“The saviour of modern poetry … this guy Eminem has created a sense of what is possible.  He has sent a voltage around a generation.”  Seamus Heaney.

Guy Adams writes, “He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy….  A decade ago, Mathers – an angy young man from the wrong side of Detroit – decided to bleach his hair, adopt the alter ego Slim Shady and transform the landscape of popular music.  In six years, from 1999 to 2005, he recorded five extraordinary albums that sold nearly 50 million copies and gave the city of Motown a new chapter in its musical history.

On April 11, 2006, DeShaun Depree Holton, Eminem’s closest friend was killed (shot three times) in a bar brawl.  “I have never felt so much pain in my life.” he recalls in The Way I Am.  “After he passed, it was a year before I could really do anything normal again.  It was tough for me to even get out of bed, let alone write a rhyme … my brain was scattered.”

Eminem was already showing signs of fatigue.  The previous August he’d cancelled a world tour, claiming to be exhausted after years on the road and suffering from a dependency on sleeping pills.   Losing Proof was a knockout blow.  It prompted him to withdraw completely from the world, retreating to his vast mansion in Clinton Township, just outside Detroit.

For more than two years Eminem barely ventured out of doors, let alone appear in public.  By the middle of 2008, he seemed consumed by self-doubt and destined for retirement.  But … on October 15, 2008, Eminem announced a comeback:  he was working on a new album call Relapse.

It is a little known fact that the only book Eminem read as a child was the dictionary.  He poured over it, searching for words that rhymed with each other. The years spent studying the English language lie at the core of his technical brilliance.  They turned him into the greatest rapper of his time.  But they did so at a personal cost:  for Eminem could be uncharitably described as an anorak.  His life starts and ends with music.  He writes constantly, scrawling lines on sheets of notepaper in a crabby handwriting.  When he’s not composing new verse, or messing around in the studio, he’ll be listening to hip-hop.

At the end of his autobiography, Eminem casts himself not as a potential saviour of a dying genre but as the master chronicler of his own, contradictory life story.  “Whether I’m someone’s favourite rapper or not, whether I’m thought of as one of the best, one of the most half-assed, whatever it is, I am one of the most personal,”  he explains.  “That’s why people relate to me, because I show so much of myself.   And the reason I put so much of myself out there in the first place is because I had no idea I was going to be so famous.  I had no idea, no f—ing clue.  If I had to do it again, I don’t know if I would.  I’m glad though, that my music has brought people together.”

Excerpt from Weekend Australian newspaper Review magazine May 9-10 2009.

After ‘Relapse’ came the album ‘Recovery’.

“I’m not afraid, to take a stand/everybody, come take my hand/we’ll walk this road together, through the storm/whatever weather.  Just lettin’ you know that you’re not alone/holler if you feel like you’ve been down the same road.  And I just can’t keep livin’ this way, so starting today/I’m breaking out of this cage …”  Eminem

I was offered half a headphone recently.  Sat, shoulder to shoulder,  listening to this song filling a young mind with strength and hope.   And while Ipods and headphones are often viewed as   ‘anti-social’, they’re also valuable in providing a way to tune out to a world that rubs up against us so harshly these days.  They also provide an intimate connection between friends (or someone new) drawn close by the limited length of an ear piece cord.  And EMINEM is often viewed as a ‘bad influence’ but his latest album, Recovery, is his calling to fans to mend—as we all, in time, must.

Print version.

Thanks to (you know who you are that sent me an email at 1am this morning) for passing on some Black Dog postcards to Paramore at the concert last night.  There’s something very super heroish about the Twilight movies – check out this Paramore video.   Another bit in the BLOG about Super Heroes is on the way.  In the meantime check out Super Hero things through the Joker in the BLOG – and help spread the word by passing it on (as did this concert goer – thanks again) ….

Angus swoons … “Lost my mind down that yellow brick road.”  Grab this beauty for a melancholy surround sound experience.  The dynamic duo’s website is a treat too – and video clips (c-b-low).  Go get lost for a while … pass it on …

When the world’s spinning way too fast to catch … and you feel you can’t keep up … yet you can’t STOP … escape … think of circles … the rolling rhythm …. the cradle … the transient nature of moments … the shifting of high points and low in an evolving space … and be held still and moved on by that thought … the circle.    

Image:  CD cover by NARO design CD by amanaska, One World Music -  soothing sounds – thanks Bernie x

Often buy CD’s just for the art.  Rudi Arapahoe – Echoes From One To Another

This one’s for you Joel. Fly that individual flag for U too.
Quote from artist: The resistance’s cornerstone, claims Matt Bellamy, who found inspiration watching G20 protests. “People were wearing silly costumes, dressed up as big puppets. That’s the most powerful protest, when it’s not too earnest. Sometimes you need to laugh, so I chose a glam rock beat with, ‘They will not control us!’ (JJJ Hottest 100)

Just received tickets to Massive Attack concert.  Like the look and thought of a black and white rainbow – and ink tears.  Pic:  cover of latest CD – converted to black and white.

Mags and Zoe reckon Black Parade would make a great anthem for The Black Dog Project.   It’s a dark one but ultimately the message is about survival  -  carry on …  and pass it on …