Eminem opens up about the highly anticipated new album The Marshall Mathers LP 2 and why he decided to go blonde again in outtakes from his upcoming Rolling Stone cover story.
Asked whether he feels good about the new project ahead of its release, the rapper says, “I don’t know if I ever feel totally great about a record when I put it out. With every record that I put out, someone has literally got to come pry it from me because when I listen to my own music, I just hear flaws in it.”
But he’s been doing what it takes to make the album what he wants.
“I feel like right now I’m probably working harder than I’ve ever worked in my life,” Eminem tells the magazine.
He explains, “Calling it The Marshall Mathers LP 2, obviously I knew that there might be certain expectations. Like, I wouldn’t want to just call it that just for the sake of calling it that. So I wanted to make sure that I had the right songs to be able to call it that.”
That said, it’s “not necessarily a sequel” to 2000′s The Marshall Mathers LP, which many fans consider his masterpiece.
Eminem calls the new one “a revisitation – like this is a different time period in my life.”
“So there’s not gonna be like, continuations of every song or anything like that. To me, it’s more about the vibe and the nostalgia,” he explains. “One of my favorite new things to do is experiment with new, older breakbeats and sounds and sh*t like that. You know, retro sh*t, and try to make it current, like bring it up to date.”
What about his “retro” blonde hair?
“Um, I’ll say that one was [his manager's] idea,” says Eminem. “In the earlier stages of the record and developing this sh*t I had thought about it. And once the songs started to come together and the picture got a little more clear of what it was gonna be, he hit me with the idea and I was like ‘Yo, you know I thought about that, right?’ And he was like, ‘Well you know, why not?’ And I was like ‘I don’t know how it’s gonna look. I haven’t had it in how many f*cking years? Five, six years.’ I was like, ‘I’m so used to it being dark,’ you know. So I just tried it. And I was like ‘F*ck it.’”
And the rapper says he’s retained other elements of his early career.
“My sense of humor has certainly not gone away,” he tells the magazine. “I realize that I’m an adult, a grown-ass man, and I don’t know what I’ll be doing a year from now, 10 years from now, but I don’t think that my tongue-in-cheekness will ever go away. I guess it’s just a part of my personality. I always want to keep some type of element of fun to the music as well.”
Referring to his new track “Rap God,” Rolling Stone asks whether Eminem feels like that — or an underdog.
He answers, “I think everything switches back and forth from hour to hour, day by day with me. That whole ‘Rap God’ record pretty much from top to bottom is tongue in cheek. So I mean, do I want to feel like that? Maybe sometimes.”
“Again, it goes back to everybody who competitive raps and does this for just purely the sport of it wants to be the best,” continues Eminem. “Again, that’s why [Kendrick Lamar’s] verse worked so well because he only said what every rapper’s already thinking, If you don’t want to be the best, then why are you rapping?”
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