The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  The final black rapper to rivet Marshall was in some ways the closest to him. Tupac Shakur (aka 2Pac) was Eminem’s predecessor as the top star on their label, Interscope. His 1996 drive-by shooting in Las Vegas by unknown assailants martyred him and, among black Americans, made him perhaps the most revered rapper of all. Album titles like Me Against The World (1995) – at the time, Marshall’s favourite hip-hop LP – suggested the mournful mix of deep paranoia, egotism, death wish and hurt which characterised much of Tupac’s work. But of more relevance to Marshall were the elements of social radicalism, low self-esteem and painful parental relations which he and Tupac shared.

  The gangsta trappings for which Tupac became famous – trumpeted Crip affiliations, shoot-outs with cops, bragging after he was shot once, seeming to invite that second, fatal attempt, and jail-time for a rape conviction – were as much willed wish-fulfilment for him as they would have been for Marshall. Though he had lived in ghetto conditions as a child, Tupac was educated and intelligent, a trained actor, and not really tough; like the adult Marshall, the muscles he flaunted were those of a pumped-up, essentially mild-mannered stripling. He lacked Eminem’s ironically distancing wit, and pop instinct for truly overground hits (despite sometimes using Dre himself). But where the two men met was in the matter of mothers and fathers. Tupac never knew his father, either; even his mother did not know the man’s name for sure, and his only father-figure (and possible real father), Legs, appeared briefly in his teens, only to die of a crack-caused heart attack. It left Tupac feeling “unmanly”, insecurely angry, always with something to prove. “Seeing Daddy’s semen full of crazy demons …”, he would rap, cursed and crazed by fatherlessness, as Eminem would slit his dad’s throat “in this dream I had”; both felt emasculated, and could be stupidly macho. Both were products of an absentee-father America.

  Tupac’s mother Afeni, meanwhile, was an ex-Black Panther, who mostly raised him alone, and would eventually become a crack addict. She called him her “Black Prince”, and filled him with revolutionary consciousness, which his records reflected. But, as poverty kept them on the move, he, like Marshall, found his sense of self a fragile, cracking thing. “I remember crying all the time,” he said. “My major thing growing up was I couldn’t fit in. Because I was from everywhere.” It could have been Marshall speaking. Shared knowledge of family breakdown would be among his strong bridges to black rap fans.

  The differences between them were as acute, and revealing. As a politicised black man, Tupac could plunge straight into the racial realities of America as he saw them, directly and seriously preaching change from his first record. White boy Marshall, almost equally radical, in part from listening to rappers like Tupac, would mask his views on race and his country at first, adopting a more cartoonish, satirical persona. As a white rapper, he had no “people” he could feel a need to address. With no vacancy for a “White Prince”, rap’s new ruler would have to start as Court Jester.

  Then, there was Tupac’s attitude to women. Though his mother worked for a while, her long-time crack addiction, and raising of him in shifting locations including homeless shelters, do not compare favourably to Mathers-Briggs’ “abuses”. But, though Tupac could sometimes conform to gangsta-rap’s thuggishly misogynist standards in music and life, his first hit, ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby’, showed woman-hating was not mandatory for a mother’s boy. “We all came from a woman, got a name from a woman …”, he reminded, as he “gave a holler to my sisters on welfare”. His later ‘Dear Mama’ was similarly sympathetic. But Eminem, an equally angry young man, would offer no such forgiveness. Denied race as a playground for his rage, he would spitefully attack women in his raps. Tupac’s unlikely white replacement would not worry about “sisters”. Only himself.

  One more element was needed to make Marshall decide to be a rapper. He might put shades on his nose, look in the mirror, and imagine he was L.L. Cool J. But the face looking back at him was too pale to ever convince. It took The Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill (1986) to reassure him that needn’t matter.

  “When I first heard them, I didn’t know they were white,” he told Newsweek. “I just thought it was the craziest shit I had ever heard. Then I saw the video and saw that they were white, and I went, ‘Wow.’ I thought, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ “

  “I was like, ‘This shit is so dope !’” he added to Spin. “That’s when I decided I wanted to rap.”

  The Beastie Boys had grown up further from Marshall’s world than Tupac or Dre. The three of them were all upper-middle class Jewish New Yorkers (continuing a bond between black and Jewish American music, with Jews as the bridge to WASPs, which stretched back to Cab Calloway hearing his jazz howl first in the wails of Harlem synagogue cantors, and which has been constant since). But the brattish, loudly obnoxious per-sonas The Beastie Boys adopted were anyway ideal inspiration for Marshall, 14 when he heard them. Layered with ear-splittingly dense rock production by Rick Rubin, the Beasties’ obvious rap skills and adoles-cently sexist and violent poses, on record, and in tours replete with caged go-go girls and court appearances for minor acts of aggression, were almost a blueprint for Eminem. That it was all just a joke and an excuse for teenagers to let off steam, to “not give a fuck”, was certainly a lesson he learned. Their biggest hit, ‘Fight For Your Right’, meanwhile, could have been written for him at 14, when “living at home is such a drag”, and “Ma looks in and says ‘WHAT’S THAT NOISE?’”, till you “get chucked out”. Eminem would repeat such songs of valueless teen rebellion and, not bothering with the Beasties’ faked stupidity, better them. But the important thing was that these successful white rappers existed at all.

  Having found role models he could aspire to, Marshall then had his dreams dashed by a man who would in some ways be his nemesis. Vanilla Ice, whose ‘Ice Ice Baby’ (1990) was the first US rap number one, was almost a parody of the racism in the American music industry. His records were mediocre, about nothing in particular. But, with his white skin, sculpted cheekbones, and stormtrooper square-cut blond hair, he could not have looked more aggressively Aryan. It was assumed rap had found its Elvis, its commercial messiah to suck in white masses otherwise scared of black music, in Nineties America’s segregated pop nation. His first album duly sold 18 million. To add to the insult of each sale to far better black rappers, listeners not only clearly bought him in such unprecedented numbers because he was white, but were not bothered that he looked like a Nazi. In fact, this deliberate styling must have been a selling point. Though Vanilla Ice vanished as swiftly as he had appeared (after being allegedly dangled off a 15th floor balcony by infamous Death Row label boss and Dre associate Suge Knight, over disputed credits for his black songwriter), his spectre would rise to haunt Eminem’s early success. “Vanilla Twice,” critics would sneer. Ice himself would reappear to taunt this rival white face. He, like Eminem, had as a boy been a genuine hip-hop fan. But, sucked into the mainstream music machine, encouraged to fake a gangsta past while being as Caucasian as Pat Boone, his success a pure product of racist avarice, he made the idea of white rappers again seem an offensive joke. Watching in Detroit, Marshall was mortified.

  “That crushed me,” he told Newsweek, of first hearing ‘Ice Ice Baby’. At first, I felt like I didn’t want to rap any more. I was so mad, because he was making it real hard for me. But then 3rd Bass restored some credibility, and I realised that it really depends on the individual. Vanilla Ice was just fake. 3rd Bass was real.”

  New York Jews like the Beasties, 3rd Bass were the last white rappers of substance before Eminem. Their Cactus Album (1991) was a more media-literate, serious and sly work than Licensed To Ill, addressing hip-hop culture from their own position, not impersonating blacks like the Beasties and Ice. ‘Product of the Environment’ in particular addressed the racial loneliness and pitfalls of Marshall’s decision to rap, but also indicated why he might survive. “His reward was almost a bullet in the chest,” as MC Serch rapped of his early days. “… ‘Cos I’m a pr
oduct of the environment/ there it is, black and white.” But as he recalled an early performance, the tone was almost of a vision, of race ceasing to matter, of rapping skill and true street knowledge saving him: “Never had static, ‘cos everybody knew me/ … I’m protected and respected for my own self/ ‘cos of talent, no shame or nothin’ else/ In a time of tension, racially fenced in/ I came off, and all the others blessed me.”

  The teenage Marshall must have ached for such acceptance. The journey he had started by listening to such records so reverently, though, and by choosing to make hip-hop his life, was unavoidably one of racial transgression, with its history of hostility and risk. Norman Mailer’s epochal essay The White Negro (1957) had first sketched the opportunities and dangers that becoming lost in black culture could give to whites: once jazz (rap’s first ancestor) had entered white society as “a communication of art because it said, ‘I feel this, and now you do too’ “, Mailer’s hipster “White Negroes” swapped middle-class repression for the swifter, riskier, nerve-end reactions of life on the edge, where poor black Americans had to live. Shrugging off restraint, they would value “the naked truths of what each observer feels at each instance of his existence”, a prophetic definition of rap’s uncensored, individual’s art. The essay’s predictions were erupting in underground America as Mailer wrote, in the musical miscegenation of rock’n’roll, as poor white Southerners like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley learned from the black musicians around them. But somehow, as everyone in Nineties Detroit could attest, America’s racial walls had never truly tumbled. So rap had to breach them again.

  The cover of Ice-T’s Home Invasion LP (1993) showed the music’s intent. It pictured a white suburban teenage boy with Iceberg Slim and Malcolm X books by his side, headphones clamped to his ears as he listened to Ices T and Cube and imagined a scantily clad white woman, maybe his mother, grabbed roughly from behind by one darkly masked man, while another coldly slaughtered a white man, maybe his father. It was many white parents’ worst nightmare, the explicit truth of what Elvis, and Little Richard, and Louis Armstrong had threatened, the reason, Ice-T knew, that gangsta-rap was condemned in America. Like jazz, it was another ghetto “communication of art”, of ideas of violent rage, rebellion and injustice. It too said, to unprotected white ears in their neighbourhoods, “I feel this, and now you do too”.

  Home Invasion could also have been drawn from life in Marshall’s bedroom. When he achieved stardom as Eminem, and his background of gangsta-rap addiction was revealed, he seemed to be the living proof of the cover’s prophecy, the first fruit of gangsta-rap’s demon seed in white youth. The difference, though, and the reason it would be Marshall who took the white rap crown, was that he was not solely some slumming suburban kid. He was also a true product of ghetto streets, a “White Negro” almost from birth. Beaten up and taunted by black neighbours, a white boy struggling for acceptance in a black medium, he was as much a victim, and creation, of the racist barriers erected by whites generations before as anyone. He did not cross the tracks to become a rapper, as the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis had done to learn rock. The tracks crossed in him. He was a new kind of white American, the end-result of the experiment Norman Mailer first noted. And to strike out and succeed, to top the rap records he loved, he would first have to face down concerted black racist contempt – to be treated like a minority.

  He was helped by one of his closest friends, future D12 MC Proof (real name, Deshaun Holton). The two met when both were 15 (13 in some stories; but Eminem stuck ruthlessly to his false age back then, and 15 fits other facts better). Proof was idly sitting on a brick wall outside his mostly black school, Osbourne High, when a white boy unusually walked towards him, and handed out a flyer. “They was for a talent show he was doing,” Proof told Spin. “He said he was a rapper.” Immediately, they traded rhymes. When both matched “first place” with “birthday” (which takes some doing), they recognised kindred spirits. Soon, Proof was introducing Marshall to a would-be producer who lived round the corner, Kon Artis (aka Denaun Porter). Kon remembered the day in a way which made clear the exceptional steps Marshall was taking. “Motherfucker came to my door, and I’m like, ‘Hmmm, what the fuck? White boy at my door!’” he drawled to Spin. But it was Proof and Marshall who kept the closest bond. Blasting out his stereo “as soon as my Mom would leave to play bingo”, staying with Proof’s mother when his own home overheated, Marshall continued his rap education with his friend. “Basically, we checked everything,” Proof told icast.com. “No matter if it was wack, we would know, because we were bright. Every tape that was out, we bought it. He had a tape collection that was incredible. I had the vinyl, and he had all the tapes.”

  It was around this time, aged 15, that Marshall took serious steps to be a rapper himself. When not annoying his mother with his primitive twin-radio recording set-up, he was, he told Spin, “picking up a pencil and like getting busy and shit. I started, you know, getting better and better. Then I was like, ‘Yo, I want to do this.’” Proof gave him the first opportunity to test himself, at Osbourne High. “Listen, I’ll tell you this,” he said to icast.com. “I went to a black dominated high school, and I used to sneak him in there into the lunchroom. And they’d be like, ‘We want to battle you.’ ‘No, you can’t battle me, why don’t you battle the white boy first?’ And everybody would be like, ‘I’ll kill him.’ Then Em would come out and kill the whole lunchroom, which was a black dominated school and would be looking like, ‘Damn !’ It was like White Men Can’t Jump.”

  Other encounters, though, were more traumatic. “When you’re a little kid, you don’t see colour,” Marshall considered to Spin, “and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager, and started to rap. Then I’d notice that a lot of motherfuckers always had my back, but somebody always had to say to them, ‘Why you have to stick up for the white boy?’ I’d hang out on the corner where kids would be rhyming, and when I tried to get in there, I’d get dissed. A little colour issue developed, and as I got old enough to hit the clubs, it got really bad. I wasn’t that dope yet, but I knew I could rhyme, so I’d get on the open mics and shit, and a couple of times I was booed off the stage.” One incident in particular lodged in his mind. “I remember I used to go to this place called the Rhythm Kitchen way back in the day,” he said. “I was probably 16 or 17. The first time I grabbed the mic, I got booed before I even said anything. As I started to rap, the boos just got louder and louder, until I just got off the mic.”

  When it happened again, at another venue, it terrified him. “The first time I grabbed the mic at The Shelter [a Detroit MCs’ hangout], I got dissed. I only said, like, three words, and I was already gettin’ booed as soon as the mic was handed to me. I was like, ‘This is fucked.’ I started getting scared, like, ‘Is this gonna happen? What the fuck is gonna happen? Am I gonna make it or not?’”

  Many would have quit after one of those nights. For a teenager with self-esteem which was already battered, getting on stage must have been bruising enough. For jeering crowds to let him know he was not wanted in the places he most craved acceptance, sometimes before he could say a word, must have crushed him. The obsessive love of hip-hop he expressed in ‘Revelation’, the sense that only it could save his desperate life, must have had something to do with him picking himself up. But it was also true, as his subsequent career proved, that the beatings, insults and disappointments of his early days did not leave him shaking and weak. Instead, they toughened him, fed him aggressive resentment and rage, determined him not to be broken. The pressure of those early open mics only intensified his will to succeed. And the racist nature of the taunts, like the racist assaults he had suffered, did not make him stupidly racist back. Instead, it made him despise all racism, with a black rapper’s force.

  He gave his most thoughtful account of his resentments to Spin. “In the beginning,” he recalled, “the majority of my shows were for all-black crowds, and people woul
d always say, ‘You’re pretty dope for a white boy,’ and I’d take it as a compliment. Then, as I got older, I started to think, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Nobody asks to be born, nobody has a choice of what colour they’ll be. I had to work up to a certain level before people would even look past my colour; a lot of motherfuckers would just sit with their arms folded and be like, ‘All right, what is this?’ I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the colour I am makes me any less of a person.”

  That diffident, defensive last sentence could have come straight from the mouth of one of Martin Luther King’s black marchers, 40 years before. The weird racial inversion of Marshall’s America was proven by the outlandish thing he said next. “There was a while,” he admitted bravely, “when I was feeling like, ‘Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this shit.’ I’m not ignorant – I know how it must be when a black person goes to get a regular job in society. But music, in general, is supposed to be universal. If I’m a white 16-year-old and I stand in front of the mirror and lip-synch every day like I’m Krayzie Bone – who’s to say that because I’m a certain colour I shouldn’t be doing that? And if I’ve got a right to buy his music and make him rich, who’s to say that I then don’t have the right to rap myself?”

  He was less considered, but as truthful to NME. “People say I’m offensive. Know what I find offensive? People always dwelling on me being a white rapper, a white this, a white that. That shit makes me sick to my stomach. It’s not like it’s a huge fucking secret! I wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see I’m white, thank you! It doesn’t make what I do any less valid. I’ve lived just as hard a life as anyone in America. I’ve been to all-white schools, all-black schools, mixed schools.” He paused, to make his most meaningful point. “I’ve seen it from every angle, and I’ve always been poor. I’ve always been poor.”