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Eminem Breaks It Down With Anderson Cooper On 60 Minutes

DETROIT (AMP Radio) - Eminem is known for his edgy lyrics and his incredible beats, but there's more to the man than simply his music. Music, which has been birthded from not only oppression but economic strife.

He's clean, he's sober and he's ready to talk about his rise from a poor white kid in Detroit to one the most successful musicians of the past decade.

In the exclusive interview with 60 Minutes Anderson Cooper, Eminem the rapper eases into Eminem the man. A person who has been scrutinized by seemingly everyone in his life, starting with his school peers and ending with the media.

Through all this, he's relyed on one thing, words. Regardless of his terrible grades he says that words always seemed to work for him and from that he took words and built an empire.

He explains that regardless of doing poorly at school he read the dictionary and armed himself with words:

I found that no matter how bad I was at school like and not matter how low my grades might have been sometimes, I always was good at English…I just felt like, I want to be able to have all these words at my disposal, in my vocabulary, at all times, whenever I need to pull them out.

Arm himself he did, despite the fact that as a rising rapper he was often scrutinized for being a white kid who was trying to establish himself in a predominantly African American art form. However, the doubt that his skin color raised in the minds of his critics only fueled Eminem's fire to succeed. He explains:

I think that, you know, there was certainly a rebellious, like youthful rage kinda in me. And there was also, the fact of, the no getting away from fact that I am white and this is predominantly black music. You know, and people telling me, you don't belong. Like, you're not going to succeed because you're this color. Then you want to show these people that, you know, that you can and you will.

Eminem has certainly established himself as the Phoenix of hip-hop, bursting into flames on the stage, dying each night to be reborn again. Through drug abuse, scapegoating from the media and even his own personal problems, Eminem is reborn, not only as a musician, but as a man.

See the whole interview here:

If  you are unable to view video, click here.

Sabrina Cognata - AMP Radio Content Editor

(© 2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)

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