"The Monster"
(feat. Rihanna)
(feat. Rihanna)
[Hook - Rihanna:]
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You're trying to save me, stop holding your breath
And you think I'm crazy, yeah, you think I'm crazy
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You're trying to save me, stop holding your breath
And you think I'm crazy, yeah, you think I'm crazy
[Verse 1 - Eminem:]
I wanted the fame, but not the cover of Newsweek
Oh, well, guess beggars can't be choosey
Wanted to receive attention for my music
Wanted to be left alone in public. Excuse me
For wanting my cake and eat it too, and wanting it both ways
Fame made me a balloon 'cause my ego inflated
When I blew; see, but it was confusing
'Cause all I wanted to do is be the Bruce Lee of loose leaf
Abused ink, used it as a tool when I blew steam (wooh!)
Hit the lottery, oh wee
But with what I gave up to get it was bittersweet
It was like winning a used mink
Ironic 'cause I think I'm getting so huge I need a shrink
I'm beginning to lose sleep: one sheep, two sheep
Going cuckoo and cooky as Kool Keith
But I'm actually weirder than you think
'Cause I'm
[Hook - Rihanna:]
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You're trying to save me, stop holding your breath
And you think I'm crazy, yeah, you think I'm crazy
Well, that's nothing
Well, that's nothing
[Verse 2 - Eminem:]
Now, I ain't much of a poet but I know somebody once told me
To seize the moment and don't squander it
'Cause you never know when it all could be over tomorrow
So I keep conjuring, sometimes I wonder where these thoughts spawn from
(Yeah, pondering'll do you wonders.
No wonder you're losing your mind the way it wanders.)
Yoda-loda-le-hee-hoo
I think it went wandering off down yonder
And stumbled on 'ta Jeff VanVonderen
'Cause I need an interventionist
To intervene between me and this monster
And save me from myself and all this conflict
'Cause the very thing that I love's killing me and I can't conquer it
My OCD's conking me in the head
Keep knocking, nobody's home, I'm sleepwalking
I'm just relaying what the voice in my head's saying
Don't shoot the messenger, I'm just friends with the
[Hook - Rihanna:]
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You're trying to save me, stop holding your breath
And you think I'm crazy, yeah, you think I'm crazy
Well, that's nothing
Well, that's nothing
[Verse 3: Eminem]
Call me crazy but I have this vision
One day that I'd walk amongst you a regular civilian
But until then drums get killed and I'm coming straight at
MC's, blood get spilled and I'll
Take you back to the days that I'd get on a Dre track
Give every kid who got played that
Pumped up feeling and shit to say back
To the kids who played him
I ain't here to save the fucking children
But if one kid out of a hundred million
Who are going through a struggle feels it and then relates that's great
It's payback, Russell Wilson falling way back
In the draft, turn nothing into something, still can make that
Straw into gold chump, I will spin Rumpelstiltskin in a haystack
Maybe I need a straightjacket, face facts
I am nuts for real, but I'm okay with that
It's nothing, I'm still friends with the
[Hook - Rihanna:]
I'm friends with the monster that's under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You're trying to save me, stop holding your breath
And you think I'm crazy, yeah, you think I'm crazy
[x2]
Well, that's nothing
Well, that's nothing
Eminem:
Marshall Bruce Mathers III, better known by his stage name Eminem and by his alter ego Slim Shady, is an American rapper, record producer, songwriter, and actor.
Latest newsabout Eminem:
Why Eminem is a greater artist than Lady Gaga will ever be:
RAPPER Eminem is known for the violent, misogynous imagery in his lyrics. So why is leading American social critic Camille Paglia such an admirer?
Lady Gaga never saw it coming. After a relentless, month-long publicity extravaganza over two continents for her new album, Artpop, she was upstaged by a comet seeming to swoop in out of nowhere - the release of Eminem’s eighth studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2. Eminem’s sales boomed big, while Gaga’s embarrassingly fizzled, leading to quick, deep discounts to keep Artpop in the charts.
Eminem, now 41, did few interviews and personal appearances for this formidable double album. As with Adele sweeping the Grammys two years ago, his instant commercial triumph demonstrates the readiness of a discerning public to respond to power and passion of voice rather than to manipulative gimmicks or exhibitionistic stunts. Furthermore, the production of this album, in which Eminem was minutely involved, has a collage-like complexity and a bold grandeur that at times approaches the orchestral.
The greatest irony is that Gaga, product of an affluent Manhattan home and a private-school education, had boasted that Artpop would be the album of the millennium in fusing popular culture with art. She hired Jeff Koons to design the cover, which features a vacuous Koons sculpture of a spread-legged Gaga, backed by a crassly ripped strip of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. During a British TV interview, Gaga betrayed her limited art knowledge by bizarrely identifying that great Renaissance painting as the Venus de Milo, a notoriously armless Greek marble.
But it turned out to be Eminem, a high-school dropout from a squalid trailer-trash past, who has produced the true work of art. I have been arguing for years that the avant-garde is dead, that it ended the moment my hero Andy Warhol cheekily embraced commercial popular culture. But Eminem, with his churning nightmare visions and brutally raw hatreds, has proved that authentic avant-garde shocks are still possible. After a first listen, I wrote to a friend: “This album slaughters all PC taboos.”
I never took Eminem seriously until now. As the teacher of an Art of Song Lyric course, which I created for music students at my university, I became impatient long ago with what I felt to be the stagnation of the rap idiom. Few truly significant rap songs have emerged since early classics such as Public Enemy’s Fight the Power(1989) or Chubb Rock’s Treat ‘em Right (1991). The crude callowness of too much rap is typified by the way, two years ago, Lil Wayne’s silly snickering about oral sex destroyed Kelly Rowland’s exquisitely beautiful Motivation.
As for white rap - Vanilla Ice, the Beastie Boys - I regarded it as little more than posturing, crotch-grabbing minstrelsy. Hence my shock and awe when I heard a tremendous song bursting from my car radio last year: it was The Monster, Eminem’s duet with Rihanna, his seething machinegun delivery alternating with her robust, pensive contralto. I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed/Get along with the voices inside of my head. As with Romantic horror tales from Edgar Allan Poe to Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, Eminem’s monster is a dark double, the amoral id or dream life from which artists take inspiration. What is particularly electrifying is how Eminem’s monster metaphor cuts two ways, simultaneously alluding to his “evil twin” and also to Rihanna’s turbulent romance with the rapper Chris Brown, who was convicted of a felony in 2009 for abusing her. You’re trying to save me/Stop holding your breath/And you think I’m crazy/Yeah, you think I’m crazy/Well, that’s not fair! Rihanna seems to admit that the real monster is not Brown but her own fatal attraction to him, an inner wound from childhood that now nourishes her art. Her searing self-recognition marks a telling advance from the melting masochism of Love the Way You Lie, her collaboration with Eminem on his last album: Just gonna stand there and watch me burn/But that’s all right, because I like the way it hurts.
Success often undermines black rappers by removing them from the deprivation and dangers of their harsh early environment. Striving to stay relevant, they can become pompous and monotonous, such as Jay-Z and Kanye West in their respective overblown new albums. But Eminem’s conflicts are internal and therefore irresolvable, forever propelling him forward.
Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born in St Joseph, Missouri, to a feckless, itinerant musician who soon abandoned his only child. Eminem’s erratic mother, Debbie Nelson (aged 17 at his birth), restlessly moved him from one family home to another in Missouri and Michigan. Rarely in one place for more than a year or two and chronically bullied by other children, Eminem developed his own distinctive imagination as a defence against an unstable world.
Never a reader, the adolescent Eminem was drawn to comic books and rap, an assertive performance style that gave him status and street cred in his largely black, lower-middle-class neighbourhood in Detroit. His volatile home life with his mother was further complicated when she allowed a runaway girl, Kim Scott, to stay with them. Eminem was then 15 and Kim 13. Within several years, their friendship became a romance. They would have a daughter, Hailie, followed by two turbulent and reportedly abusive marriages and two bitter divorces.
Eminem struggled to support his family through odd jobs: as he relates on his new album, he used to “mop floors, flip burgers and wash dishes”. His first album, recorded in 1996 in a small Detroit studio, sold 1000 copies. His second, The Slim Shady LP, produced by veteran rap star Dr Dre and released in 1999, went quadruple platinum. Unstoppably morphing into Slim Shady, his drug-thug alter ego, Eminem was now world-famous.
In a 2002 film, 8 Mile, Eminem played a version of himself with Kim Basinger doing a striking turn as his chaotic, louche mother. It is a riveting recreation of a white rapper’s struggle for acceptance from an often hostile black audience. More than one reviewer spotted Eminem’s resemblance to James Dean in his ability to suggest hurt and vulnerability beneath an impassive mask of cool. It was during the stressful making of the film that Eminem became addicted to prescription drugs. Gorging on fast food, he eventually ballooned to 104kg and was unrecognisable to fans. This phase ended in 2007 when he nearly died from a methadone overdose. His subsequent album titles,Relapse in 2009 and Recovery in 2010, evoked his protracted ordeal.
Eminem’s album sales total 115 million, and he is the bestselling artist of this millennium. He has won 13 Grammys and an Academy Award for best song in a film. Despite his fame and wealth, his life remains unchanged. A dutiful single father, he still lives with Hailie in a mansion in Rochester Hills, near Detroit. He also has custody of his ex-wife’s niece, as well as her child from another man.
Since its emergence in the 1970s from the Bronx, rap has swept the world as a populist genre, employed even by political dissidents as a sharp instrument of protest. Its roots can be traced through African-American rhythm and blues back to West Africa, with its oral tradition of tribal bards (griots). A narrative offshoot, the “talking blues”, flourished in country music and was practised by folk musicians such as Woody Guthrie and his acolyte Bob Dylan. Rap first surfaced in scratchy 1920s recordings as jive - meaning to talk to or about someone in an insulting or deceptive manner. Improvisation, aggression, humour and competition are intertwined in rap history. In the freestyle rap battles that Eminem braved at his school cafeteria or in the marathon open-mic contests depicted in 8 Mile, the audience laughs heartily at merciless put-downs, the crueller the better.
There are Caribbean precursors to today’s rap, notably in Jamaican “toasting” - talking or chanting over a rhythmic beat. It is no coincidence that the first significant rap song,The Message (1982), was created by a Bronx-raised native of Barbados, Grandmaster Flash. The Message is the direct ancestor of Eminem’s gritty urban tableaux, with their vivid radio-like sound effects of slamming doors, running footsteps, gunshots, squealing tyres and police sirens.
Black rappers, with their swaggering braggadocio and phallocentrism, became Eminem’s foster-father figures, proxies for a mentoring he never received in real life from his absentee “deadbeat dad” (his phrase). They appear as honoured guests throughout his albums. Foremost among them is Dr Dre, of NWA (Niggaz with Attitude), the prototypical gangsta rap group formed in 1986 in a tough Los Angeles suburb. Eminem studiously absorbed from black rappers their brazen rhetoric and infatuation with guns, as well as their cynical stance towards women and gays.
Despite his title of co-executive producer, Dr Dre played a lesser role on the new album. Eminem has taken control of his creative operation, one sign of which is surely the commanding new voice that he is using at crescendo. This album, with all its tormented veering between craving and disgust, dramatically demonstrates how much deeper Eminem’s view of women is than that of his rap precursors and peers, who are stuck in tedious formulas of male sexual prowess and booty-wagging female compliance. Eminem has shown the full spectrum of male emotions on his albums, from a cooing tenderness toward children to ranting arias of betrayal and revenge. We see the agonising ambivalence that is one of the principal engines of obsessive art-making, from Michelangelo to Picasso.
Headlights, on the latest album, is Eminem’s poignant love-hate letter to his estranged mother, whom he prudently keeps at a safe distance. “I was the man of the house,” he recalls of his insecure childhood. Borderlines would remain blurred in his love life: his wife, after all, emerged sister-like from his mother’s orbit and therefore intensified its incestuous energies. Eminem’s rap saga is its own House of Atreus. As in the Greek myth cycle, with its cannibalism, treachery, sexual delusion and blood sacrifice, he seems to be battling an inherited curse. Eminem is beset by vengeful furies, whose punishing voices pour out in his convulsive rapping.
Eminem’s work is a synthesis of traditions, black and white. Though his initial impetus was rap, his lyrics approach the slangy vernacular and taunting provocations of Beat poetry, whose syncopated metric was based on 1940s bebop jazz. Like the Beats, Eminem mischievously incorporates the rude and repressed, a Rabelaisian soundscape of belches, farts, pissing and vomiting. Eminem has a fearless sense of artistic persona. He calls himself “Michelangelo with a paint gun” or “Picasso with a pickaxe”. His method? “I word-bully”: his purpose is “to beat a beat purplish”. He is a “hogger of beats, hoarder of rhymes”. When the “flow” comes, “I speak in tongues”, flooded like a prophet with supranormal powers. He often portrays himself as a slave or victim of his own gift.
While Lady Gaga panders to fans, inviting their symbiotic attachment to her as “Mother Monster”, Eminem takes the courageous route of the true artist: he dares the audience to hate him. He breaks every shibboleth, every rule of decorum. He raves with the defiant, repellent spirit of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the poete maudit, cursed and exiled. “I want to dig my way to Hell!” thunders the majestic chorus of Wicked Ways, the final song on the new album.
Gaga, with her constant costume tat, fatigues the eye. Eminem, in his simple hoodie, looks like an ascetic monk, fed on apparitions and devoted to art.
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