Combined, Eminem's first three albums had enough impact to make him Fueling his incendiary rhymes with fresh a part of music history, and cemented insight, Eminem launched a comeback his position as Billboard's Artist of the that propelled him to new artistic Decade in 2009. But, as he told Rolling Stone last year, "Around the tail end FUI! heights -and blockbuster numbers. of [2004's] Encore, the songs started getting really goofy. `Rain Man,' `Big Weenie,' `Ass Like That'- that's when the wheels were coming off." Meaning addiction was taking control of his life. Grieving over the murder of his best friend, Proof, and the dissolution of his RECOVERY marriage, his weight ballooned by 8o pounds and he fell into a four -year -long writer's block. "Nobody could talk to BY DUDLEY SAUNDERS PHOTOGRAPH BY MARY ELLEN MATTHEWS me," he said, "or I'd rip their head off." To the outside world, it looked like one more music -star tragedy on the way. UST AS BOB Dylan started as a folk singer and expanded beyond the After a near -death overdose ( "The genre, Eminem is now bigger and more significant than rap itself. Like doctors told me I'd done the equivalent it or not, he's now a permanent part of our culture. "I never thought of four bags of heroin," he told my life would amount to this," he told Billboard in June 2010. "It is Rolling Stone), he reached out to Elton so strange to me because I still feel so regular." Rap may be a genre John for help and got into recovery. in decline, but somebody forgot to give Eminem fans the memo: his Newly sober, he began to take a fresh most recent album, Recovery, hit the charts at No. i and spent seven look at his work. "I would go back and weeks there, spawning two No. i singles and ending 2010 as the year's best -selling listen to songs off The Marshall Mathers album, both nationally and internationally. And it's the best -selling digital album LP, The Eminem Show, and some of ever. This was the year Eminem made the jump from being merely a popular artist Encore and ask, `Why don't my music to an important one. feel like this anymore ? " That he would end up making that transition was hardly obvious at first. Eminem Invigorated, he began to get his sea hit hard and fast in 1999 with The Slim Shady LP, showcasing his comically socio- legs with 2009's Grammy- winning pathic alter ego, gleefully playing out every teenage boy's deepest revenge fantasies Relapse (an album he now rates with an in intricate rhymes. Whether enlisting his baby daughter's help in dumping his "ehhh "). But 2010 saw Eminem rise to then -wife Kim's murdered body ("97 Bonnie & Clyde ") or killing a schoolyard bully a whole new level with Recovery, which ( "Brain Damage "), Eminem worked from an irresistible underdog setup, with the brought his old rage together with new twist that the underdog makes good by daring to be meaner and more evil than the insight. Particularly on the smash hit people keeping him down. And where other rap artists boasted, Eminem brazenly "Love the Way You Lie," Eminem admitted to a weak body, cowardice, even outright stupidity, and shrugged it all followed in the footsteps of his earlier off with a joke and a stapler aimed at his teacher's testicles. On the album's release, Stan by layering his direct -address rap parental outrage ran hot and hard, and kids couldn't buy it fast enough. with Rihanna's achingly masochistic A working -class hero like John Lennon often responds to success by trying to chorus. Finally, it seemed, Eminem was grow more refined, to rise up from his humble beginnings. But the working poor able to see his tortured marital relation- (like the lifetime low -wage earners who couldn't scrape together bus fare to flee ship clearly. It was easily the most Hurricane Katrina) are different: they believe their lives will never get better. So honest, powerful song of the year. when the rare "working -poor hero" unexpectedly rises (e.g., comedian Roseanne But in some ways it was the album's Barr), he continues to see the world as exclusionary. And in fact, the criticism that first single that signaled a new Eminem. Eminem faced on his ascent seemed aimed not so much at him but squarely at his "Not Afraid" was something we'd never lower -class, "white trash" identity, at the misogynist, homophobic phrases that heard from him before: inspiration, and made up the language of his real culture. The price of the ticket to acceptability a call for people in trouble to "take my would have been, then, to deny who he really was. hand." Somehow, without leaving his In his follow -up albums, The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show, Eminem working -poor roots behind, he'd made seemed to become only more angry, more taunting of mainstream mores, telling his a turn toward hope and was willing fans "I don't owe you a motherfucking thing," shoving the dirty details of his abject to fight for it. "I won't back down," childhood in our faces ( "My mother did drugs, hard liquor, cigarettes, and speed/ he had Pink sing on Recovery. It's a The baby came out disfigured...don't you dare make fun of that baby cuz that baby sentiment that, in the recent battle for was me "). But in a larger sense he was simply making the choice to paint a portrait union rights in his neighboring state of his life, mind, and culture that was painstakingly accurate. Whether in direct - of Wisconsin, seemed to resonate with address raps or imaginative, horror -comic -book narratives, Eminem displayed ex- growing crowds of once middle- and actly who he was and where he came from with jaw- dropping, unflattering honesty. working -class people who now find When he proclaimed "God sent me to piss the world off," it could be said that he they are turning into Eminem's working was acting out the way a neglected child would, preferring negative attention to the poor. Twelve years after his break- soul- crushing violence of being ignored. But in his case, he was making America through, it could well be that Eminem's see a whole invisible class, too. time has truly arrived.

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