![]() ![]() ![]() This use of psychedelic drugs by a predominantly white youth differed from the drug addiction which, as a result of poverty and violence, devastated some of the most fragile social groups for decades – notably the black community – as tragically demonstrated by the well-known fate of stars such as Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles and Whitney Houston. Two years earlier, Lou Reed’s prophetic song “Heroin” became the ambiguous anthem of those for whom drugs meant “death” as well as “women and life”. Thus, while we celebrate the anniversary of 1969 – the ultimate year of dissent – Woodstock stands as a memorial site, the idealised metonymy of a decade and yet we forget that at the end of the decade three of its heroes, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, all died of a drugs overdose within a few weeks of each other. It would appear that the tortured rapper thus immersed himself in a willingly decadent rock and roll world in which a doomed artist can only live and be creative when in a chemically-induced trance – a world whose spirit still lives on in America. In 2006, after years of chronic but comparatively controlled drug addiction, Eminem sank into the depths of the clinical beyond, the mescaline of modern-day America: an ever-increasing prescription of anxiolytics – a curse prescribed in the name of a refusal of pain and misused by the patient in the name of a refusal to live in the world as it is. The lyrics are the story of his long journey through a narcotic underworld, beginning with the violent death of his best friend. To be sure, they are reminiscent of the playful M&M’s candy from which the rapper gets his name, but their seductiveness and anodyne appearance act as bait, as Eminem goes on to describe. The subject matter is apparent from the cover: Eminem’s face is decorated with hundreds of multicolored antidepressant tablets (Ambien, Valium, Seroquel, Xanax, Lunesta, Percodan, Vicodin, etc.). A few months ago, Eminem, one of the most surprising artists in the United States today, released his new album Relapse. ![]()
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