by Hasted, Nick
Talking to the Mail On Sunday, Mathers-Briggs seemed to confirm the story. “No one should take anything he says seriously,” she explained. “He doesn’t mean it. He is making money out of negative issues, because he could not make it any other way. When he first started to write filthy lyrics, I asked him why. His answer was the more foul he was, the more people loved him. He didn’t make money out of nice things. If he wrote a song about how much he loved his mother and little brother, he’d be laughed at.”
Once he became famous as Eminem, Marshall would never be averse to doing what it took to sell records, and the advice of the Basses, still effectively his paymasters, must have carried weight with him. But, as even Marky indicated, the emotions that congealed into Marshall’s new persona were genuine; Slim was his own creation. “All kinds of shit – not being able to provide for my daughter, my living situation, etc., just started building up so much that I had just had it,” he recalled in Angry Blonde.
The contrast between Slim and his previous character was shown by the shocked reactions even of his foul-mouthed soulmates in D12, when he rapped Slim’s first song for them. It was two freestyle, crazed verses he didn’t even bother to name – “Stole your mother’s Acura/ wrecked it and sold it back to her,” was one rhyme he remembered. At its end, Bizarre intoned, “You have now witnessed a white boy on drugs.” Proof was still more appalled, warning, “You need to quit talkin’ that drug shit.” But Slim’s malign influence went deeper than Marshall’s rap style. His life changed to suit his alias. As he described it in Angry Blonde, the decline of his daily existence and the rise of Slim went hand in hand. “[That first song] seemed like it was from out of left field compared to what I usually rapped about,” he wrote. “I soon found myself doing things that I normally didn’t do. Like getting into drugs and drinkin’. I was reeeaaally fucked up. I was sick of everything. Kim and I had Hailie, my producers FBT [the Basses’ pro name] were just about to give up on me, we weren’t paying rent to my mom’s, and just a whole bunch of other horrible shit was going on.”
But now, at last, he had a weapon with which to retaliate. Over the summer of 1997, as his circumstances simply got worse, he wrote three songs which would become the centrepiece not only of the next year’s The Slim Shady EP, but key tracks on The Slim Shady LP, the album which would introduce him to the world. His “first real song”, ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, was the one which bottled the essence of his fearlessly, funnily dark new identity best. It was written while he was still living back at his mother’s with Kim and Hailie. On record, its introduction by D12 associate Frogger shows the nervous uncertainty everyone around Marshall seemed to feel at his transformation. “A get your hands in the air, and get to clappin’ ‘em and like, back and forth because aah, this is … what you thought it wasn’t,” he announces, washing his hands of what follows even as he applauds. There’s a hacking cough in the background, before Slim Shady roars onto vinyl.
‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ is a battle rhyme in essence, but of a ruthless, rude confidence Eminem never managed on Infinite. He bundles most other white rappers into touch – Vanilla Ice, Everlast, even the admired 3rd Bass – as well as his Detroit rivals, before admitting “I’m ill enough to just straight up dis you for no reason.” But the rap’s point is to let Slim off the leash, and define him at the start, while burying Infinite‘s failed Eminem: “Slim Shady, Eminem was the old initials (Bye-Bye!)/ Extortion, snortin’, supportin’ abortion/ Pathological liar, blowin’ shit out of proportion/ … Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict/ Half animal, half man/ Dumpin’ your dead body inside of a trash can.” By the final verse, Slim’s outrageous thoughts are blending into true moments from Marshall’s life, a wrong-footing technique which would become a trademark; cursing his dishwashing chores at Gilbert’s, remembering his quietness at school, he then imagines he had a Junior High drug habit, and at 13 raped the women’s swim team. What really makes this the “first”, fully realised song by Eminem/Slim, though, is its sneered chorus: “Screamin’ ‘Fuck the world’ like Tupac/ I just don’t give a FUUUUUCK!” The rallying cry was irresistible. In the real world, holding down a job to support a baby and girlfriend, Marshall cared too much. But the “Fuuuuuck!” he didn’t give on record temporarily trampled all that. It was his first, relished raised finger to everyone.
‘If I Had’, by contrast, dropped all bravado, and sank into the troubles which spawned Slim. A cousin of Infinite‘s ‘It’s OK’, it jettisoned that track’s artistic distance, for one of hip-hop’s most nakedly depressed, weary songs. Marshall had left his mother’s to live with a friend and his roommates by now. He was still struggling. “I wrote that shit the same week my car broke down,” he remembered in Angry Blonde. “My fuckin’ engine blew out and a bunch of fucked up shit was happening, all at the same time.”
“Life … by Marshall Mathers,” it begins, like a school report, or a teenager’s secret diary. It’s rapped flatly, almost whined, in Marshall’s normal speaking voice, to a barely varying, downbeat drum track by its EP producer, DJ Head. For the LP, the Basses would spruce it up into a version that included a descending, looped organ, and a soft female voice. Either way, it was circular music with no exit, expressing Marshall’s true feelings with no adornment; Slim’s existence now letting him be honest as himself, as well as from behind that dark mask.
What he thought was bleak. Life was a “big obstacle”, friends were “really your enemies”, money was, as on ‘It’s OK’, still “the root of all evil”; everything was geared to trick and backstab him. “What is life?” he wondered. “I’m tired of life.” And, 38 more times, he said “tired”, listing the dissatisfactions that drained him. Skinny crackhead friends, drive-by shootings, minimum wage jobs and petty bosses, DJs playing bad rappers and never him, his own weakness with drink, “using plastic silverware … not being a millionaire,” it all “tired” him. He was “tired of being white trash, broke and always poor … tired of being stared at” (something which, ironically, would worsen with success). Slim butted in with a chorus of vengeful fantasy: “If I had one wish/ I would ask for a big enough ass for the whole world to kiss.” But the overall mood was of rare resignation: “Just fed up/ That’s my word.” It wasn’t a song by someone expecting success, or who cared any longer about hip-hop’s requirements. It just said poverty had left its writer hopeless and depressed. Bordering self-pity and paranoia, as such feelings do, its shameless self-exposure was one reason he would soon be plucked by Interscope into a new, vastly wealthy life.
‘Just The Two Of Us’, the EP track renamed ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ on the LP, was something else again. It was written still later in the summer of 1997, when Marshall and Kim had temporarily split up, and Kim was threatening a restraining order to keep him from Hailie. Both were seeing other people; if the song is to be believed, there was talk of Kim making her new boyfriend and his son Hailie’s stepfamily, cutting Marshall out completely. With Kim’s stepfather allegedly threatening him too, Marshall’s resentment and apparent impotence at Hailie’s removal made him lash back with this swiftly infamous song, about the hours after his killing of Kim.
But, unlike its even more notorious 1999 prequel ‘Kim’, it is not at heart a misogynistic, violent song. As Marshall wrote in Angry Blonde, it had begun with his desire to write about himself and his daughter. “But I thought, ‘How can I make a song about Hailie?’ I didn’t want to make the shit corny or nothing, [and] I was also tryin’ to piss Kim off.” Of the massive invasion of Kim’s privacy that resulted, he explained: “At the most I thought it would be talked about in Detroit, but I didn’t figure I was going to get a deal and go nationwide with it.” Still, to anger Kim in the extreme, he used Hailie as co-vocalist. “I lied to Kim and told her I was taking [Hailie] to Chuck E. Cheese that day,” he told Rolling Stone of his daughter’s participation. “But I took her to the studio. When [Kim] found out, she fucking blew. We had just got back together for a couple of weeks. Then I played
her the song, and she bugged the fuck out.”
It would not be the last time he’d profess naïve surprise at such outrage from Kim, after a verbal assault. But Hailie’s presence on this track, in a half-baby-talk dialogue with Dad when not yet even one, in fact softens the song, leaving its central subject as his love for her, as he’d intended. His fear of being “corny” – which hadn’t worried him when he wrote ‘Searchin’’, and he’d stop fearing again by The Eminem Show‘s heartfelt ‘Hailie’s Song’ – was, though, also allayed by creepy horror. To dreamlike, rippling harps, he quietens Hailie’s gurgling queries about why Mama’s sleeping in the trunk and smells so bad, why she has “that little boo-boo on her throat” (“it’s just a little scratch – it don’t hurt”), and why she won’t talk to her child, and wants to “swim” into a lake, late at night.
There’s a rueful playfulness to his explanations (“See, honey, there’s a place called heaven and there’s a place called hell/ A place called prison and a place called jail/ And Da-da’s probably on his way to all of ‘em, except one”).
But there’s a disturbing, selfish certainty in his attitude, too, which would resurface in future conflicts with Kim and Debbie, as Slim made him suddenly rear up assertively, after years smarting under the two women’s thumbs. “Just me and you, baby, is all we need in this world,” he murmurs blissfully, not having given his child a choice, and after he’s tricked her into helping throw Mama in the lake. In later years, he’d pull not only Hailie but his half-brother Nathan to his side to live, replacing their mothers, quite convinced he was acting for the best. This song shows that pathology’s birth, making him sound more like a mad baby-snatching Dad than a murderer, before reaching the closing lines, which were all he really meant to say: “If you ever need anything, just ASK/ Da-da will be right there … I love you, baby.”
A murderous, easy-to-miss twist in the tale, meanwhile, was left dangling. As Kim’s rock-weighted legs plunge to the lake’s bed, he asks Hailie, “just help Dad with two more things out the trunk”. It was Kim’s new boyfriend and his son, the prequel would reveal. But at the time, this killing spree’s corpses could have been anyone. His mother? Vanilla Ice? Sick Slim Shady left no clues.
‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, ‘If I Had’ and ‘Just The Two Of Us’ made the 8-track The Slim Shady EP a startling step up in quality from Infinite when he recorded it, in two weeks, in the winter of 1997. But, as the songs’ downbeat nature suggested, this was not a time of creative thrills, but creeping desperation and fear. Slim Shady, and the EP with his name, was part of a last throw of the dice which tumbled through the end of 1997, a gamble which, if Marshall lost it, would condemn him to a dead-end life.
“My daughter was one at the time,” he told launch.com. “I couldn’t afford to buy her diapers. I didn’t have a job. I had job after job and just kept getting fired. I failed ninth grade three times. I was basically going nowhere. When I made The Slim Shady EP, I told the production people, ‘Yo, if this doesn’t work, I’m about to be 23 [25, of course], I gotta quit, get a job, do something.”
Linked to this feeling of a final chance was an invitation to rap in LA, the mythic home of his gangsta-rap heroes. The offer came from Wendy Day, a white one-time Vice-President of a liquor company who in 1992 had quit, and sunk $500,000 of her money into the Rap Coalition, an organisation intended to combat the often exploited status of young rappers in the record industry. According to one report, she had met Marshall when he and D12, as part of his last-ditch efforts, drove to Miami for an industry seminar, and he gave her an Infinite tape; others say it was at a Detroit convention. Either way, Infinite convinced her to call Marshall, and invite him to the Rap Coalition-sponsored Rap Olympics, a major battle to be held in South Central LA that October. She’d pay his air fare. The prize for first place would be $500 and a Rolex watch.
Marshall’s need to win ratcheted up in the week of the competition. He was still separated from Kim and Hailie. His time living with a friend and other roommates in a cramped apartment had ended when an acquaintance offered cheaper rent, if he and his friend moved across the street. But the acquaintance pocketed their cash, instead of passing it to the building’s landlord. “So one day we come home and all our shit’s on the fuckin’ front lawn,” Marshall wrote in Angry Blonde. “We never could catch that motherfucker. Till this day, we haven’t caught him. It was a real fucked period in my life (no surprise there), and I felt like I had hit ‘rock bottom’.” He wrote the song of the same name that week, a work even bleaker than ‘If I Had’, which also made it on to The Slim Shady LP. It begins with a dedication to “all the happy people who have real nice lives/ And who have no idea what it’s like to be broke as fuck.” He probably wrote it the night before he flew to LA, when, homeless, he had to break back into the house he’d been evicted from. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go,” he told Rolling Stone. “There was no heat, no water, no electricity. I slept on the floor, woke up, went to LA. I was so pissed.”
Homelessness devastates your sense of security and self-esteem, strengths Marshall was already wretchedly short on. But typically, he spent the flight transforming his desperation into iron determination. Now he had to win that $500. So he would. He’d get a record contract, too. He assessed his competition as the plane neared LA, preparing put-downs for the only rapper he thought could challenge him, a boy called Kwest the Mad Lad. He convinced himself that all his hopes came down to what he did that day, in that alien city. Agonising months later, he would be proved right.
It was the 27th of October when he touched down, a Friday. The Rap Olympics were held in the Proud Bird nightclub, in Inglewood, right by the airport. The British journalist William Hall was there that evening, researching his definitive study of young hopeful South Central rappers, Westsiders. Before the first round began, Marshall joined the other competitors milling in nervous clusters, practising their freestyles, psyching themselves up. He was the only white boy in the place. Hall glanced up briefly when “M + M” – he thought – was announced, surprised and disappointed by his colour, then returned to his conversation with an ex-member of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, who once included one Dr. Dre in their ranks. Hall was forced to look up again, by a crescendo of cheers. He realised it was the white boy who was ripping his opponents apart. “What you need to do,” came the first words Hall heard, “is practise your freestyle/ ‘Cos you come up missin’ more than Snoop Doggy Dogg’s police file …” “He’s cold,” a man next to Hall hollered in approval.
Paul Rosenberg, convinced by Infinite to become Marshall’s manager, was in the crowd too, willing his friend on. “Oh my God,” he told Rolling Stone. “There was this black guy sitting next to me in the crowd. After the first round, he yells, ‘Just give it to the white boy. It’s over. Give it to the white boy.’ “
This LA crowd’s difference to the racially hostile audiences Marshall had faced down in Detroit was shown when he moved on to the second round. Standing face to face with his new, black opposition, the latter made a snide comment about Marshall’s skin, and was greeted with loud boos. Marshall, used to such attacks, deflected it back to destroy this crude opponent. “Every body in this place I miss you,” he rapped, “If you try and turn my facial tissue/ Into a racial issue …” The cheers were for him again.
Marshall kept going, round by round. It was like it was a movie, like it was his destiny to win, as he’d made himself believe it was when he fled his wrecked Detroit life for this night. But in the final, something happened. He faced not Kwest, the obstacle he’d been preparing for, but an unknown. The other rapper walked away when Marshall stepped up to battle him, standing behind a nearby projection screen, destroying the drama of confrontation. Still, Marshall was sure he’d crushed him. “He was garbage,” he told Hall afterwards. But somehow the judges disagreed. And suddenly, his chance to change his life had been and gone. “He really looked like he was going to cry,” Rosenberg remembered.
“Em was so far ah
ead of all the competition, it was embarrassing,” Dan Geistlinger, then an 18-year-old intern for Dre’s home, Interscope Records, who would be promoted to a top A&R man for what he saw that night, told NME. “I think the reason he didn’t win was that if he had he would have had to battle the competition MC, this guy called Juice. I don’t think he could’ve handled the humiliation. Em just crushed everyone that night.” That was no consolation to an appalled Marshall. “When I lost, I was ready to kill somebody,” he told launch.com.
He was sitting with Rosenberg, washed out and angry, when two men walked over. Led by Dan Geistlinger, they both worked for Interscope. They’d been watching him carefully. “He came up to me afterwards and I didn’t know he was anybody from anything,” Marshall told The Source. “He was like, ‘Yo, you got a tape or anything?’ I was all pissed, like, ‘Yeah, here, just take it.’” He shoved them a demo of The Slim Shady EP. He thought nothing more of it. Someone else came over and asked him to appear on the local Sway & Tech radio show the next morning, and he did so. Then he flew back to Detroit, almost broken.
He patched things up with Kim. He returned to work at Gilbert’s Lodge, intending to work overtime at Christmas, to get a present for Hailie’s first birthday. And he held onto one lifeline for a future as a rapper, a promise of a deal from a major label contact. Then, over the last week of December, even these small securities tore apart. He thought he had hit rock bottom earlier that year. But it was now that he smashed into it, and cracked. That week, he thought about killing. Others, for money. Or himself, to get it over with.