Eminem has credited fellow rappers LIL WAYNE and T.I. with rescuing hip-hop - by saving the genre from going "downhill".
The Stan hitmaker is back on the music scene with his new album, Relapse, due next month (May09) following a five-year recording hiatus.
He is convinced rap music took a turn for the worse while he was away - but praises his hip-hop contemporaries, including Lil Wayne and T.I., for bringing a creative new sound to the industry.
He tells XXL magazine, "I stayed up on the music, and obviously I watch TV and saw what was going on. And without naming any names, it just felt like hip-hop was going downhill. And it seemed like kinda fast.
"It was like everybody just cares about the hook and the beat; nobody really cares about substance.
"Things are looking a lot better now. You can appreciate Lil Wayne using different words to rhyme and actually rhyming words that you know. Or T.I., where you hear s**t and you're like, 'Whoa, ah, I wish I would have thought of that!' You know what I mean? Or you hear all the compound-syllable rhyming and all that.
It just seems like now the craft is getting cared about more."