Anderson Cooper: I've heard you say that you bend the word. Marshall Mathers: Yeah, it's just in the enunciation of it; like, people say that the word "orange" doesn't rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off, because I can think of a lot of things that rhyme with orange. AC: What rhymes with orange? I'm trying to think–I can't think of anything... MM: If you're taking the word at face value and you just say "orange", nothing is going to rhyme with it exactly. If you enunciate it and make it more than one syllable, "o-range", you could say, like, I put my orange four-inch door-hinge in storage and ate porridge with Geor-ridge. You just have to figure out the science to breaking down words. AC: And do you think about this throughout the day? When you're driving along, do you think about rhyming words? MM: Yeah, all day. Yeah, I actually drive myself insane with it. AC: But it's interesting for a guy who hated school, who was in the 9th grade three times, you spend all your time thinking about words. MM: I found that no matter how bad I was at school, and no matter how low my grades might have been at some times, I always was good at English. AC: I heard that you used to read the dictionary. MM: I just felt like, "I want to be able to have all of these words at my disposal, in my vocabulary, at all times, whenever I need to pull 'em out. Somewhere they'll be stored, locked away. AC (Narrating): His words are stored but they're not exactly locked away. He actually keeps them in boxes. AC: You store stuff in just boxes like this. MM: Yes. AC (Narrating): Inside are hundreds of scraps of paper on which he's obsessively scrawled words and phrases. AC: So, wait, this is a pad from a hotel in Paris, it looks like. MM: Yeah. AC: And you just scribbled four little words, scribbled there. MM: Yeah. AC: How do you even read this? This is tiny? MM: I know what it says...I guess. (Looks at pad.) I might use that, actually. AC (Narrating): They're not lyrics, really, they're just ideas that he collects. He calls it "stacking ammo". AC: I've gotten letters from crazy people, and they kind of look like this. MM: Yeah? AC: Sometimes, yeah. They're all in capital letters or they're scrawled on pages like this. MM: Yeah, well, that's probably because I'm crazy. |