The Dark Story of Eminem (19 page)

The smallest attack on him over the previous, wrenching year triggered hysterical lyrical overreactions, nuclear verbal force. At least one critic,
NME
‘s Sylvia Patterson, thought he had lost himself in the useless self-obsession also typical of today’s famous. But Eminem’s mind was far too lively to stop there. Although he regularly claimed once
The Marshall Mathers LP
was out that it was all about answering “the critics”, and showing people “the real me”, he was also drawn into far more important controversies in his year of fame. He had watched his label-mate and fellow young white American rebel Marilyn Manson have his name opportunistically associated by the authorities with April 1999’s Columbine High School shootings (in which two students in Colorado killed 15). Typically, he saw through this hypocrisy, with a force which at once made him a political threat to an American Establishment that consistently scapegoated pop for the nation’s deeper ills.

Eminem’s first Columbine reference on the new album was secreted in the speedily written (even by his standards) ‘I’m Back’:
“I take seven kids from Columbine, stand ‘em all in line/ Add an AK-47, a revolver, a nine/ A Mack-11 and it oughta solve the problem of mine/ And that’s a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time.”
As the LP’s release date loomed, it was these lines that Interscope put most pressure on Eminem to change, fearful of attacks from the parents of Columbine’s victims. Simultaneously, they were squeezing him for a “lead-off single” to boost their 2000 profits. Typically, these two impositions only focused his resentment, at both his paymasters and mainstream America’s deluded sensibilities. ‘The Way I Am’, written in Kim’s parents’ home after a month of fruitless, itinerant hotel room scribbling, addressed both frustrations in a hoarse, furious voice, over a nagging, claustrophobic keyboard loop. Snarling at how fame had changed his life (
“But I can’t take a shit in the bathroom/ Without someone standin’ by it”
) and commercial demands (
“Let’s stop with the fables/ I’m not gonna be able to top a ‘My Name Is’”
), he depth-charged this enforced bit of hit-writing with a still clearer, less apologetic Columbine reference:
“When a dude’s gettin’ bullied and shoots up his school/ And they blame it on Marilyn … and the heroin/ Where were the parents at/ Middle America, NOW it’s a tragedy/ NOW it’s so sad to see, an upper-class city/ Havin’ this happenin’.”

“My whole thing was, what is the big fuckin’ deal,” he expanded, in
Angry Blonde
. “Why is that topic so touchy as opposed to, say, a four-year-old kid drowning? Why isn’t that considered a huge tragedy? People die in the city all the time. People get shot, people get stabbed, raped, mugged, killed, and all kinds of shit. What is the big deal with Columbine that makes it separate from any other tragedy in America?”

In an interview with
The Face
later that year, his status as an enemy of the state was reinforced. “Parents should have more responsibility,” he declared, asked about Columbine again. “Those parents just didn’t pay attention to their fucking kids. That kid’s getting bullied every day … I guarantee you, he’s coming home, punching some walls. And the parents aren’t talking to that kid. Okay – innocent kids died. But those other kids got pushed to the fucking limit. And nobody saw it from their side. Growing up in school, I was bullied a lot. And I know what it’s like to feel you want to kill somebody.”

To music365, he reflected more widely: “My shit was real political, but people didn’t see it like that, they thought I was just being an asshole. I look at the way I came up and the things I was around and the places I was raised, and I figure, that shit made me what I am. So if people perceive me to be an asshole, the way I live made me an asshole, what I been through has made me an asshole.” Lest there be any doubt, in discussing ‘Criminal’ with
Muzik
, he called himself a “political rapper”: “I’m taking stabs at crooked motherfuckers in the system. When someone says kids look up to me, I’m like, ‘Our President smokes weed and is getting his dick sucked and is fucking lying about it. So don’t tell me shit, I’m not the fucking President, I’m a rapper and I don’t want to be a role model.’ I’ll tell a kid, ‘Look up to me as someone who’s come from nothing and now has everything. Don’t look up to me for being violent and doing drugs. Don’t be like me.’”

‘The Real Slim Shady’, the eventual “lead-off single”, turned this politicised counter-blast at his detractors into a hall of mirrors from which no one escaped. Its genesis showed Eminem’s unapologetic skill, when he chose, at the old-fashioned, hit-making side of pop. It started with a hook he had stored up for a while. That came to life after hours of exhausting experimentation one Friday ended with Coster Jnr. finally finding the keyboard notes the track would begin with. Dre then added beats. The next morning, they met Interscope executives, who expected to hear the album-finishing hit they’d requested. ‘The Way I Am’, they judged, was “not the first song”. Eminem, at this stage of proceedings the industrious professional musician, not the “fuck you” rebel, promised he’d offer a completed ‘Slim Shady’ that Monday. Recent comments by Will Smith dissing the obscenity of stars like Eminem, and Christina Aguilera’s public mention of his marriage on MTV was typically petty fuel, as he blazed through the lyrics in a weekend. “I came in on Monday, recorded it, and was done. Interscope, obviously, was satisfied,” he noted proudly, in
Angry Blonde
. But ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s power as a pop hit, on permanent MTV rotation from its moment of release, went far deeper than a good hook and inter-celeb bitching.

The video, which added so much to the single’s impact, returned to the uplifting, disarmingly funny style of ‘My Name Is’, again emphasising Eminem’s comedic skill and charm. Beginning in a
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
-resembling, nurse-ruled mental ward, where he was joined by D12, he leaned into the screen to put over his points, moving his hands like a hip-hop conductor. In an interlude at a Grammy ceremony peopled by stars including the real Fred Durst, and Eminem in the roles of a ditzy Britney Spears, a smarmy reporter, and himself, looking quizzical, the good humour was infectious. With lyrical digs at not only Britney, Will Smith, the Grammys, and Aguilera (no doubt regretting her MTV indiscretion after she was charged in the song with giving Durst head, and Eminem the clap), but gay marriage, bestiality on children’s TV, feminists who fancied him, Tommy Lee beating Pamela Anderson, and Eminem’s murder of Dre (the Doc’s scared face is hilariously “Missing” on the back of a milk carton Em places in his fridge), the impossibility of offence at this concoction was remarkable.

One reason was that, whichever flank you tried to attack it on, Eminem was already there to meet you. Sexual explicitness?
“Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose/ But no worse than what’s goin’ on in your parents’ bedrooms.”
Intolerance of every sort?
“I’m like a head trip to listen to, ‘cos I’m only givin’ you/ Things you joke about with your friends inside your living room/ The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y’all.”

When you brought the whole album home, this self-consciousness spread everywhere: on ‘Who Knew’, in which Eminem proclaimed himself blameless if millions wanted to buy and agree with his thoughts, even if some of them self-mutilated, or shot up their school; ‘Steve Berman’, in which his own label boss disowned him (
“Tower Records just told me to shove this record up my ass. Do you know what that feels like?”
); ‘The Way I Am’’s ju-jitsu flooring of his critics (
“I am whatever you say I am. If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?”
); and the fan love-hate of ‘Stan’.

But ‘The Real Slim Shady’ disarmed potential enemies, and became Eminem’s true anthem for more positive reasons. When its scattershot points were collected, it was about individuality, in a way at once personal and universal. There was no “real” Slim Shady, of course; he was just another, obnoxious layer of disguise Marshall Mathers had placed between himself and the world. But the frustration Slim/Eminem/Marshall felt at the hypocrisies and persecutions shackling him as he just tried to be true to himself were as real as could be, and spoke to people who would never have to worry about seating at the Grammys.

In its video form especially, what ‘Slim Shady’ most resembled was the MTV breakthrough of that first bleached-blond, white youth icon of the Nineties: ‘Feels Like Teen Spirit’ by Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana. But where that video disrupted MTV’s bland consumer parade by presenting mainstream teenagers as faceless, robotic cheerleaders, ‘Slim’ was more assertively subversive. It showed a secret production line cranking out and clothing blank-faced Eminems by the dozen; in another sequence, Eminem raps from a room filled with nodding lookalikes, clones he’s only slightly more authentic than:
“And there’s a million of us just like me … And just might be the next best thing but not quite me!”

As he would on ‘Stan’, he was taunting fans who lost their own identities in idolising his. But in ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s climactic lines, he also imagines a true army undermining America by petty acts of rebellion, detectable only in their hearts: teenagers spitting on fast food during serving jobs designed to deaden them, or swerving senselessly round parking lots, blasting music offensively loud for the sake of it, venting fury that can’t be coherently released at lives they don’t know how to change. The video shows a few of them, white kids clumsily acting out their Eminem moves outside the mall. They’re the lost young men Marshall Mathers would be among if music hadn’t saved him. And what ‘The Real Slim Shady’ offers to the millions he left behind is a happy, knowing song to holler along to when it comes on the radio, to go
“circling, screaming, ‘I don’t give a fuck!’ “
to. It finishes with a response to its opening request for
“the real Slim Shady”
to
“please stand up”
.
“Fuck it, let’s all stand up,”
Eminem murmurs as it fades, Spartacus speaking to his rebel army of slaves.

But there was another side to
The Marshall Mathers LP
, and to Eminem when he made it, which was far more difficult to defend. Though there were still some stray moments where he imagined himself insane, or impotent, or retarded, or deformed from his mother’s alleged drug use, or killed for his unshuttable mouth, the vulnerable autobiographical sections of
The Slim Shady LP
which had balanced its humour and rage were mostly absent. Instead, the violent fury of his imagination was turned outwards, at the enemies he now perceived to be circling him. When, as on those Columbine-baiting tracks, he traded blows with censors and officials, from parents to the President, he maintained a laser-sighted aim and class-based logic more intelligent than his detractors. But when he focused on individuals he wanted to batter and bruise, he revealed a more thuggish side. His new targets were not the bullies, absent father or black racists that had abused him before he was famous. That intimidating world of straight, violent males that had damaged him so much was left alone. Instead, he concentrated on verbally beating up, raping and strangling women, with a side-order of threats to effeminate gay men. If you were physically weaker than him, Slim Shady was going to get you.

“If a critic calls me a bigot, a misogynist pig or homophobe I’m gonna be that,” he tried to explain to
Muzik
. “If your perception of me is fucked up, I’m gonna be fucked up. If your perception of me is that I’m a decent guy, I’m gonna show you a decent guy. It’s sarcasm which is too extreme to be funny. It’s me backlashing at people who take everything literally.” This ceding of moral and artistic control to a bunch of critics he felt unable to ignore was damaging and limp enough. But the obsessions thrown up by his “backlashing” made matters worse. Mock-encouragement to
“slap bitches”
in the otherwise innocuous ‘Drug Ballad’ added to a misogynistic slate also including ‘Who Knew’ (where he rapped,
“rape shit”
, and mentioned his wife being
“Fucked up after I beat her fuckin’ ass every night, Ike”
– a reference to pop’s première wife-beater, Ike Turner), the wife-murdering prequel to ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’, ‘Kim’, and the unequivocal ‘Kill You’, of which he bragged in
Angry Blonde
: “The whole hook is basically beating up women … then at the end of the song I say, ‘I’m just kidding ladies, you know I love you’ … like you can say whatever you want so long as you say you’re joking at the end. Which is cool ‘cos that’s what I do.”

It’s true that it’s hard to stay offended at ‘Who Knew’ and ‘Kill You’, as both skid between flashing signposts telling you baiting the naïve is their intent (
“You probably think I’m in your tape deck now/ I’m in the backseat of your truck with duct tape …”
), defending his art in the context of American reality (
“You want me to fix up lyrics while the President gets his dick sucked?”
), and verbal swerves too giddy to do anything but laugh at (
“Just bend over and take it like a slut, okay, Ma?”
). ‘Kill You’’s references to
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
,
Psycho
‘s Norman Bates and O.J. Simpson, especially, make it a sort of woman-culling Americana pageant. But even as he slaps you round the head with your stupidity in getting wound up by a bunch of words, and triggers more useful, challenging thought than any politically correct liberal mantra, the chorus keeps coming:
“Bitch, I’ma KILL you!”
And when you do get to ‘Kim’, near the LP’s end, you know he’s not just joking, and that real misogyny is in this brilliant record, and him.

His memory of writing it tells you so much. It was the very first song he recorded for the album, after he had finished
Slim Shady
, at the end of 1998. He and Kim were separated, and he spent an afternoon alone watching a romantic film at the cinema. It made him want to write a love song, to flush out all his feelings of frustration at the split. But he balked at being sentimental on record. Instead, when he began work in the studio that day, buzzing on Es, he decided, he wrote in
Angry Blonde
, to “scream”. “The mood I wanted to capture was that of an argument that me and her would have,” he added.