The Dark Story of Eminem (31 page)

The first reaction was disappointment. When ‘Without Me’, Eminem’s first solo single since ‘Stan’ came on the radio, he sounded like a man implausibly low on material. After the suicide attempts, divorces, brawls, lawsuits, terrorist outrages and wars of his time away, it was a song consumed with himself. Built around a lyrical reference to Malcolm McLaren’s hip-hop proselytising early Eighties single ‘Buffalo Gals’, and ‘Purple Pills’’ sax riff, it had the childishly bright, bouncy addictiveness of his previous, album-introducing worldwide pop hits, ‘My Name Is’ and ‘The Real Slim Shady’. It just seemed to lack anything new to say.
“Guess who’s back? Back again?”
a voice taunted before the first verse began. Interscope had ensured everyone knew that answer. The question that needed asking in return was: why?

“I just settled all my lawsuits. Fuck you, Debbie!”
seemed to throw down a gauntlet, and a queue of other enemies were slapped: Limp Bizkit, Moby, Canibus, the FCC and, most memorably, Lynne Cheney, who was tactfully warned that the famously delicate heart condition of her Vice-President husband Dick was
“complicating”
. But as Eminem repeatedly rapped
“we need a little controversy, ‘cos it feels so empty without me”
, it seemed a perfunctory, insufficient reason to return. Even his bragging of the
“revolution”
he could start with his lyrics
“infesting”
teenagers’ ears,
“nesting”
in suburban parents’ homes, said nothing new. Only two references to Elvis Presley, who his life paralleled in so many ways, suggested a fresh, fascinating awareness of this fact. Elvis’ first appearance was as an embarrassment, still on the unfashionable stereos of parents, who Eminem’s teen fans drown with their own hero’s hollers. But Eminem himself was more wise to the chain he linked:
“Though I’m not the first king of controversy/ I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley, to do Black Music so selfishly/ and use it to get myself wealthy.”
Superficially embracing the black rap view standardised by Chuck D of Elvis the culture-thieving
“flat-out racist”
, and dumping himself in the same bracket, Eminem’s understanding of the eruptive, miscegenating, parent-appalling force of himself and his ancestor a half-century before was clear.

Another American hero sucked into ‘Without Me’ was Batman, as Eminem imitated the TV show’s theme, and presented himself as a superhero come to save the pop world from his own devastating absence. His life-long fascination with comic-books then spread to the accompanying video. Shot largely as if it was a comic, complete with speech balloons, it co-starred his half-brother Nathan, who sneaks a Parental Advisory-stickered Eminem CD home, while Rap Boy (Eminem as Robin) and Rapman (Dre) bounce their heads to the beat. TV was also sampled and satirised once more, with Nathan as young Eminem and Eminem as a blonde, big-haired Debbie clone on a Springer-like show, then, with the nearest thing to real controversy, a cut to live “ENN” footage of Osama bin Laden (Eminem again, in joke-shop beard and Stars-and-Stripes-patched turban). Found and threatened in his cave by D12, they all make up and dance to ‘Without Me’.

No one was really offended, but Eminem explained anyway: “With the Osama thing, I was trying to make light of a bad situation. If we don’t address the issue, that’s not a healthy thing. Although this will not take away the pain of what happened, I’m trying to lighten the mood a little and help us get past it.”

Whatever its merits, ‘Without Me’ predictably went straight in at number one in the UK on its May 20 release, and number two in the US. But Interscope’s carefully escalating build-up to
The Eminem Show
had already been thrown into sudden disarray. By May 11, nearly a month before the album’s official release, one of the few, jealously guarded copies in existence had found its way onto the Internet, where it was downloaded, bootlegged, and for sale on New York street corners for five dollars within minutes.

Interscope tried to be sanguine about what was an industry-wide problem (Oasis’
Heathen Chemistry
had been downloaded three months early). Eminem was understandably less open-minded. “I think that shit is fucking bullshit,” he announced. “Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going, ‘I got Eminem’s new CD! I got Eminem’s new CD! I’m going to put it on the Internet!’ Anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch. I’m sorry; when I worked nine to five, I expected to get a fucking pay cheque every week. It’s the same with music; if I’m putting my fucking heart and time into music, I expect to get rewarded for that. I work hard, and anybody can just throw a computer up and download my shit for free.”

The underground, illicit spread of the album forced Interscope’s hand anyway. On May 27, billboards sprang up around London, advertising: “THE EMINEM SHOW. OUT NOW. BECAUSE THE WORLD COULD NOT WAIT.” The posters showed the record’s sleeve: a spotlit mic-stand on a wooden stage, with velvet, gilt-tasselled curtains parted, in this typical theatrical scene, just wide enough to reveal a besuited, sharp-shoed Eminem, sitting with his head in clasped hands, lost in thought, waiting to go on.

When the fans who flooded record stores that day took
The Eminem Show
home, a week early, they found the theme of its title – of Eminem’s whole life as an exposed,
Truman Show
-style performance, just as he’d said in April – spread through every part of its package. When they flicked through the CD booklet, it was illustrated with closed-circuit TV pictures positioned in every part of his gated, exclusive new Detroit residence – in the mailbox when he reached in for letters, by the swimming pool as he and Hailie played, in his walk-in wardrobe as he picked from a wall of shoes and row of jackets; as he put out the trash in his yard, and scribbled raps in his clean white kitchen, CD headphones and spectacles on; even as he recorded
The Eminem Show
with Dre. 3:23AM.04-09-02 WORKINPROGRESS>VIEW354>STUDIOSCREENWITHDR. DRE ran computer type alongside, letting you know the very second of his life you were spying on. A skulking, hooded paparazzo was shown too, pointing his long lens at the house, suggesting by whom the rapper felt stripped. But in showing us his new home, Eminem was of course doing more to help us picture the mundane details of his life than any
Hello!
shoot or celeb-snapping helicopter dive. The booklet’s final images then twisted the satire inside-out: in open-necked office shirt and loosened tie, Eminem looked up from the business pages to coldly inspect us. In the darkened room (BACKSTAGE), a bank of TV screens let him watch each showbiz snapper. The very last page showed the MAINCONTROL-ROOM of the TV station running
The Eminem Show
. But Eminem was running it. Like all his best lyrics, he had spun his feelings of celebrity intrusion and insanity around, until self-pity was shredded, and he controlled what we thought.

When you put the album itself on, nervously, after such long expectation, that almost arrogant grip did not loosen. ‘Without Me’’s disappointment was forgotten. Eminem had refined and focused all he’d done before, and matched every hope.
The Eminem Show
, intended as the close to a loose sort of trilogy, did not try to retrieve the raw shock of its previous instalments. He had become more dangerous in a harder, more lasting way: by getting better.

So sure was he of what he’d done that his thoughts on what you were listening to were hard to find. After previous media blitzes, and in a year which would also include a soundtrack album and major film, only four carefully spaced print interviews were permitted. They gave only the barest of insights.

To
The Face
, he considered the production style, which built on changes begun with
Devil’s Night
. “I just took the record on as my own project,” he said. “I know how to produce now. I’ve soaked up everything. When I first got with Dre I was like a sponge, asking him questions. What is this called? What’s this button do? And now I know how I want my shit to sound. I was trying to capture a Seventies rock vibe for most of it. We treated this record like it was a rock record, as far as how it’s produced. It’s, like, loud. There’s a lot of guitars in it. There’s a lot of hip-hop shit, too. I tried to get the best of both worlds. But I listened to a lot of Seventies rock growing up, when I was real little,” he added, something which – perhaps in denying his “little flower child”, Hendrix-adoring mother – he’d never admitted before. “When I go back and listen to them songs, you know, like Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith or Jimi Hendrix … Seventies rock had this incredible feel to it.”

To
White Teeth
author Zadie Smith in
Vibe
, too, it was sonic shifts he wished to discuss. “I learned how to ride a beat better, that’s what I wanted to focus on,” he told her. “It’s not easy. Sometimes I’ll spend hours on a single rhyme, or days. Even if I have my ideas stacked, if I’m flooded with ideas, I’m always trying to figure out how to make it better, make it smoother.” To
Rolling Stone
, he added, “I’m paranoid as fuck about anything of mine sounding like a track I just did or anything out there. I practically live in the studio, apart from spending time with Hailie.”

But he also looked back for
Rolling Stone
on some of the swirling turmoil in which
The Eminem Show
had been composed. “I have songs on the album that I wrote when I went through that shit last year, with a possible jail sentence hangin’ over my head and all the emotions going through the divorce. I went through a lot of shit last year that I resolved at the same time, all in the same year. And yeah, that’s when the album was wrote. I was in that shit, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me – I thought I was goin’ to jail. But the scariest thought was, ‘How am I going to tell this to Hailie?’ What am I going to say – ‘Daddy’s going away and he’s been bad, and you have to come visit him in jail’? I never told her anything, because if there was a slim chance that I could get off, then I didn’t want to put her through that emotionally – being scared. She hates when I go away, any time. The first song I wrote for the album, ‘Sing For The Moment’, is that frustration and all that shit. There I was, in the fucking precinct getting booked, and the police were asking me for autographs while they were fucking booking me, and I’m doing it, I’m giving them the autographs. But I’m like, ‘My life is in fucking shambles right now, and you look at me like I am not a fucking person. I am a walking spectacle.’ I signed it. ‘They’re the police, and I’m sure that if Marshall is a good guy, word will get around, so okay, fuck it, lemme do it.’”

To Smith, he added, “I had a wake-up call with my almost going to jail, like,
slow down
. That was me letting my anger get the best of me, which I’ve done many times. No more.” But to
The Face
, he ruefully admitted how such confrontation still fed his art. “It’s funny, it’s like I need drama in my life to inspire me a lot, instead of just trying to reach for something. Last year was like a really rough year for me. You know, divorce and trying to raise my little girl. Obstacles are thrown at me – you’ve just got to fall or you don’t fall. And I can’t fall.”

He also talked to Smith about the catastrophe that had happened in his absence, the terrorist assault of September 11: “That was, like, a dark day. It’s a subject I couldn’t really bring myself to make fun about – then I’d just have no fucking morals or scruples at all.”

Whether that contradicted his comments on ‘Without Me’’s video or not,
The Eminem Show
did anything but ignore how America had changed. Instead, Eminem passed the radical test this presented, in a way few previous musicians had managed. Without the groundswell of support among politicised fans which cushioned Dylan in the Sixties; at a time, in contrast, when the streets of Warren he drove through to his studio in Royal Oak were draped with Stars and Stripes, and dissent had vanished from America’s TVs, he attacked its government and wars directly. There was no easily identifiable anthem on the record, no self-conscious stance. Eminem’s politics just poured naturally out, with all the other shit in his head.

The first few seconds of the album were deceptively peaceful, a theatre curtain being winched open over a classical prelude, then the clearing of a throat. Then came the first word:
“America!”
It was how
The Godfather
had opened too, the subject of both, no matter what bloody distractions occurred along the way, made plain from the start. The song was called ‘White America’, and Eminem spat his nation’s name in the Rotten snarl he’d perfected on ‘Renegade’, pronouncing it like a Black Panther:
“Amerikkkaaa!”
To a heavy rock beat, his next words, dripping with irony, were:
“We love you! How many people are proud to be citizens of this beautiful country of ours/ … The women and men who have broken their necks for the freedom of speech the United States government has sworn to uphold …”
Darkly, he murmured:
“… Or so we’re told.”

He then asked everyone to listen to the lyrics (something he’d never done before), and used them to discuss the politics of his own situation, how his white skin had probably doubled his sales, and how he and Dre had traded fans across the colour line. As he told
The Source
, “I’m not saying anything different than any rapper has said. I reached into them homes of Middle America because white kids looked up to me, because they looked like me.” It was this suburban fan-base that made Congress and protest groups pore over his lyrics like no one else’s, that made censors want to silence him, and made him feel watched and throttled and paranoid every time he picked up a pen:
“Surely hip-hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston, after it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom.”
It was the same class and race distinction he’d drawn between Columbine and Detroit before, with the added fear of miscegenation which powerful American music had always fingered; except that white boy Eminem was the contagion now.