you can't be

...an official part of the blogosphere unless you comment on MJ's death. So.

I myself have lately been listening to Eminem's Relapse, which is his own inimitable take on his recovery from prescription drug addiction. (That's where the slow jam came from. C'mon now.) I say "inimitable" because, for example, the album starts out with a spoken word skit called "Dr West" in which Dominic West--not speaking like Jimmy McNulty but in fact in his native accent--plays the psychiatrist discharging Mr Mathers from rehab:

DW: Steps? There's a lot of them, aren't there?

MM: Well...twelve.

DW: Christ. I don't even know them all.

Yeah. If you're gonna write a whole CD worth of music mostly about your recovery, you bet your ass you better be making fun of it, and yourself, throughout, or you are going to sound even more like a self-absorbed, self-pitying douche than you already do. Not that self-pitying douches don't sell a lot of CDs.

Anyway, Mr Mathers also namechecks Heath Ledger a couple times, since that situation must have hit pretty damn close to home. But perhaps his most cogent remark on the whole album is "what would Elvis do?"

Maybe MJ asked himself that.

xoxo