Detroit, which in addition to new merchandise also offered what he called “Mom’s spaghetti”.
“It’s good,” he declared early that evening, as he settled into a suburban Detroit studio for a “fireside chat” on his Shady 45 Sirius XM channel, but he quickly noted that “we’re going to make some minor changes”.
“It’s a work in progress,” added his manager, Paul Rosenberg, who also was part of the broadcast. “But it’s only going to get better.”
Eminem couldn’t ask for a much better start for Revival, however. His first new album in four years, featuring high-profile guest appearances by Beyonce, Alicia Keys, Pink, Ed Sheeran and others, was his eighth consecutive album to debut atop the Billboard 200, selling 197,000 copies its first week out. It also topped charts in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and elsewhere, while the single Walk on Water, which features Beyonce, rolled into the Top 20.
Eminem’s career hardly needed a revival, of course. He’s been a multiplatinum stalwart since The Slim Shady LP (1999), and has sold an estimated 172 million records worldwide, while also winning 15 Grammy Awards and an Academy Award for Best Song for Lose Yourself from the film 8 Mile (2002), in which he also starred.
Nonetheless the rapper — whose birth name is Marshall Mathers III—views
Revival as the third entry in a trilogy, begun with Recovery (2010) and continued in
The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013), which brought him back to form after he was laid low by an addiction to prescription drugs that led him to be hospitalised in 2007.
“Looking back at albums like Relapse (2009) and Encore (2004), I do feel like I could’ve done better,” the 45-year-old Eminem admitted to an audience of journalists and fans during the “fireside chat”. “But I realised at the time, thinking back to it, that was the absolute best I could do at that time. On Encore I was on drugs,
Relapse I was flushing them out. I was learning to rap again, basically.
“But, yeah, obviously every album I always try to put best foot forward, so hopefully that’s what I did [on Revival].”
The 19-track album displays a full artistic agenda, both personal and political. The title, Eminem explained, “is kind of like a double entendre, in the sense that it’s a revival for myself and it’s kind of the theme of the album, but there’s also hopefully the revival of America”.
He launched the Revival campaign with a Trump-bashing freestyle called The Storm that aired as part of the 2017 BET Awards on Oct 10, while the album confronts the president head-on on tracks such as Like Home, Offended and Untouchable.
Eminem isn’t worried about becoming a Trump tweet target, either.
“He’s not going to answer me — what, ‘Washed-up rapper. Failing career. Overthe-hill rapper who sunk his fan base in half, now wants to attack me,’” he quipped. “If he does, I’ve got ideas.”
He also said his virulent anti-Trump commentary is for real. “He makes my blood boil,” Eminem said. “I can’t even watch the news anymore, because it makes me stressed out ... I’m trying to get a message out there about him. I want our country to be great, too, I want it to be the best it can be, but it’s not going to be that with him in charge.
“What he’s doing putting people against each other is scary,” he added. “His election was such a disappointment to me about the state of the country.”
Eminem wasn’t slacking during the interim between The Marshall Mathers LP 2 and Revival.
“I was making songs,” he said during the “fireside chat”, “but I don’t know if I was really serious about it a couple years ago. We had some side projects we were working on. I did the Southpaw (2015) soundtrack. I always was active, as far as writing and recording and putting out songs. I was still busy.”
For Revival, Eminem said, he “probably recorded 40 or 50 songs”, but also had to step back from things at one point.
“I had released a couple songs a couple years ago,” he noted, referring to Phenomenal and Kings Never Die, both released in 2015. “Going back to them now, I realised, ‘Damn, I never took a breath. I didn’t leave no space.’ I had to figure out how to let off the gas—but not too much. It took me about six months to really figure out, ‘OK, now I’ve got the pacing right’, because I didn’t want to let off the gas too much.
“As I go along and the songs get better than the last one, the last one gets scrapped, and it just keeps going until I feel like we have the right ones.”
The timing also allowed Eminem to recruit an impressive lineup of guests for Revival.
“[Beyonce] was one of the things on my wish list,” he said, “but I wasn’t sure if it ever could happen, and I also never really had the right song to bring her, to present, so I’m super-grateful that came together.”
Ed Sheeran’s contribution was key to the track Rivers. “One of the producers I work with, Emile [Haynie], did the track,” Eminem said. “He did the beat, and I think he sent it to Ed and they worked on it in the studio and came up with that hook, and I just heard the hook and what it was talking about and wrote the song.”
Near the end of Revival, on the song Arose, Eminem raps that “I’ll put out this last album, then I’m done with it,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case. He’s already committed to performances at some major U.S. festivals later this year, and also is thinking about more music in the future: Noting that his longtime patron and mentor Dr Dre was not much involved in Revival,
Eminem said that this gave him a starting point for his next album.
“There’s a couple of tracks that I do have that I might revisit and check them out,” Eminem said.
“There were two of them. I’m sure that at some point in the future me and Dre are going to connect again, and hopefully be able to be as intertwined as we were on past projects.”