The Dark Story of Eminem (24 page)

Preview reports from across Europe gave clues on what to expect, and titillating gossip. In Hamburg, Eminem got the crowd to chant “Pop the pills!”, before seeming to down two Es. A D12 member called them a gift from Marilyn Manson, also hauling a censor-baiting show towards Britain that month, and a guest of Eminem that night. In Paris, R&B artist Mya watched him parody boy band N’Sync’s ‘Tearing Up My Heart’ as ‘Tearing Up My Ass’, before he and the French told each other, “I love you!”

But it was in Manchester that the jackals, the zealots and the curious gathered in earnest, news crews, protesters and young girls jostling for space outside the MEN Arena, on a crisp winter night. On his plane earlier in the day, Eminem had rested unawares, listening to the Xzibit album on which he guested. He walked down the plane’s steps towards the Manchester ground like a T-shirted Pope, only to be sent back up by Paul Rosenberg, wanting to catch the moment just right for a possible video. When he cancelled his night’s reservations at the Mal Maison Hotel, the day’s first rumour flew. He was fearfully avoiding the city’s nearby gay district, it was gleefully claimed. He had always planned to drive straight onto London, his label countered, barely caring. The fine points of this frenzy of attention no longer mattered.

Around 100 pickets gathered in the early evening, some in make-up, their literal-minded flyers showing why they could not challenge the man waiting inside. “EMINEM HAS GONE TOO FAR!” they warned. “Everyone knows Eminem’s lyrics are oppressive to women, homophobic and they actually make fun of rape victims … Manchester is proud of its diversity, women, gay and straight. Why should we give this bigot a warm welcome?” But their own “rap” was no contest: “Eminem you are not funny, you oppress us to make money.”

The teenagers and younger children, the majority girls, who filed past these protesters, not looking oppressed, had their own voices heard in a
Smash Hits
survey in the tour’s wake. Were his lyrics offensive? “Nope, they’re normal,” said Sarah of South Wales. “Some, but I guess he’s joking,” said Katie of Wembley. “Only to people who have no life and actually take them seriously,” said Jenna of Sutton. “He makes it clear he doesn’t actually believe in what he raps about.” As to dating the author of ‘Kim’: “Yes! He is the sexiest man on da planet!” “Most definitely, he’s God!” Only Katie worried about getting “beaten up” for liking Westlife, too. Their unfussy good sense put most of the week’s commentators to shame.

Inside, meanwhile, nervous expectation rose by the second. Outkast, the blistering Southern rappers due as support, failed to show, back in America due to family illness. British-Armenian rappers Mark B and Blade stepped into the breach, as the British garage act So Solid Crew, soon to be notorious themselves, would in London. But all that mattered was the moment, at 9.20 pm, when the lights at last went down. Now the crowd knew it was really happening, that nothing could stop Slim Shady striding to them.

All they could see at first was a 25-foot, broken-roofed shack, like the one on
The Marshall Mathers LP
. “This is the house I lived in when I was 13,” Eminem would tell them later, and most thought it was a joke, a parody of his white trash image, a pretence he’d once lived in a hovel like a Thirties bluesman. To anyone who’d been to Detroit, the parody seemed only slight. He really had brought the broken home he hated with him to Europe, to dance and shout in its ruins. Video screens moved us inside, showing
Blair Witch
-shaky footage of two young burglars being attacked by a maniac in blue dungarees and horror movie hockey mask, wielding a whirring chainsaw. Then Eminem was standing on the stage, in that mask, with that chainsaw, and the crowd surged forward in ecstatic relief.

But what followed had little of the offence or illicit thrills the storm preceding it had promised. Instead, like in ‘Stan’’s video, the “real” Eminem stepped forward again. He swigged a bottle of “Bacardi”, and declared he would “drink myself to death”; asked the crowd “if I’m amongst some drug addicts”, to a positive roar, before taking two “Es”; appeared strapped to an electric chair; even touched on the Guerra court case, declaring, “Of course I pistol-whipped that motherfucker. Because I’m a …
Criminal!
” But all the while, he treated his near-child audience conscientiously, letting them swear and pretend they were addicts, ensuring they were in on the joke. He let them touch him, and brought one girl up on the stage. He didn’t tell his fans he loved them, like he did in Paris. But it was there in the soft warmth of his voice. Apart from his daughter, it was hard to believe he loved anyone more. As he told
Q
when asked if he wanted to explain his lyrics to his fans, “They get it, they know what I mean. I don’t need to explain it to adults and older people, or critics. If anything, I’d like to thank the fans for understanding where I’m coming from.” For a man from a disrupted childhood who doted on his daughter, a mutual bond with these youngsters willing to join him in saying “fuck you” to the world was natural. When they shouted ‘Stan’’s words for him, new depths were tapped in its tale of fan love.

The problem with this increasing revelation of the sensitive, decent man Marshall Mathers felt himself to be, behind the Slim Shady mask others had taken so seriously, was that the emotional impact of this breathlessly awaited show was almost nil. D12 joined him near its start, for 20 minutes, letting him safely disappear in their number; there were set-changes (shack to castle), pantomime crowd participation, even an Eminem cartoon. Everything was safe, as if his art’s jagged edge was being kept from minors. He railed against critics at the end. But once again, he seemed to have listened to them too much. He was so worried about fans falling for his “bad” example that he had sanitised himself. Those who didn’t see him were lucky. They could still believe he was “the world’s most dangerous rapper”. But the Eminem seen live in Britain, as the excesses of 2000 slipped away, was someone more humane, and more ordinary.

His last three days in the country evaporated in gentle anticlimax. Police rushed to his dressing room after that first show, believing, like the concerned, naïve grown-ups they were, that the Es Eminem had necked were real. Once, maybe, they would have been. But Eminem, having slipped away already, explained the next day that the “pills” had been rolled-up chewing gum. The tabloids’ disappointment was naked. Manchester Police Inspector Steve White seized video footage anyway. “I thought it prudent … to see if any offences had in fact occurred that might be in breach of the Misuse of Drugs Act,” he declared, with Dickensian formality.

Eminem was already being driven to London, for two dates at the Docklands Arena. He dined at his exclusive hotel on egg mayo and chicken salad sandwiches, and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, spending the first day shopping for Hailie, and the second in his room with his old D12 friends. Two years of limitless opportunity hadn’t altered the people and things he liked. But two radio interviews showed the relaxed, confident, amused man he was beginning to become.

Asked by Kiss FM’s Matt White about D12 solo careers, he spluttered: “What do you mean? Like the group split up? Like this is a stepping stone for everyone’s solo careers? We’re a crew, we’ll whip your ass! There’s six of us in this fuckin’ crew and we’ll stomp you like there’s 12 of us!” To Radio 1’s Jo Whiley, he was sparkier still. If he had a time machine, when would he go back to? “I’d probably go back to the day I was born and kill my mother as soon as she had me.” Would he let Hailie listen to his records? “Yeah, she listens to it, she walks around the house going, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ She’s my little secretary at home too. She answers the phone, ‘Shady Records!’” Would he get into movies? “I’ve been so busy with doing what I’m doing and I’m so drunk all the time that I can’t possibly …”

By the time he flew back to America, in the early hours of Sunday, February 11, the storm he had aroused had broken, in the dawning realisation that he had given no evidence of evil, or genius. He must have known he could not have the same impact again, and seemed glad of it. His farewell words summed up his time in the tabloid fire. Looking at the papers on his arrival he’d wondered why he bothered. “Why do you guys all hate me so much?” But the fans’ screams had changed his mind. “I totally didn’t expect that reaction. Respect. I love y’all.” He’d come as Johnny Rotten. He left polite like Johnny Mathis.

The closing months of 2000 had meanwhile seen him collect another batch of random, meaningless awards from various US show business corporations. In November, the
Rolling Stone
and MTV: 100 Greatest Pop Songs list placed ‘My Name Is’ at 67. The same month, Eminem was named
Spin
magazine Artist of the Year, and picked up two awards each from MTV Europe and
Billboard
, as well as the “My VH1” prize for Most Entertaining Public Feud (Eminem vs. Everyone).
The Slim Shady LP
‘s sales clicked over to four million, doubled in its successor’s slipstream. And, in December,
Billboard
‘s Year-End charts declared Eminem Top Artist – Male, and
The Marshall Mathers LP
the year’s second-biggest US seller, now up to 7.9 million.

These vacuous bashes, cobbled-together lists and crushing sales statistics placed Eminem in the same global pop arena as Britney, Christina, N’Sync and all the other production-line pop stars he loathed so bitterly. An Internet rumour that he had died in a crash – like James Dean, or like Dylan nearly did at a similar exalted, exhausting stage – was so pervasive that, on December 17, he had had to deny it himself. The story seemed to confirm his sudden worldwide ubiquity.

But it was the biggest music awards of all, the Grammys, which pushed the public’s awareness of him up still another notch at the start of 2001.
“You think I give a damn about a Grammy?”
he had sneered on ‘The Real Slim Shady’,
“half you critics can’t even stomach me, let alone stand me.”
The video’s nightmare vision of Eminem attending the awards, squeezed next to a simpering Britney, had been hilarious, but hardly ingratiating. Yet when the awards’ shortlist was announced on January 3,
The Marshall Mathers LP
was on it, for Album of the Year, part of an unusually risky list for the Recording Academy’s annual prize-giving – Radiohead’s
Kid A
and Beck’s
Midnite Vultures
were also there, alongside Paul Simon and Steely Dan. Eminem had three more rap nominations, too. Perhaps ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s brinkmanship had embarrassed the Academy, perhaps
Marshall Mathers
’ sheer weight of sales had forced their hand. Grammy President Michael Greene certainly sounded equivocal. “This is probably the most repugnant record of the year,” he said, flinching, “but in a lot of ways it’s also one of the most remarkable records of the year.” The nominations might still not have mattered very much more than the countless others Eminem had already absent-mindedly collected – though the Academy talked the Grammys up as their industry’s Oscars, their commercial impact was far less. It was ‘Stan’ which again helped him haul in yet more fans, when it was announced he would perform it at the Awards: as a duet, with the famously gay Elton John.

Though John’s own creative vitality seemed long spent by 2001, he had a pop scholar’s interest in fresher talent, and had not been slow in supporting Eminem – “ELTON TELLS EMINEM: I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU”, as
The Sun
tastefully put it in August 2000. “It feels like the nuclear bomb has just hit,” he said of
Marshall Mathers
. “This is really hardcore stuff – funny, clever. It’s poetry and also musically interesting.”

John’s willingness to share a stage with an accused homophobe, though, brought instant fury on both their heads. In America, Eminem’s old critics swiftly regrouped. Of his nominations, GLAAD spokesman Scott Seomin declared, “What this says is a little scary. It’s about murdering, stabbing, slitting throats, and putting women in the trunks of cars. It’s about violence.” As to the duet, “GLAAD is appalled that John would share a stage with Eminem, whose words and actions promote hate and violence against gays and lesbians.” Senator Lynne Cheney, wife of the current US Vice-President, turned her latest attack on John. “Elton John has been good in the past about speaking out on issues of equality for gay people, on issues of being against violent language against gay people,” she noted. “I am quite amazed and dismayed that he would choose to perform with Eminem.” Peter Tatchell, of British gay rights protest group Outrage, was more succinct, and vicious: “It’s a curious alliance – a bit like a Jewish performer doing a duet with an avowed Nazi.” Only Ed Robertson, of fellow nominees Barenaked Ladies, could see the positive side: “Wow, Sir Elton! Eminem is going to call him a fucking fuck, kick him, and walk off the stage – it’s going to be great!”

The ability of a gay pop star to enjoy
The Marshall Mathers LP
, and his willingness to then support its maker, seemed to be the real hook under the skin of Eminem’s detractors this time, more than anything he had done himself. It revealed the enlivening, unpredictable nature of his words and possible reactions to their potency, the point of his work at its best, but one which was anathema to the pious, literal-minded pressure groups he so easily inflamed.

John’s reaction was unrepentantly open-minded. “I don’t know why everyone is getting so crazy about this – it’s just pop music,” he reasoned. “As a gay artist, I’m asked by a lot of people, ‘but what about the content of Eminem’s music?’ It appeals to my English, black sense of humour. When I put the album on for the first time, I was in hysterics. If I thought for one minute that he was hateful, I wouldn’t do it.” John’s disgust at real homophobic violence would be confirmed the next year, with
Songs From The West Coast
‘s strong protest song about a gay student’s murder, ‘Wyoming’. But his reported promise to “have a word” with his new partner about toning down his musical message sounded unlikely. Eminem for his part declared he hadn’t even known John was gay when their duet was suggested. But his reaction to finding out showed a tentative maturing of his suspicion of gay men. He told
Q
, of John’s support: “I think it’s hilarious and I think it’s fucking great, because it shows that Elton John gets it. He understands where the fuck I’m coming from. My music is about what goes on in the world, I don’t say one thing on my record that doesn’t happen.”