RAMBLE ON: "Drug Ballad" by Eminem

I don’t talk much about the alcohol. I don’t really need to, it ramped down a long time ago, I never needed to go to AA or anything. I’ve been kickin’ back with a cold one most nights during this lockdown and it’s not a thing. It used to be a thing though. I’m not a fan of the “personal memoir disguised as a review” review so I’m not gonna go into it, let’s say it’s a phase of my life I’m glad to be past. 

It was never so bad that I was hospitalized, or had to quit entirely, so I probably shouldn’t relate as much as I do to Eminem, whose struggle with drugs is well-documented. His overdose in December 2008 has become part of his late-career mythos; I don’t think he’s gotten through an album since without mentioning it several times. I tweeted the other day that despite that life event’s importance to his music, Eminem’s never written a good song about his OD; some people objected, I took a relisten to some of those tunes and yeah, they’re actually all right. But they’re all right by the much lower standards of the aging, sclerotic Eminem. Back when Marshall Mathers was shady and slim, he had already written his best song about addiction, “Drug Ballad,” an album track from the year 2000. I said as much on Twitter and someone responded “lol that was my jam before I got sober.” Yeah, it was mine too. Nothing off of “The Marshall Mathers LP” should ever be called underrated and yet I don’t think that song gets the attention it deserves; I honestly don’t think there’s a better song on the subject, by Em or anyone. 

Even before the overdose, Em’s appetite for substances was already legendary. At his peak, one of his bodyguards published a tell-all that listed all the shit he was on. “I can recall one day during the Warped Tour where he took 14 different drugs,” it says. “It started with ecstasy, then liquor, Vicodin, Valium, shrooms, marijuana, Tylenol 3, Whippets, and a host of other over-the-counter drugs.” Whippets! Biggest star in the universe at the height of his fame and he’s huffing aerosol like a 9th grader. The details might be exaggerated to sell books, but if so not by much. “I wanted to touch on how last year I was always fucked up,” said Eminem of the track later. “Life was like a big party for me. It was the first year that I blew up and I did a lot of celebrating.”

“Celebrating” is not how I would describe that song. “Drug Ballad” is a spiritual sequel to “The Slim Shady LP”’s “Cum On Everybody,” a sort of parody of the Puffy/Will Smith dance rap popular at the time. “This is my dance song,” Em says at the beginning of that one, and it does have a nice funky beat, but his “dance song” is as dark and violent as anything else he made at the time. “Drug Ballad” begins the same way, with backup singer Dina Rae cooing over a dance beat; this time Marshall says “This is my love song.” It’s a line that changes the song’s entire meaning; nothing else on the track remotely suggests a love song, yet so it is. Em attempted this same trick more explicitly on a recent track, “Never Love Again,” but it belabors the metaphor and tires quickly; it spends the entire song saying what “Drug Ballad” conveyed in a single throwaway line. Genius.com blows my mind with another quote from Marshall about “Drug Ballad,” that he wrote it in like twenty minutes. Such was the effortless virtuosity of Em in his prime; there are defenses of latter-day Eminem but he’ll never be called “effortless” again. 

One other thing separates Old Man Marshall from his peak: his beats are a lot worse now. Much like Em himself, they’re overwrought and overbearing and just try way too hard. “Drug Ballad” instrumentally is as energetic as Slim was in 2000, pulsating with a killer bass line, but undercut suddenly by a piano tinkling up the scales in a horror-movie minor key. It sounds fun. But it doesn’t sound like a good time. 

Eminem describes the thrill of party drugs in the vivid terms of total hair-metal decadence. Most anti-substance abuse songs are about the lows, the misery of rock bottom. There’s a place for that – Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank)” is probably hip-hop’s definitive statement on it – but “Drug Ballad” is about the highs, the revelry, the wild life. Eminem parties. He starts fights. He falls over. He vomits. He crashes his car. He has regrettable sex he doesn’t remember. He gets in his feelings and wallows. He feels like shit in the morning. It conveys these details in what may be Marshall’s slickest flow ever: “Everything’s spinnin’, you’re beginnin’ to think/Women are swimmin’ in pink linen again in the sink.” Hip-hop’s wordiness is both a strength and a drawback; Powfu’s recent hit “death bed,” for example, is basically ruined by all of Powfu’s unnecessary details weighing down the delicate simplicity of the hook. But “Drug Ballad” needs every syllable. Only an overwhelming flood of words can capture the manic energy of Marshall’s drug spree.

There’s a famous quote that there are no anti-war movies, because they all necessarily make war seem thrilling. It applies to drugs too – it’s exciting to hook up with randoms, start violence, make yourself sick and throw up and feel your stomach acid eating away at your teeth. Many of the best anti-drug songs, like Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines,” vibe like pro-drug songs, but Eminem doesn’t even pretend that he’s writing an anti-drug song. He couldn’t, not at that point in his life; it wouldn’t be honest. “If I could take it all back now, I wouldn’t/I would’ve done more shit people said that I shouldn’t.” Em describes partying in enticing terms: “You’re young, you still got a lot of drugs to do, girls to screw, parties to crash,” then shrugs: “Sucks to be you.” 

It’s that “sucks to be you” that always got me; what sucks about partying and sex? And yet I knew it did. He predicts his daughter Hailey will be doing the same someday while he babysits her kids; he says it as a grim punchline, in the same tone he uses when rapping about murdering random people. Youth in Em’s conception isn’t something to be enjoyed, it’s a terrible ordeal you’re lucky to survive. If “Drug Ballad” was anyone else’s jam while they were in the throes of addiction, I get it. It’s the only song I can think of that makes drugs sound like something you’d want to do, while being unflinchingly honest that everything about this sucks. The only thing I can think of that pulls off the same tone is the movie “Trainspotting,” which was accused (not entirely unfairly) of “glamorizing” drug addiction but still doesn’t make it seem like a remotely enviable lifestyle. 

It’s hard to make anti-drug songs – even “Swimming Pools (Drank)” is a good drinking song, if you’re a sad drunk at least – but they do exist. Eminem’s more recent tracks, though not good, are genuinely anti-drug, largely because they’re about drug abuse’s inevitable endpoint, getting high alone in your house not because it’s fun but because it’s too painful to be sober. The chorus goes “They won’t let me every let ‘em go/I don’t want to but I gotta stay.” It’s not true. He’ll get to that point later in his story, where he doesn’t want to do drugs but he has to. But as of “Drug Ballad,” he does still want it, and he’s proud of it. Judging by the amount of times he brings it up in his later work, he misses it. It’s reductive and probably harmful to say that sober Eminem is bad, but it is true that since he got sober he’s never cared about anything like that again. A love song, indeed.