by Hasted, Nick
‘Never 2 Far’, for one, was pitched somewhere between desperation and faith, seemingly drawn from real conversations between Marshall and his friends. At its start, he meets one of them on a Detroit street corner, and they scrabble around for the bus fare, wondering whether to scam the driver, till Marshall snaps. “You know what, look, I’m sick of taking this damn bus everywhere, man,” he cries, “… I got a baby on the way, I don’t even got a car/ … I still stay with my moms, 21 and still with my moms/ Look hey, we gotta make some hit records or something/ You know what I’m saying? ‘Cos I’m tired of being broke.” Lying about his age even this early (he was 23), he lays bare the terror of a young, poor man with all his life ahead of him, and no way of knowing if it will improve, if he will ever amount to anything, or even be able to leave his mother’s care (uncriticised, here). But the chorus, with more than a touch of Sly Stone’s euphoric, community-minded ‘Everybody Is A Star’ (1970), showed Marshall keeping his head above water, by belief in a hip-hop American Dream: “No matter wherever you are, you’re never too far/ From revenue, huh, ‘cos you can be king/ You can rule the world, you can do anything/ It’s on you, baby, ‘cos you can be a star/ … A million dollars ain’t even that far away, man.”
It takes a special kind of strength to sustain such a vision, while flipping burgers in a Detroit diner, and going home to your mother and a pregnant girlfriend you can’t support. Outside America, it might seem delusional. But the song showed Marshall did not mean to dream and bitch his life away, when he knew hard, rapping work could save it: “Yo, I’m not about to chance it and dismiss handling business/ I’m cancelling Christmas to gamble and risk this.” Nor did he feel alone. As would be true when he became famous, and too suspicious of others’ motives to make new friends, he had already decided D12 were the comrades to help him on his journey. Again, he used spiritual terms: “The few that I trust, them’s the people that I still got/ … we move through into time, my crew’s true and divine …”
‘It’s OK’, the second track on Infinite, was still more specific and heartfelt. It described the effort of will it took to say its title in Detroit. As Eye-Kyu contributed a numb chorus about sleeplessness and alienation, Marshall set out another version of his dreamland: “One day I plan to be a family man happily married/ I wanna grow to be so old that I have to be carried/ … And have at least a half a million for my baby girl/ It may be early to be planning this stuff/ ‘Cos I’m still struggling hard to be the man, and it’s tough …/ I’m on a quest to seize all, my own label to call/ Way before my baby is able to crawl.” Success would not, it would transpire, stop him struggling, or leave him satisfied. And Hailie would be able to walk by the time he had banked his first million, and set up Shady Records. But otherwise, he followed this early agenda to the letter.
‘It’s OK’ clearly unveiled the iron character his roles as quiet, drifty student and cook, and maddened, car-punching son and boyfriend had concealed. But it also put sweaty flesh on what this intense, unrelieved stage of his life, and the responsibility he felt for those around him, was doing to his head: “Praying for sleep/ Dreaming with a watering mouth/ Wishing for a better life for my daughter and spouse.” For the first and last time on record without the distance of Slim’s sarcasm, he then widened his view beyond his own poverty, to picture the whole ghetto he was trying to escape. He saw “my little brother” (either Nathan or his terrorised younger self) trying to learn at school, then racing home through streets infested with crack and children shooting each other for clothes. The boy has asthma, Marshall feels his lungs shutting and blood vessels bursting, as if they’re drowning in a sunken city; a feeling a visit to Detroit will give you, as we’ve seen.
He’s finally moved to another religious epiphany, a layer of his thinking he’s kept almost secret since, apart from the hip-hop rapture of ‘Revelation’. He sees the world as fallen (“It’s been Hell on this Earth since I fell on this Earth”), and scorns the dope-selling avarice around him: “the root of all evil.” So Marshall finds a different rock: “in the midst of this insanity, I found my Christianity/ Through God, and there’s a wish he granted me/ He showed me how to cope with the stress/ And hope for the best, instead of mope and depressed.”
His later contempt for TV evangelists on The Marshall Mathers LP becomes less clichéd and more serious, in this light. Hip-hop alone had not been enough to sustain him in his struggles. He had prayed to God, too, like any good Midwestern boy, and been answered. His indifference to the usual rap star’s materialist bragging once he’d made his millions may also be explained by this forgotten song. In it, battling “the root of all evil”, he sounds more like Christ scattering the Temple money-lenders than Puff Daddy, dripping “Ghetto Fabulous” gold and bought women.
It may not be in his interests to emphasise this moral uprightness these days, when the world loves Slim Shady’s perceived careless sickness. But the Christianity he “found” in his early twenties was not a passing thing. “He’s not a hate-monger, he gets on his knees every night and prays with his daughter,” his mother told the Sydney Sun-Herald last year. And he’s happily told reporters this is true. Like his semi-suburban background, his praying is another neglected facet of his public, evil face.
The most embarrassing of buried secrets on Infinity, though, may be ‘Searchin”, one of three songs complicating Slim’s later, loud misogyny. It’s shamelessly sappy, abjectly laying his love at Kim’s feet, teenage in its unqualified, fervent adoration. Marshall can’t sleep, can’t speak, goes weak at the knees at the thought of her, can’t think of anything else when he’s not with her. This isn’t R. Kelly “sex you up” stuff, either, not “one for the ladies”. Marshall’s lost in love for Kim, ignoring hard hip-hop convention for the sort of lines a doe-eyed high school student might slip to his girl in class: “The way your lips sparkle and glare in the sun/ You got your hair in a bun, no matter what you’re wearing you stun.” His more serious hopes, and the relationship’s frustrations at the time, are expressed at the end: “I see you grasping to trust, but my intentions are good/ ‘Cos I just need you to see how much I’m eager to be/ Your man legally wed.” The seeds of ‘Kim’’s murderous vengeance are in this early, nervously exposed, eventually thwarted need.
In ‘Jealousy Woes II’, surely about Kim too, those seeds grow. With a woman’s voice loudly arguing (the kind of dialogue he’d later drop), he paints a picture of a girlfriend faking kisses, fighting him over money, frisking him for girls’ numbers, making him grovel with stony silences, laughing at him when he hurts and cries. But the worm turns, in what would become familiar fashion: “So I’m a wait for your evacuation/ ‘Cos every accusation makes me wanna smack your face in.” Eventually, he finds she’s been seeing another man, the kind of accusation that would later tear them apart. But the pain she could make this essentially soft boy feel when they were younger, and all he wanted was to be a rapper and married to her, bleeds through this song. He might “wanna smack your face in”, in true Slim Shady style but, as would always be the case in real life, he doesn’t. Like Infinite‘s last “female” song, ‘Maxine’, about a whorish, possibly AIDS-ridden crack addict, the writing is more considered and less obnoxious than later (“I refrain from getting angry,” Kon Artis chivalrously tells Maxine; on The Eminem Show‘s similarly themed, humourless ‘Drips’, Eminem searches for the “ho” to throttle her). Still loving Kim, not yet bitter at her, Marshall at 23 was not a misogynist.
Only one track fully suggested his future persona. ‘Backstabber’ had been his début single the year before, pressed with the proceeds of an income tax refund. A simple, lurid, pulp comic-book story about chasing a slippery super-villain, its tone was again gauche compared to later. But the Backstabber bore more than a passing likeness to Slim. An escapee from a psychiatric ward like that in The Real Slim Shady video, “he’ll stab you with a sword, don’t be fooled by his charm …/ He has a mean stare but usually cracks jokes.” The narrator this time is a cop, but h
is arrest methods give a first glimpse of the graphic, sick humour to come: “He shed his skin, then he promised to come clean/ I took his butcher knife and jabbed it under his spleen/ Cut him at the seam then dragged the fella home/ Beating him over the head with a telephone.” On ‘Open Mic’, too, Marshall chased enemies “in a Jason mask”. Infinite might be juvenilia. But his potential was now in place.
The record’s complete failure, though, was one of the jolts he needed to force that potential to the surface; and such blows, for the next nightmare year, came thick and fast. “Infinite, you know, [the Bass Brothers] lost money on it,” Marshall told elamentz.com. “They tried to put out a local tape in Detroit, it sold a little bit, but they didn’t really make their money back on it, even. So, then we was gettin’ ready to just be like, ‘Fuck it.’ And then we was like, nah, there’s too much there. I was doing too many shows and gettin’ too much response.”
“When that failed,” Paul Rosenberg recalled to Newsweek, “he decided to stop trying to fit in and simply make the kind of music he loved. And that’s when he started experimenting with the Slim Shady character.”
“After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and angrier,” Marshall confirmed to Rolling Stone. “A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. Motherfuckers was like, ‘You’re a white boy, what the fuck are you rapping for? Why don’t you go into rock’n’roll?’ All that type of shit started pissing me off.’ “
More concrete factors also helped turn the diffident rapper of Infinite into his infamous Mr. Hyde, Slim. Hailie was born on Christmas Day, 1996, after Infinite‘s hopes had already sunk. Marshall’s desperate desire to improve on his own fractured upbringing seemed doomed to sink with it, torpedoed by life in Detroit. “It was a struggle to know that I had a little girl and couldn’t afford to raise her,” he told Rolling Stone. “I’m like, ‘Fuck, I can’t afford to buy my daughter diapers.’ I literally didn’t have shit. So when I hit 23 [he most likely means 25, late in 1997], that was like a wake-up point for me. Like, ‘I gotta do something now.’ That’s when I started getting into every single battle in Detroit. Every competition. It was do or die for me.” Kim, meanwhile, “had to strip to make money,” he told Newsweek. He felt like grabbing dollars by any means necessary, too. “I had nothing. I felt like robbing somebody or selling drugs to get myself out of the situation I was in,” he recalled to Q. The moral high ground he’d taken on Infinite was slipping from under his feet.
The places the couple had to live, now they had a dependent, darkened his mood further. “I was working 50-, 60-hour weeks for $6.50 an hour [at Gilbert’s Lodge] just to pay the rent,” he told NME. “And I still couldn’t do it. In east Detroit you can get real cheap houses for, like, $200 a month, but once my daughter was born I couldn’t meet it. So we were moving every six weeks or so.” The similarity to his cashless mother’s wanderings when he was a boy, which he so despised her for, must have sickened him. Now he was “changing the scenery” behind his daughter, too, the cycle of poverty keeping him trapped. And when they did stick in one home, it had to be in a crack zone, along 7 Mile. A stray bullet lodged in the wall near Kim’s head one evening, as she did the dishes.
More grinding offences followed. “The neighbourhoods we lived in fucking sucked,” Kim told Rolling Stone. “I went through four CDs and five VCRs in two years.” One taunting crack addict was to blame. After his first break-in, he came back a few nights later to make a sandwich, and mark his territory. “He left the peanut butter, jelly, all the shit out and didn’t steal nothing,” Marshall spat to Rolling Stone. “Ain’t this about a motherfucking bitch. But then he came back again, and took everything but the couches and beds. The pillows, clothes, silverware – everything. We were fuckin’ fucked.”
The festering racial tension that had scarred his attempts at a rap career followed him to that house too. “Little kids used to walk down the street going, ‘Look at the white baby!’” he remembered to Spin. “Everything was, ‘white this, white that’. We’d be sitting on our porch, and if you were real quiet, you’d hear, ‘Mumble, mumble, white, mumble, mumble, white.’ Then I caught this dude breaking into my house for, like, the fifth time, and I was like, ‘Yo, fuck this! It’s not worth it, I’m outta here!’ That day, I wanted to quit rap and get a house in the fucking suburbs. I was arguing with my girl, like, ‘Can’t you see they don’t want us here?’ I went through so many changes. I actually stopped writing for about five or six months, and I was about to give everything up. I just couldn’t, though. I’d keep going to the clubs and taking the abuse. But I’d come home and put a fist through the wall. If you listen to a Slim Shady record, you’re going to hear all that frustration coming out.”
It was the thinnest his skin became to his minority status, and the nearest he came to admitting it had an element of choice. He could have snapped under the abuse, gone “back to where he came from”, like many a black racial pioneer in his city before him; accepted the white suburban life he’d been half-raised for, and would at least find camouflage in. No wonder he stopped rapping at this moment of crisis. If he retreated from black America, how could he make its music?
But in the end, he carried on. He and his young family moved back with his mother for a while, with the usual crises and screaming. He would later live with friends, while Kim and Hailie stayed behind – an indication, perhaps, of who now riled each other most. And from this tumult, in the summer of 1997, Slim Shady was born to save them all. His genesis was typically unwholesome.
“I was on the pot when I thought of Slim Shady,” Marshall happily told FHM. “I was taking a shit and it popped in my head. It was because in the Dirty Dozen you have to have an alias. I’m Eminem, but in the Dirty Dozen I’m Slim Shady. I was taking a shit, thought of it, got off the pot, forgot to wipe my ass and went off to tell everybody.” “Boom, the name hit me, and right away, I thought of all these words to rhyme with it,” was the slightly alternative origin in Rolling Stone. “So” – more hygienically – “I wiped my ass, and, ah, called everybody I knew.” “I thought of the name and then wrote, ‘Slim Shady/ Brain-dead like Jim Brady’,” he recalled in Angry Blonde, “and that’s when I went with the name.”
His Eminem alias was the sort of thing every rapper needed, but never changed who he was, on record or off. This new name was different. Coming when all the simmering problems in his life were reaching boiling point, Slim Shady – plucked perhaps from Shady Lane, near Gilbert’s Lodge – set something rolling loose in his head. “The more I started writing and the more I slipped into this Slim Shady character, the more it just started becoming me,” he wrote in Angry Blonde. “My true feelings were coming out, and I just needed an outlet to dump them in. I needed some type of persona. I needed an excuse to let go of all this rage, this dark humour, the pain, and the happiness.” It was as if he had named his subconscious, or the rush of uncensored emotions which crash through, for better or worse, on Es (which he’d soon start to hungrily gobble). The way he told it, he had been possessed by himself. In a period of despair, in the crude process of taking a shit, Slim Shady had appeared to set him free.
There would be encouraging hands on his shoulder, when this new Marshall made himself known. To hear Marky Bass tell it to the Sydney Sun-Herald, the Bass Brothers had moulded Slim, a product not of a private apparition, but old-fashioned showbiz Svengalis. “His lyrics were a lot tamer when he started out,” Marky confided. “He always had his characters and an edge, but it wasn’t so much about his life story – and now pretty much everything he is writing about is what goes on in his life. We came up with the idea of shock rap. Things were going a little berserk in Marshall’s life, we were getting turned away by labels who didn’t want a white rapper, and some of the anger started coming out of him. We said, ‘You’ve got to let this out and ride with it.’ His early stuff was accepted within the rap genre and by the critics, he was always clean with his lyrics and his delivery, but the market didn’t take to it until it got
a little foul-mouthed, a little potty-mouthed. Now, they’ll take anything from the kid.”