The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  The result stated his defence for his lyrical outrages, before anyone had heard them to attack. “We recordin’?” he asked as the track began, emphasising its spontaneous feel. But there was a self-consciousness, tight detail, and almost prophetic awareness and outracing of listeners’ expectations in each packed line, too, with little precedent in pop. With giddily free association, Marshall moved from attacks on enemies he hadn’t made yet, like Hilary Clinton and Lauryn Hill, to a list of crimes so extreme they couldn’t be believed, and acts so self-destructive he could never have survived. A corpse himself one minute, killing O.J. Simpson’s wife the next, referencing Warner Brothers cartoons and Psycho II for cultural context, the song’s genital wart-pussed, brain damaged, hallucinating Shady could never really be confused with the “role model” of its title. The climax was a chorus of acid irony: “Now follow me and do exactly what you see/ Don’t you wanna grow up to be just like me!” In a deeper trap for the literal-minded, he even declared himself fictional: “How the fuck can I be white, I don’t even exist.” Add comically schizoid dialogues between multiple Marshalls – yelling “Bitch!”, “Hi!” and “Fuck you!” to himself from stage left – and bubbling sound effects suggesting the man we heard was a drowning suicide, and the musically simple result boiled with contradictory life. It also showed startling, fullblown confidence. Marshall had walked into Dre’s house looking like a starry-eyed, anonymous apprentice. But after all he had been through to get there, he made sure he took the mic like a master. In one song, half-written right there, he outrapped almost everyone hip-hop’s most famed producer had ever worked with.

  Although Marshall makes no mention of it in Angry Blonde‘s reminiscence of that first session, legend has it a still more definitive Eminem track was recorded that day: ‘My Name Is’.

  Heard on the radio for the first time, when it became the single that brought him worldwide fame, this would make every record around it sound like it was in slow motion, and at least two fewer dimensions than Marshall’s hyperkinetic, sensurround, emotionally seesawing head-space. It was “knocked out in about an hour,” he breezily informed Rolling Stone. But that belies the result, which sounds like a perfect partnership between Dre’s famous studio perfectionism and Marshall’s suddenly bottomless, instinctive creative well.

  On The Slim Shady LP, it comes after the first of the ‘Public Service Announcements’ which would introduce all his subsequent records, too: a portentous, Fifties style disclaimer by Jeff Bass warning the album’s contents are “totally fucked” and “not necessarily the views of anyone”; furthermore, that children shouldn’t listen to it with “laces in their shoes”. However, “Slim Shady is not responsible for your actions.” After a minute, you can hear Marshall whispering this legal nonsense in the announcer’s ear. Asked if he has anything else to say, his first words on his first album to be heard outside Detroit are: “Yeah. Don’t do drugs.” Then, there’s a second of old-school scratching. And Marshall’s message to the planet blasts in: “HI! My name is … my name is … my name is … Slim Shady.” Dre’s production, often over-emphasised in accounts of Marshall’s career, earns its reputation with what follows. Rumbling beats and a child-like, toytown-tinny sort of Stax organ riff create the momentum and viral catchiness of that repeated, calling-card chorus. The production then alters for every packed, narrative verse, sometimes peeling back to what sounds like just a slowing heartbeat, other times adding eerie, outer space effects.

  But the track’s real trick is to extend ‘Role Model’’s multi-voiced experiment, till the first-time listener might have wondered just how many radio stations he was receiving from the ether, or some more appalling source. Where Marvin Gaye once spent weeks constantly layering his own voice to create a sonic bed of spiritual balm on 1971’s What’s Going On, ‘My Name Is’ saw Marshall and Dre do the same, to suggest a maniac’s multiple identities ricocheting round a padded cell. The first Slim you hear lasts just four words, “Hi – my name is …”, that are heckled on every off-beat – “Who?”, “What?” – before the answer arrives, faint and buzzing with faraway, ominous static: “Slim Shady”. While this dialogue plays out, a third Slim is noisily clearing his throat and asking for the class’s attention, “for one second”, like some beaten-before-he-starts Lincoln teacher, if not for his next words: “Hi kids! Do you like violence? Want to get fucked up worse than my life is?” “Uh-huh !” chirps a helium-voiced tot. Where are we, and with whom, and to what place will he take us? These questions had rarely troubled regulars to chart radio stations or record stores in years. Within Dre’s solid sonic structure, the answer was a flowing, fast journey around Marshall Mathers’ mind.

  He’d only just introduced himself, but already he was pouring his heart out, about people in his life we’d never met. “99 per cent of my life I was lied to,” he began one verse, “I just found out my Mom does more drugs than I do.” Another section finished: “and by the way, when you see my Dad, yeah, tell him I slit his throat in this dream I had.” When his life started to be scalpelled open in interviews, these infamous lines would be the instruments. His mother would enter the debate with a lawsuit. It was the surely deliberate start of his anonymous, awful life becoming a public soap opera, the script for which was made available on his records. His vengeance on Mathers-Briggs’ destabilising of his youth was to cast her as a white trash Joan Collins, a villainous super-bitch. It was a role she would find hard to shake. His further criticism that she couldn’t breast-feed him as “you ain’t got no tits” was a bit harsh.

  Indications of Marshall’s own instability were inserted as casually (“Since age 12, I’ve felt like I’m someone else”). But these downbeat passages were off-set by stories of stapling English teachers’ balls to their desks, and running over friendly ETs. With its jaunty tune, it was dubbed a novelty record. The novelty in 1999’s chart was its inspiration, unflagging for four-and-a-half minutes. The one downside for its creator was when Labi Siffre, writer of ‘I Got The’, sampled for ‘My Name Is’’s rhythm track, took deep exception to a lyric about raping a lesbian, among other soon-to-be familiar offences. With Interscope pressure to get radio play, too, Marshall considerably toned down his first mass market missive.

  Dre produced only one other significant track on The Slim Shady LP. ‘Guilty Conscience’ would be the follow-up single to ‘My Name Is’, and would cause much more controversy. Dre came up with the idea of a duet with Marshall, first called ‘Night’n’Day’, in which the pair would trade opposing views. Returning from the gym, where they worked out and talked in between the album’s draining sessions, Marshall wrote the lyrics, as usual, in a day. It was a more cinematic track than anything he had attempted before, presenting three scenarios, argued over in the protagonists’ heads by an angelic conscience (Dre) and devilish tempter (Slim). The moral dilemmas were the robbing of a liquor store by a depressed young man trying to support his kids; the drugging of a 15-year-old girl at a party by a 21-year-old man as they make out, so she’ll forget him fucking her; and the murder of a man’s wife and lover when he discovers them both in bed.

  They were all potentially queasy situations. But more slick production from Dre, the pair’s keen sparring, and the tales’ linking by a Sixties TV-style, moralising narrator and evocative, radio play sound effects created a highly enjoyable, visually suggestive track. It also turned Dre into another supporting character in Slim’s rapidly expanding rep company, as a grumpy foil to his live-wire young charge, a persona developed in future videos. Marshall memorably ran rings round his mentor’s high-minded pronouncements this time by suddenly smirking: “You gonna take advice from somebody who slapped DEE BARNES?”

  “Dre lately had been on the positive tip,” he recalled to Launch, “trying to clean up his image and shit. I’m at the stage where I don’t give a fuck. At the end of the song, I felt I was losing the battle, so I felt I had to take pokes at him. And I remembered when he slapped Dee Barnes. I didn’t tell him I was going to say
it. He fell over in his chair laughing, so I guess it was all good. But I was thinking the whole time, ‘What is he going to say?’ “

  The more serious hostile response, though, came from those critics who were repulsed by the climax of the rape verse, in which Slim argues: “Yo, look at her bush, does it got hair? (Uh-huh)/ Fuck this bitch right here on the spot bare.” ‘Guilty Conscience’’s light, fictional tone was the lines’ main defence, as would be the case throughout The Slim Shady LP, generally less savage and misogynistic than its successors. Another strong track, ‘As The World Turns’, seems typical of his attitude at the time. Though in it he intends to rape a trailer park blonde, and ends up fucking her to death with his “go-go gadget dick”, in between she knocks him through a plate-glass window and bites off his leg, a castratingly, sexually voracious match for all he attempts. As the song includes autobiographical school single combat with a fat female bully he also needs magic powers to beat, he seems to have been more worried by women than they had to be of him, at this stage. Still, in interviews he responded aggressively to ‘Guilty Conscience’’s critics.

  “Why can’t people see that records can be more like movies?” he asked the LA Times. “The only difference between some of my raps and movies is that they aren’t on a screen. I’m put on a blast for ‘Guilty Conscience’, but the idea came from Animal House, which is a movie that everyone thinks is funny and wonderful. Dre and I were talking about doing a song about what’s on somebody’s mind when they are thinking of doing something bad, and I remembered Animal House, where the girl passes out and the guy was about to rape her. He had a devil on one shoulder and the angel on the other saying, ‘Don’t do it.’ So we did the same thing, only in a little more graphic detail.”

  To City Detroit he gave a less convincing, but more interesting explanation. “My reaction is suck my fucking ass, you little prick,” he informed a particular critic. “These people are just ignorant to the music, and they don’t understand. They do not understand that damn near every song that I do has a message to it. All I was trying to show was that it seems that nowadays everybody’s got a good half and an evil half to ‘em, and it seems like the way America is now, nowadays the bad half always rules. Evil always rules in your conscience, and that’s how crime happens, that’s how everything happens.”

  The remainder of The Slim Shady LP fell into two distinct halves. ‘Brain Damage’, ‘If I Had’, ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ and ‘Rock Bottom’, the spartan, mostly Bass-produced tracks from his already swiftly receding period of hopelessness and self-pity the previous year – which, curiously, had helped secure him his deal – were retained from the EP and the sessions just after it. They gave an undertow of loss and misery to the more confident, funny California tracks (like the bad trip routine, ‘My Fault’). It was the Slim-defining cousins of ‘My Name Is’ and ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ that dominated the album, though, a sequence including ‘Still Don’t Give A Fuck’ that sounded like a single unstoppable gush, a notepad of Tourette’s psychosis, written with the good humour of someone quite sane. Slim might say he was born in an earthquake and would die by lightning, first cousin to the Stones’ crossfire-hurricane-spawned Jumpin’ Jack Flash. But the smirk and wink of a word addict saying the unsayable (that he shot up schoolyards, for instance) only because it made life more amusing, and because he knew they were just words anyway, were never far from such demonic jive. ‘I’m Shady’ was one track in which he explicitly separated jokes from truth. He expected such discernment from his listeners, too.

  “On my album, I’ve got my happy songs, crazy songs, serious songs,” he explained to Launch. “There are songs like, ‘Okay, I’ve slit my wrist 90 million times, I cut my own fucking head off, but this is how I really feel,’” he expanded to City Detroit. “It’s not rocket science here. It’s so clear when I’m joking and when I’m serious. ‘If I Had’ and ‘Rock Bottom’, those are a couple of the serious songs. I made those songs so people could really see what I went through. A lot of the album represents my serious side. But even in the joking songs, there’s a lot of truth. Like if I say I wanted to slit my father’s throat – that’s true feelings. ‘Rock Bottom’ or ‘If I Had’, those are my two most serious songs. All jokes aside.”

  The album had one further unusual strength. In a hip-hop genre where extra-musical efforts were usually limited to lame spliffed-up “skits” between tracks, The Slim Shady LP presented a cohesive, populated world. Slim Shady was its crazed king. But Debbie, Kim, Hailie, Dre and put-upon Marshall were locked inside too. Other characters were introduced, like Ken Kaniff from Connecticut, a sleazy-voiced, snickering gay man who obsessively love-hates Eminem, Paul Rosenberg (“Em, the album … can you tone it down a little bit?”), and the Public Service Announcer. All would be retained for future records. A dramatist’s mind, as well as a satirist’s, had been at work. Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine was one who noticed. “He has an incredible ability to tell stories,” he told the LA Times, “and if he keeps working that muscle, he could write movies, anything. He’s got wit and imagination. He could write the Marx Brothers’ A Day At The Races, if he ever wanted to.”

  The Slim Shady LP was everything its backers had hoped it would be. Now, they went slickly to work to ensure their investment’s return. Marshall was a willing partner in their schemes. He wrote ‘Still Don’t Give A Fuck’ on the advice of Paul Rosenberg, effectively composing a sequel to order. He toned down his lyrics when asked, too, on ‘My Name Is’ and others, as Rosenberg admitted to the LA Times. “Have there been times when we had to change stuff [because of Interscope]? Yes. Em understands that he wants the stores to stock his records or he won’t be heard, so he’ll do what it takes for the most part, unless the complaint is just ridiculous.” A “clean” version of the album was even prepared, and released, allegedly as a sop to potential obscenity trials. Marshall claimed embarrassment, but let it happen.

  As 1998 wound down, Interscope put their secret new star to work. He went out on rap’s prestigious Lyricist Lounge tour, and a radio-unplayable track from the album, ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, was selectively released as a single. Marshall naïvely spilled the strategy at work to elamentz.com.

  “The Lyricist Lounge tour? My production company hooked it, I guess … I don’t really know. All I know is Interscope Records came to me and was like, ‘You’re doing the tour.’ The single that’s coming out, it’s mostly for the Lyricist Lounge. They’re like pressing up vinyl and shit to give out. You know, to get the buzz going. What they’re trying to do is elevate the underground buzz. Then they’re gonna drop the second single, probably right before the album. And then, um … the second single is gonna be called, ‘My Name Is’. It’s a song that Dr. Dre produced.”

  There was a genuine “buzz” on Marshall by this time, anyway, from those who had heard The Slim Shady EP, or his stray verses on indie singles like Shabaam Sahdeeq’s ‘5 Star Generals’ (recorded for cash and forgotten about in his unsigned days, and suddenly selling), or seen him battle (he had even been on a Lyricist Lounge tour before). But the shift from underground to mass market, with credibility intact, was now fine-tuned. A subtly controversial sleeve for the album was prepared. On its front, Marshall and little Hailie stared thoughtfully from a pier’s edge towards the water, under an ominous moon. “Kim”‘s feet could be seen sticking out from a nearby car boot. On the back, a blue-lit, bare-chested Marshall shut his eyes and held his head, a picture of pretty-boy angst. For the record’s release, hundreds of interviews were arranged, along with mind-frying, demographic-bridging tours, playing to rock then rap audiences the same day, leaving no listener immune. Marshall would not complain, till he collapsed. He had worked hard at cooking meatloaf. He would work hard at this.

  The true secret to The Slim Shady LP‘s mass acceptance, though, was much simpler: ‘My Name Is’, and its video.

  Marshall had made one previous video, in 1998, for ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’. Mostly black-and-white, with unc
ensored lyrics, it was cheaply shot, for “underground buzz”. It tried to make him a threatening B-boy, emphasising his muscular arms, and surrounding him with women shorter than he was. Marshall scowled for the cameras, punched an old woman, and moved like a slasher movie killer. But the images were generic and incoherent, and Marshall was listless and unconvincing, detracting from his song. He looked like just another Detroit thug.

  ‘My Name Is’’s video bore more personal touches. “The thing of it is that, with the videos, people produce them and that,” Jennifer Yezvack reveals to me, “but I’m telling you – those are his ideas. He’s out there! He’s very imaginative. He’s creative. He’s an artist.”

  The clip is the opposite of ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, with a depth foreign to MTV, but a top kids’ TV show’s sense of controlled chaos, colour and glee that was addictive to its viewers. Starting in the living room of a sweaty, stereotypical white trash couple – him a fat pig in a vest cracking nuts, her a slutty tramp in a slip swigging whiskey – as they settle down for an afternoon’s mutual loathing and sappingly bad TV, their hopeless channel-hopping stops at ‘The Slim Shady Show – Starring Marshall Mathers’.