The Dark Story of Eminem (23 page)

Eminem himself accepted that the racial issues that made the best black rappers incendiary were not for him (a line in ‘Criminal’ goes,
“I drank more liquor to fuck you up quicker/ Than you’d wanna fuck me up if I said the word …”
, the unspoken “nigga” and its baggage something he couldn’t touch). It was why he had prodded America instead on the raw nerve of its sexual attitudes, and by making his own fraught celebrity his theme. And so, in a way rare for movies and books, but natural for a rapper, he had put his own personality at war with his country’s hypocrites, from the President down. Affronted Senators, students, protesters and pickets vanished into the funhouse reflections he’d prepared for them in
The Marshall Mathers LP
. Every line Lynne Cheney partially quoted to attack him had retorts waiting for her a word or two later. As he taunted on ‘Criminal’:
“… every time I rhyme, these people think it’s a crime/ To tell ‘em what’s on my mind/ But I don’t gotta say a word, I just flip ‘em the bird, and keep goin’ … You can’t stop me from toppin’ these charts.”

The most popular six months of Eminem’s life had ended with his marriage on rocky ground, three court cases pending, politicians denouncing him, and jail a looming possibility. But his greatest days of notoriety were still ahead. On October 28, he announced he would be touring Britain.

“PARENTS BEWARE! The world’s most dangerous rapper is coming to Britain. Eminem will perform his controversial songs about murder, drugs and violence to women in February.”

The Sun
‘s shamelessly simplified warning, as Eminem dates for 2001 were scheduled in Manchester and London, was followed by a strengthening salvo of “shocked” tabloid broadsides, as his arrival neared: “THE TRUTH ABOUT THE REAL SLIM SHADY: The Astonishing Story Of The Bullied Trailer Trash Nerd”; “BULLY’S BRUTAL BEATING LEFT HIM FOR DEAD”; “RAPPER WAS SHY LONER”; “EMINEM LOVED DOLLIES”; “TOUR SHOCK FOR GAY HATE RAPPER”; “PUBLIC EMINEM”.

“The show is the most outrageous ever,”
The Sun
‘s Dominic Mohan brazenly reported from the start of Eminem’s European tour, in Hamburg on January 30. “I predict there will be a storm of controversy here … Take cover, Britain. Eminem’s show should have a health warning.”

But, rabid as the British tabloid press could be, no one’s heart seemed to be in efforts to make him the nation’s newest folk devil. Comparisons with the last rapper to achieve such notoriety in this country are instructive, and do no-one credit. Snoop Doggy Dogg had arrived in March 1994 to a
Daily Star
front page screaming, “KICK THIS EVIL BASTARD OUT!” Though the case of Philip Woldemariam’s shooting was still awaiting trial (and Snoop would eventually be found innocent), and though the degree of violence and misogyny on his album
Doggystyle
which the tabloids (no strangers to sexism) condemned these days sounds mild, the media fury was unrelenting. No detail was sought about Snoop’s life in the mainstream British press, as they did with Eminem, and nothing was asked about his music. Instead, the
Star
‘s headline was accompanied by a mug-shot of Snoop looking brutal and unrepentant, redolent with echoes of the last black man to be so spotlighted on British front pages: Winston Silcott, who had been accused, and later acquitted, of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock. The stench of unapologetic racism then was powerful.

Eminem had certainly done nothing to soften impressions before his February arrival. On top of his own pending court cases and lyrical savagery, he had opened a new front of verbal warfare in November, after fellow white rapper Everlast, ex-House of Pain, sneered of him, while guesting on Dilated People’s ‘Ear Drums Pop’,
“lift up your panties and show your skirt for the world to see.”
Eminem immediately responded on ‘I Remember’, recorded as a B-side for D12’s forthcoming début single ‘I Shit On You’:
“I just wish the cardiac would have murdered you”
(a typically tasteful reference to Everlast’s near-fatal 1998 heart attack). With his usual city-flattening overreaction, he followed up with D12’s ‘Quitter’ (eventually left off the group’s
Devil’s Night
LP). Here he told fans to
“hit”
Everlast
“with sticks, bricks, rocks, throw shit at him, trip him, spit on him, treat him like a ho, bitch slap him … Fuck you, fat boy, drop the mic, let’s fight.”
“I’m not gonna let someone else diss me on a record and not say something back,” he redundantly explained. “It’s in my blood; it’s a competition thing.”

But far more decisive in the public’s reaction to him when he touched down in February was the December release of
The Marshall Mathers LP
‘s third single, ‘Stan’. Once that reached the radio, the tabloids’ already weak outcry was muffled by a louder, less predictable noise: the sound of everyone in the country who still listened to pop talking, like they hadn’t in years, in consternation, wonder and surprise.

“It’s about an obsessive fan who keeps writing me and taking everything I say on the record literally,” Eminem told the
LA Times
. “He’s crazy for real and he thinks I’m crazy, but I try to help him at the end of the song. It kinda shows the real side of me.” “I know I ain’t got it all upstairs, but some people are sick,” he added to
Muzik
. “There are people who write saying they’re into hurting themselves. They’re cult people, fucking devil worshippers, who say I’m right next to Satan in their thoughts. I’ve had skinheads and KKK members on my case, telling me they love my shit and how I’m one of them.” Even as his manner in concert would show how much he loved most fans back, these “sick” ones at the margins weren’t people he felt any tie to. “As a kid, much as I loved L.L. Cool J, Run-DMC and The Beastie Boys, I wouldn’t have cried, hyperventilated, or had a fucking seizure if I met them,” he told
Muzik
. “I … would have been real shy.”

Stan, the single’s progressively more unhinged stalker, had no such reservations. But the song, a 6½-minute, boundary-busting radio event like Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ 34 years before, was a far more intricate, jagged piece of music than Eminem’s summary even started to suggest.

‘Stan’’s masterstroke was its extensive sampling of ‘Thank You’ by Dido, one of the most daring, lateral record raids in hip-hop history. Dido Armstrong was then known, if at all, as a singer in her brother Rollo’s British house act, Faithless. Although aggressive marketing by her label and the Eminem association would drive sales of
No Angel
, the début LP from which ‘Thank You’ was drawn, past one million in the US by the time of ‘Stan’’s single release, when Eminem started to build his track around her’s in the studio, only he heard something right in it.

What Dido gave him, most of all, was a voice, mood and sound from a world far from his, the first part in what, with Eminem as superfan Stan and himself, would become a weaving, unpredictable, three-way dialogue. It starts with a crash of thunder, and Dido’s ‘Thank You’ beaming in tinnily, then stronger, as if her voice is transmitting to a place that’s hard to reach, a room submerging in lightning-streaked rain.
“My tea’s gone cold, I’m wond’rin’ why-y-y, I got out of bed at all,”
she sings.
“The rain clouds up my window, and I can’t see at all.”
The picture of an English bedsit on a gloomy Thursday is completed by the accent of her pensively accepting voice. Looking at the pictures of her lover on the wall, she feels happy, in the hemmed in way her country’s cold and drizzle have trained her to be. But the voice and the beats are getting louder, as if someone’s turned that radio up as far as it will go. And here, with no warning, comes Stan.

He sounds polite at first as he writes Eminem a letter, reasonable, informed, the kind of fan every artist wants. He likes the most obscure tracks, he’s papered his room with his idol’s pictures, feels he knows him in a way. He wishes he’d had a reply to his last letter, but he understands. Only a harsh, scratching sound, like a ragged typewriter, or rats in the roof, is disquieting. That, and the way the bass, guitars and beats loop claustrophobically, like they can’t find their way out of Stan’s head. When Dido comes back in, her kind voice doesn’t sound as comforting as before.

Verse two, and Stan’s sanity’s taken a dip.
“I ain’t mad, I just think it’s FUCKED UP …”
, he’s writing now, still with no reply, so forced to pour more of himself onto the page. Stan says his father was a wife-beater and cheater, he cuts himself, his pregnant girlfriend can’t understand, he’s just like Eminem; only Eminem, who he met for seconds at a signing, is his friend. When Dido returns, her tea sounds cold as death. And in Stan’s final letter, the sympathetic detail with which Eminem has entered this wounded fan’s head spins into merciless farce: Stan’s on the freeway, barking last words into a tape, his pregnant girlfriend screaming in the trunk, just like Kim, till he screeches and splashes into the river, unheard tape and all.

The swerve in mood has a logic you can only imagine after it’s happened. And then, when you think surely there can be no more, here’s Eminem himself, replying sensibly, conscientiously, “the real me”, maybe, as he told the
LA Times
; but he’s too late, as Stan is dragged from the water on TV. Psychodrama, stalker comedy, character study, shaggy dog tale, a sick, cruel joke: that was ‘Stan’, every time the radio played it.

The video, another automatic MTV number one in November, added even more nuances. It starts as a horror movie, with an actor as Stan and Dido as his heavily pregnant girl, arguing in an eerie house. Dyeing his hair blond, Stan peers at himself in the bathroom mirror, wearing a vest that makes him look like the poster image from
Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer
. But he sees only himself, turning into Eminem. The schizoid role-playing at ‘Stan’’s heart – Eminem impersonating his biggest fan pouring his heart out to Eminem – is now naked, as Stan retreats to his cellar, where he writes surrounded by torn images of his hero, eyes bright, remembering the times he caught real glimpses of the star. We see that Eminem, dead-eyed and self-protecting, as Stan grabs him to hug at a signing.

But it’s a third Eminem, the one shown receiving Stan’s letter in his trailer, who is really a new face for an artist so addicted to masks. This is again “the real me” he’d mentioned to the
LA Times
, but portrayed with a force the song could not match. More even than ‘The Way I Am’’s video, the minute of film in which he acts out the final verse, studiously writing Stan back, wearing glasses to see the page, is a corrective to all the cruelties and fears he’d unapologetically mined elsewhere; evidence to suggest that that truly was play-acting. As he returns Stan to reality, recommending
“counselling”
, saying his songs are
“just clownin’ “
, feeling
“sick”
when he sees Stan’s crash on TV, these lines leap from the screen:
“I really think you and your girlfriend need each other. Or maybe you just need to treat her better.”
With Dido’s strong, kind-eyed female presence in the video too, this advice to a fan who’s taken in by ‘Kim’’s cruelties, on what would become Eminem’s biggest hit, is his clearest, overlooked indication that, when at peace, he might not want to harm women, even with his words.

British reactions to ‘Stan’ were particularly acute because it was released as the least likely Christmas single in years. It was unmissable on the radio that December, hard, funny and fresh among a slew of novelty songs and bland boy bands. In the traditional race for Christmas number one, it looked briefly as if Eminem’s astonishing stalker ballad would for once give the position some dignity. But his record company backed down, not trusting seasonal buyers’ sense of adventure. ‘Stan’ was slipped out early in December, securing Eminem’s second UK number one without serious opposition. Bob the Builder’s ‘Can You Fix It?’, a grating children’s song, toppled him in time for the turkey.

Still, it was ‘Stan’ and Eminem people were still talking about as 2001 dawned, and his UK tour neared. As was now routine around the world, his approaching entry was protested against as if he was a real convicted criminal. On January 30, Sheffield University Student’s Union banned the playing, merchandising and promotion of Eminem on its campus, worrying that this would “intimidate” gay students, after three complaints. The stereotypical notion that its gay population were wilting flowers prone to cowering at people playing records was not challenged, and on February 3, the University’s radio station, Sure, was fined £7,000 for playing Eminem. The Swedish manufacturers of the chainsaw he used in his act, Husqvarna, were also perturbed. “We make chainsaws for mature people,” they declared, “who have genuine forestry work to do.” The notoriously unhip and censorious Tory Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe then weighed in with her own condemnation, making both parties look foolish.

But the most striking aspect of the tour as it neared was that everyone had to write or say something. Because ‘Stan’ had been heard so widely, simple
Sun
-style vilification was no longer supportable. And the thematic baggage and dramatic life Eminem hauled behind him like contraband – the homophobia, the misogyny, the maternal strife, the bullied past, the beatings, the race – was so alive, it forced thought from literary critics and pop pundits, and people in the street. On ITV’s
Tonight
news magazine, Trevor McDonald interviewed his mother. On Radio 4’s more highbrow news programme of note,
Today
, his grandmother spoke. By the time Eminem and his entourage stepped onto a private plane in Paris on the 8th, after a gig in the city the night before, with their Manchester date now only hours away, a media thunderstorm not seen in Britain about a pop act since The Sex Pistols was boiling to a head.