The Dark Story of Eminem (26 page)

This base-covering was nothing new: hip-hop’s initial crossover into mainstream acceptance in the Eighties had come from Run-DMC’s use of Aerosmith’s dinosaur rock, and the example of Cypress Hill’s grunge-rap ten years later, and hip-hop’s subsequent domination of the American charts, had shifted rock towards rap’s beats, in the form of the massively popular Nu-Metal. But while Eminem and Dre were not above considering such commercial factors, the blurring of demographic lines in
Devil’s Night
went deeper.

As it was made by five young black men from the ghetto, and a white best friend who was partly raised among them, and who had the ear of more black and white listeners than the rest put together, such crossed borders were perhaps inevitable. But tracks like ‘Fight Music’ and ‘Devil’s Night’ showed the changes that could cause. The former, Eminem barked, was
“just some shit for some kids to trash their rooms to/ just refuse whenever they’re asked to do shit/ a drastic movement of people acting stupid.”
On the latter, he tauntingly imagined
“a whole generation of kids blowing their brains out to this Kurt Cobain music/ … as soon as they heard it went out and murdered and maimed to it.”
Though the reference to Cobain was ironic – and disrespectful – these songs moved surprisingly near Nirvana’s old constituency of disaffected young whites. Eminem’s commentary on Columbine – hardly a hip-hop staple – was also resumed, his amused sympathy with the reviled white killers even more explicit:
“making fun of your trenchcoat/ that’s how students get fucked up …”
His Cobain-like solidarity with alienated teens was then confirmed in a personal context at the climax of ‘Fight Music’, even as sonically it veered towards a white nu-metal anthem:
“I came to save these new generations of babies/ from parents who failed to raise ‘em ‘cos they’re lazy.”
In the same song, meanwhile, other D12 members imagined crashing through a club with casual reference to black icons:
“any nigga looking too hard/ We Rodney Kinging ‘em.”
“Nigga” was now a sayable word on an Eminem album; though not, of course, by Eminem.

The sampled, confrontational opening of Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 ‘(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Down Below We’re All Gonna Go’ –
“Niggers! Crackers! Whiteys! Jews!”
– on ‘That’s How …’ showed D12’s playful awareness of their racial confounding. The fact remained that, on what had been intended as an underground, uncommercial hip-hop album, Eminem’s own contributions moved it closer to white concerns than anything he’d done before. The deliberately brattish rebellion of ‘Fight Music’ – making kids
“trash”
rooms and not do anything they’re told – was a 13-year-old white suburban idea of punk attitude, the sort of self-indulgent sulkiness which had eventually made grunge risible. Black hip-hop fans with more pressing concerns in South Central LA or downtown Detroit must have found it quite hard to give a fuck. But D12 were merely shoving at the door into the mass market gangsta-rap had long catered to; with a white rapper on board, that door could be snapped off its hinges.

Most of
Devil’s Night
was ideal anyway for sniggering teens of all colours, in a less contentious way. It was a foul-mouthed stoner album
par excellence
, the least “meaningful” record its makers could manage. Fair warning was given of what was coming in the opening “Public Service Announcement”, helpfully listing D12’s favourite offensive terms – “lesbian”, “faggot”, “fudgepacker”, “clit-licker”. “It’s not that they don’t have no creativity,” the announcer (aka Kuniva) chided. “That ain’t the case. We just like saying shit like that just to fuck with you … bitch.”

“It was to be disgusting,” Proof said of their aims to
Spin
. “To piss people off, raise eyebrows,” Eminem concurred. “Our politics are a little more incorrect than Eminem’s,” Proof added, with frightening accuracy.

This was the obscene badinage Eminem and his one-time roommates had amused themselves with in private, put on record; the mind that had carelessly toyed with
“raping his own mother”
egged on by five equally untrammelled friends. ‘Shit On You’, the single released before the album, showed how far below the belt D12 had deliberately set their sights, as did LP opener ‘Shit Can Happen’, both single-mindedly scatological in a way Eminem on his own showed no interest in.

Nor was he always the strongest swearer. Bizarre’s claim in
Spin
that he had “the foulest style” proved true, causing even Slim to feign dismay –
“Bizarre, you’re on Capital!”
With a voice sometimes slow, deep and flat like a stone killer, then on the verge of childish tears at chastisement of his peccadilloes, Bizarre was a memorable sex monster in the style of the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Whether fucking his dog, enticing under-age girls and putting his mother on the game, or wanking into antifreeze till his penis was burning, fucking groupies with genital warts and eating his girlfriend’s miscarriage, he was an object lesson in deflecting disgust with creativity, and in showing up Eminem’s suddenly pedestrian “potty” mouth. It was still left to Eminem, of course, to defend such art in
Spin
: “Remember how fun it was to cuss when you were in the first grade? Just to be like,
‘Fuck.’ ‘Shit.’
But still, it’s just words.” Kuniva put the case best in
Loaded
: “Look, freedom of speech is the shit. If I just did a whole song about fuckin’ dogs in they ass and it sells a million records, why are you mad at me? It just means there’s a million motherfuckers that wanna hear that. Where’s the problem?”

D12 certainly gave full value when it came to swearing, and sex (‘Nasty Mind’, ‘American Psycho’, ‘Pimp Like Me’), drugs (‘Purple Pills’, ‘Blow My Buzz’, ‘These Drugs’), and punch-ups (‘That’s How’, ‘Fight Music’, ‘Instigator’). As a successor to
License To Ill
, 2 Live Crew, or Cheech & Chong, they had done a decent job. As a successor to
The Marshall Mathers LP
though, my original disappointment remains.
Devil’s Night
confirmed the faults first exposed when D12 took the stage in Manchester that year. In their comforting company, one voice among six, the creative tension Eminem had felt battling the world with his words mostly melted. His desire to dispel the monstrous myths about him to that young crowd now filled what was largely a comedy album. It was as if, in reaction to
Marshall Mathers
’ shattering success, he was slowly returning his artistically vital Slim Shady side to the shadows. Now he preferred us to see him with the mask off, swearing and spliffed up with his mates. But the results on
Devil’s Night
were so often sluggish, meandering, repetitive, and short on the synaptic leaps he had previously made with ease that you couldn’t help wishing he’d drop his friends, put the mask back on, and sell us the evil, angry myth again. Fortunately, there were corners of the album where Slim and his compulsive demons still breathed.

Eminem’s autobiographical instincts, for instance, were still unflinching. He sketched an update on his troubles since he’d last been heard from over several tracks, seeming to like skating on thin legal ice. ‘Pistol Pistol’ and ‘Words Are Weapons’ responded aggressively to his disarming by the courts, while ‘Purple Pills’ returned to another litigation scene:
“Cool, calm, just like my Mom/ With a couple of valium inside her palm.”
But the most fascinating development was in his attitude to Kim. D12 had added some unsavoury memories of their relationship to ‘That’s How …’ –
“Choking your wife all in front of your peeps (‘Bitch!’)/ She tossed a brick through the window of your jeep/ They’re back together by the end of the week.”
But on ‘Girls’, written after their personal battles were over, Eminem saw Kim more clearly, as someone who, like D12, was on his side, not the world’s:
“Now I’ve got five dogs that’d die for me like I’d die for them/ I’d fight for them, swing or shoot, like I’d fight for Kim/ All of them been with me through this fucked up life that I’m in.”
It was a lone, late admission but, after ‘Kim’, an unexpected and touching one.

Devil’s Night
also included one track the equal of anything Eminem had done before, on which every member of D12 played their part. The album’s climactic effort, ‘Revelation’ was a jolting reminder of why he had seemed so dangerous and essential, six short months before. Produced by Dre, it confirmed the Doctor’s own increasing rockist inclinations, as it began and ended with wailing guitar riffs from Mike Elizondo, and was built on an ominously unresolved, rising guitar line. Pink Floyd’s anti-education ‘Another Brick In The Wall’ was also quoted, but ‘Revelation’ was a far more sophisticated work. Eminem sang its chorus in a sulky, petulant voice, a teenager throwing a tantrum. But his words built into an excoriation not only of education, but of the pious hopes of liberal America, and ended in territory he’d never broached before, somewhere between existential hedonism, and imminent rapture:
“I don’t wanna go to school/ I don’t need no education/ I don’t wanna be like you/ I don’t wanna save the nation/ I just wanna live my life/ Every day a celebration/ One day I’m gonna leave this world/ I’m waitin’ for the Revelation.”
Whether he was playing another role, in suddenly voicing this apocalyptic spiritual vision – which must swim in the heads of many alienated, Midwestern teens – or really had such religious dreams himself could only be guessed. But he had never before “acted” attitudes which were not partly his.

Within this, ‘Revelation’ played out a more ordinary apocalypse, of teenagers refusing education, railing against parents, and falling by the wayside, sometimes by their own gun-wielding hand. With each D12 member taking a verse, the similarity of black and white adolescent experience was emphasised. Bizarre led off with his usual six-feet-deep deadpan humour, concluding his tale of inter-family crack-dealing and AIDS by declaring,
“There’s three things that keep me from being a Nazi/ I’m black, I’m gay and my Dad’s Liberace.”
For the rest, though, the stories of threatening a female teacher and mother who try to corral a boy’s wild-ness, student, parent and teacher bullies creating trench-coated outcasts, truant escape, peer pressure to drug-deal, drunk, lazy, violent and sexually abusive parents are jaggedly individual but uniform pictures of teenage devastation.

Though the jet-black jokes keep coming (
“Daddy no!”
and
“I’m gonna kill myself!”
were screamed with satiric exaggeration, like the female begging on ‘Kim’), Kuniva’s verse in particular touched hurt as deep as anything Eminem had managed. Ignored or punched by his Dad
“like a grown fucking man”
, he flees, feels sexually useless, flicks through porn and pines for a gun, to fix things, crying he’s
“about to lose my mind.”

The lack of personal responsibility in these adolescent voices, left floating in a world blamed on useless, oppressive adults, is a telling American tale in itself. It was how Eminem had always excused raging at his mother, an immature, arrested development that ‘Revelation’ suggested was shared by all his friends. His teenage-fit parody on its chorus at least indicated he knew how childish this was. And, for once, safe in the company of his old gang as they too cried and confessed, Eminem used his own verse for adult reflection on his teenage self.
“My mother was unable to raise me,”
of course. But then, Marshall too was
“full of crazy rage, an angry teenager/… ooh, I was stupid, no one could tell me nothing.”
Most movingly, this was where he remembered how gangsta-rap derailed his ordinary life, sounding lost in its spell again:
“hip-hop overwhelmed me, to the point where it had me in a whole ‘nother realm/… it felt like we was on welfare but wealthy.”
This second supernatural vision of transcendence was broken by a typically snotty “fuck you” to the Lincoln school he left for rap:
“a dropout that quit. Stupid as shit, rich as fuck, and proud of it.”

The track as a whole offered no solutions, accepted no blame, nursed no social wounds; if anything, it inflamed them. “All I see is violence,” a voice said somewhere in the mix, and rage was offered in return. Rip up your schoolbooks, shoot your father and slap your mother, it seemed literally to advise. But, moving between parody, commentary and confession with practised ease, what Eminem had really done, near the end of an inessential, stopgap release, was once again show more of what squirmed in America’s underbelly in one five minute song than most artists managed in a career. ‘Revelation’ proved he still mattered.
Devil’s Night
meant it had to.

The album was received adequately. Reviewers treated it with less respect than an Eminem record – “not exactly pushing the envelope”, said
NME
; “feels a bit perfunctory”, said
Rolling Stone –
and sales followed suit. In the UK, it entered the charts at number two, with sales of 54,000, the most for a rap band’s début. In the US, it reached number one, and sold a million. The drop in interest whenever D12 played without Eminem showed the real reason for the sales. Considering its faults, it did him no harm.

Censors and politicians certainly trailed him through 2001 as if his threat was undiminished. On June 6, the US government’s Federal Communications Commission levied a $17,000 fine on KKMG, a Top 40 station in Pueblo, Colorado – a Republican, Bible Belt community – for playing the edited version of ‘The Real Slim Shady’, after a listener complaint a year earlier. Even in bleeped form, it was deemed “patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards”, with “unmistakable offensive sexual references … that appear intended to pander and shock.” The draconian decision “sent a tremor throughout the radio industry”, according to
Billboard
, and radio corporation Clear Channel Communications warned its stations that “the industry is deemed to be on notice of the song’s indecency, and subsequent fines for broadcasting the song may be higher.” An immediate outcry from musicians, radio programmers and First Amendment activists, and a keynote address on indecency by Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons at the following week’s inaugural Hip-Hop Summit, forced the FCC to back down and rescind its fine in January 2002. It was a rare victory in two decades of censors’ attacks on pop. “Freedom of speech is the shit,” as Kuniva had wisely observed. But few other than Eminem at that moment could have drawn such absurd, unsustainable fire in the first place.