The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  The first Marshall we see is a bespectacled nerd, waving outside a picture-book Fifties suburban house, a straight white American ideal version of his Warren trailer. A hurled newspaper almost swats him in the face. A little nonplussed at this hostility, he gamely keeps smiling. Marshall Mathers did wear glasses at school, and was once that geeky and peaceable. But The Slim Shady Show could hardly stop with him.

  The channels hop again, along with the song’s bouncing beats, but now Marshall/Shady’s on all of them, in a casual deconstruction of the clip’s medium, and a garish introduction to Shady’s head. He’s a golf swing-practising showbiz pro, a ventriloquist’s dummy, Marilyn Manson and President Clinton, in a variety of bad suits and wigs. The scene keeps switching too, even the film stock does, as the variety of scenarios Marshall packs into each verse becomes visually explicit: he’s falling drunk out of his car on America’s Most Wanted, being hurled out of a club by indignant strippers, and fervently moralising from the President’s podium, till we see his pants are down, and a Lewinsky-alike pops up guiltily wiping her lips, and trots off at Benny Hill speed (far from the last time he’d pull the President’s pants down in his work).

  Like his album, though, what was most impressive and electric about the clip was the persona it kept defining, the many moods of Slim Shady it shoved at you. The jump in performance skill and personal revelation from the anonymous ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ was total. No longer just a moody bad boy, everything he did with his body looked original, the Lincoln class clown and sarcastic Gilbert’s Lodge cook merging with the snickering D12 filth merchant and snarling Shady, and adding to the confident, quickwitted Marshall Mathers Californian success had turned him into. Whether in a straitjacket (again, not for the last time in his video career) being inspected by Dre, or in a dream-zone with “Mom” – her hip whorishly cocked outside a white trash shack – or just as his smartly tracksuited self, he used his eyes and mouth for maximum, exaggerated expression, and moved his arms and hands in far more interesting shapes than the B-boy semaphor he’d started with. His eyes were charismatic black holes on the screen, too, however funny he was being. For someone who would prove a stilted stage performer, he had mastered this second medium right at the start. He had also stayed true to his roots, and made a social point, in his allotted four minutes. The white trash couple are shown coming alive as they watch him, not just slobs, but roaring and bonding, over someone as unashamed as them.

  There was one more striking alteration in this second video. Marshall Mathers had always been a brunette. This new creature’s hair was dyed platinum blond.

  The only drawback of the video as an introduction to Eminem was that it necessarily used the “clean version” of ‘My Name Is’ (with scared substitutions of many of his best lines – the one about slitting his Dad’s throat changed to the nonsensical “if you see my Dad/ ask him if he bought a porno mag, and saw my ad,” for instance). But that made it all the more perfect for MTV, who slapped it on heavy rotation to an almost unheard of extent for such a new act. “They jumped on the video before the video was even done, when they got the rough draft,” Marshall told ?. “It’s like, ‘Finish it up. We wanna play it right away.’ So two days, three days later, they were screening it. And MTV is what made radio jump on it.” Interscope again cemented in all possible demographics, giving the station a clip in which Dre and Missy Elliott sang this new rapper’s praises. Advertising time was also bought to screen ‘My Name Is’ during Howard Stern’s prime-time TV show.

  ‘My Name Is’ and The Slim Shady LP both finally reached American stores on February 23, 1999. The appetite for what Eminem had to offer was far greater than anyone had expected, even after such careful cultivation. With first-week sales of 280,000, the album entered the Billboard pop chart at number two. It would become the R&B number one as well, the sort of double-header in which Elvis once specialised. In March, ‘My Name Is’ was a UK hit too, as was The Slim Shady LP, released there on April 10. By the end of that month, the album had sold two million in America.

  Reviews were hardly relevant in such a frenzy. Critics anyway mostly saw him as amusing, if unmistakably talented, the rock press adding immediate if muted distaste at his woman-beating words. Rolling Stone compared him to comedians Rodney Dangerfield and Pee-Wee Herman, as well as helium-voiced rappers like the Beasties’ Ad-Rock and Cypress Hill’s B-Real; noting “the bitch-bashing gets tired fast”, and, insightfully, the loneliness of his white voice on the record (“he has hardly any homies”), it judged him to “earn his buzz as a bona fide rap star”. NME‘s Steven Wells led a still less serious British response, calling him a “Wonda-Wigga” and “squeaky motherfucker”, with a “comedy album” ideal “if you’re retarded, stoned or 12.” He then wondered why “all the women on this end up raped, battered or slaughtered white meat”, fondly imagining the day “a tuff lezzer is going to twat you between those baby-blue eyes.” ‘As The World Turns’ already imagined something similar, of course, drawn from Marshall’s life. But it was a sign of conflicts to come.

  Somewhere among this, Marshall Mathers, the anonymous, abused boy from Detroit who a year before had seen only emptiness in a life he toyed with ending, disappeared. For the world at large, at least, that identity was no longer important. It was like Clark Kent, a boring front for the man who really mattered. From now on, except for a few in Detroit who knew the real Marshall he remained in his heart, he would be Eminem.

  In a spare moment, he considered his position. “I dealt with a lot of shit coming up, a lot of shit,” he told Rolling Stone. “When it’s like that, you learn to live day by day. When all this happened, I took a deep breath. Just like: ‘I did it.’ “

  6

  AFTERMATH

  Eminem had jumped from rock bottom to the top in 12 months. But if he thought he had at last reached a place of stability, he was wrong. Sudden wealth and fame was not a plateau where he could catch his breath and reflect. It would prove more like rocketing through the Bends, being spat from his old submerged life into more rarefied air, where bubbles in the brain made your actions, and those around you, dangerous and strange.

  Rise, a journalist for elamentz.com, watched the journey begin when Interscope introduced him to Eminem in August 1998. A cog in the record company’s chanceless hype machine, Rise was told the rapper was “the next big thing”, six months before his LP’s release. But the white boy in a grimy baseball cap he met standing outside an Ol’ Dirty Bastard show on LA’s Sunset Boulevard “looked more like he should be delivering pizzas,” Rise recalled in his eventual piece. “All I can think of is, ‘This guy raps with Dre?’ Not because he is white” – oh, no – “but I guess I just imagined more of an … image.” Instead, this boy was still a styleless, hopeless outsider, despite his record deal. He despaired of getting into the show to the Detroit friends and disappointed, dagger-glaring girls with him. “Yo, man, I ain’t got no pull around here to get into this shit,” he explained, embarrassed even to be trying. “These fuckin’ guys don’t know who I am. I ain’t nobody! Fuck it, let’s just go …”

  A week later, the man whose interviews would one day be doled out like diamonds casually took Rise to Tijuana in a cheesy white rented convertible. “Yo, are you about to do a real interview for real?” he excitedly asked. “Set it off then …”

  After using the tape for quickfire comic impersonations (including South Park‘s Cartman, a minor influence, he’d later admit), he settled into serious responses, about his race (“anything that has to do with colour, it’s like, next question”), influences (“my daughter”), and wanting to be famous. “Would I sound right saying no?” he answered wisely, knowing how ingratitude would play to those in the life he’d just escaped. “Famous is not really the term I’m looking for. I want to be respected. I want to be looked at past the colour. But fame if it comes with it, I’m gonna take it, ‘cos you know, fame ain’t gonna feed my daughter. Fame, money, yeah. That shit’s gonna feed my daughter.” Looking ac
ross to his oblivious subject as he drove, the interviewer started to believe the hype, observing: “You could tell it was his time to shine. Not because he was owed it, but because he wanted it so badly and had worked so hard for it.”

  September, and Rise caught Eminem on the Lyricist Lounge tour. Outside, street pluggers handing out Slim Shady LP samplers were sneered at by rap fans, for skin reasons (“Vanilla Twice”). Then Eminem’s performance was delayed when bouncers wouldn’t let him in. He was blocked from the VIP lounge even when he left the stage, protesting vainly, “I’m Eminem. I just performed …” He was barred twice more that night, unrecognised by anyone, still seemingly expecting no better. He and LP guest rapper Royce Da 5-9 joked on the street outside about one day being stars, with fans and limos.

  In December, at his own gig, he still struggled for recognition. The idea that a skinny white guy could be a hip-hop star still made bouncers laugh, as he again pleaded, “I am Eminem. I am headlining the show.” In the queue, though, even before ‘My Name Is’ reached MTV, girls were starting to scream: “Oh my god … he looks like such a babe. He looks like a fucking superstar!” Inside, fans sang and jumped to unreleased album tracks they already knew by heart.

  By February, at his record release party, Eminem was entering unchallenged, past rows of fans wanting his autograph. A limo awaited him. He had moved from one side of the rope to the other, and now looked out of celebrity’s looking glass. His own shut out self six months before could have stared him in the face.

  In April, a Rolling Stone cover story offered more insights on the changes he was going through. It picked up where elamentz.com left off, just after ‘My Name Is’ hit, with Eminem and a posse of 17 piling into a vast white limo, to ferry them to three distinct shows he’d play in New York that night. They were all in clubs booked before he was famous, sweatboxes where he was close enough to touch. A black hip-hop audience gave him their familiar frosty indifference, before his four-song set broke them down. Manhattan models and fashionistas enjoyed him in the small hours. But it was the night’s first set, at an all-ages show, that showed the distance ‘My Name Is’ had dragged him from his hard-won Detroit rap roots. Shut-out teenage girls screamed his name as he entered. Inside, they lapped up his filthiest raps. When one young girl shouted, “I love you,” he said it back and bent to hug her, only to be kissed on the lips, and the girl next to her to yank his head away and kiss him hard on the mouth. Other girls tore at his pants, one gleefully screaming, “I touched his dick!” He seemed to relish it on stage. But when a teenage girl pulled her shirt down and shouted, “I want to fuck you!” as his limo eased away afterwards, he showed his ambivalence to this strange temptation. “I want to fuck you, too,” he murmured. “But I won’t.”

  “That actually makes me feel kind of sick,” he’d mention to NME. “Some girl will be telling me how fine I am and trying to sit on my lap and I’ll be thinking, ‘If I was just me and I didn’t have all of this fame, you wouldn’t look at me twice. You wouldn’t look at me once.’ People wonder why my lyrics are so misogynistic and violent towards women. But my opinion of girls is not very high right now.”

  More revealing still was when Rolling Stone followed Eminem back to the home town where he’d always been dismissed. “I like living in Detroit,” he said loyally. “My little girl is here.” But everywhere he went, there was now a chill. At Gilbert’s Lodge, only owner Pete Karagiaouris seemed interested to see him, mildly asking, “Coming in to buy the place?” One waitress waltzed up to say she never saw him on MTV. For 20 minutes, as he sat in a booth at the place where he’d laboured loyally most of his working life, he wasn’t served. Instead he seethed over the waitress’s slight, stardom seemingly no shield to him here. To NME, he later described the hurt the diner’s staff made him feel. “I go back there now and pull up in a limo just for the spite of it,” he tried to brag, “hop out, go to the bar, drop a couple of hundred dollars for a tip and throw it in their faces. They took me for a joke, but the joke’s on them.” But he couldn’t keep up the cocky front. “When I go back, it’s not to flaunt,” he admitted. “I go back to try to be cool with people and see how they’re doing. I went in there the other night to see my old manager. But he couldn’t look me in the eye.” He broke off and thought about this. “It’s funny. It’s very funny.”

  “This is his reality,” Paul Rosenberg sighed, watching his client with Rolling Stone. “He came from this. And after everything is over, this is the reality he has to go back to.”

  The group moved on to Eminem’s latest Detroit residence, a mobile home in a St. Clair trailer park. It had been taken over from his mother, who had left for Kansas City as soon as he got his deal, and the means to make her payments. Inside were the few things he owned, after his life of poverty and being thieved from: a few CDs (2Pac, Snoop Dogg, Luther Vandross, Esthero, Mase and Babyface); photos of him and Dre, one signed (“Thanks for the support, asshole!”), and one of Hailie; The Slim Shady EP‘s artwork; a seat for Hailie; a TV. And, on the wall, a list of “Commitments for Parents”, including this: “I will give my child space to grow, dream, succeed and sometimes fail.” It was a mantra he must have felt his mother never read.

  The little time he’d have left in this modest home for young parents was clear anyway even as he walked through the trailer park with Rolling Stone. In the month The Slim Shady LP‘s two-millionth sale was recorded, he found an eviction notice stuck to his door. He’d forgotten his payments, while on his sell-out tour. “Don’t worry, we took care of that one,” Rosenberg advised. The realities of arrears and evictions, so central to his Detroit life, were no longer his concern. As the notice was casually crumpled, the message so many American stars had discovered before him seemed clear: you can’t go home again.

  “From the day after we shot that ‘My Name Is’ video, I remember shit just moving so fast,” he’d look back to The Source a year later. “Like, I went from being home all the time to never seeing my girl, to being out on the road, to bitches throwing themselves at me. Shit was like a movie,” he considered in wonder, “the shit you see in movies.” The fictional world he’d created for The Slim Shady LP had almost instantly dropped out of his control, consuming chunks of his real life he wanted to keep. “I wish I could come off-stage and turn off the lights that flash over my head saying ‘Slim Shady’ and ‘Eminem’,” he’d admit to Muzik in 2000, only two years after Slim had saved him. “I wanna turn that shit off and just be Marshall Mathers again.”

  “It’s something bigger than he ever expected, the pressures he has to go through,” Jeff Bass explained to City Detroit. “Just because he’s doing so well, he’s from Detroit, and the media keeps pointing out he’s a white rapper, it’s very intense. You’re talking about going from making pizzas to being almost a household name. You can’t prepare yourself for anything like this. He has to put a hat on and a hood, ‘cos as soon as someone sees his blond hair they know who that is. But,” he backtracked, “he’s got his age and his experience on his side because he’s been doing music so long. He has no problems with it; he rolls with the punches.”

  That wasn’t how it seemed. Eminem was experiencing a new kind of alienation, opposite and yet the same as when he’d locked himself in his teenage bedroom. “I don’t trust nobody now because anybody I meet is meeting me as Eminem,” he told the LA Times. “They don’t know me as Marshall Mathers, and I don’t know if they are hanging with me ‘cos they like me or because I’m a celebrity or because they think they can get something from me.” The sudden pressure swiftly forced him from the trailer park. “Once I hit MTV everybody was coming up to me and talking about it,” he explained to Hip-Hop Connection. “People that knew me for the longest were starstruck, the kids in the neighbourhood were knocking on the door all day. It got to the point where I was like, ‘I’ve been here all my fucking life, what is different about me now?’ Before I could walk down the street and nobody said shit. Now it’s ridiculous.” Even his anger had to be checked,
his assertive street instincts reined in. “One of the main things that’s really fucked up is when people piss you off, you can’t hit them in the face,” he complained to icast.com. “When somebody disrespects you on a street level, you want to do something to retaliate. But you got to learn to control your temper and you got to take the ‘Fuck yous’ and ‘You sucks!’” Sighed Proof, sitting next to him: “The way it used to be, we was the bully busters.” A 6‘ 8” bodyguard, Byron Williams, was brought in to discourage those who might show a lack of respect.

  As fame denatured him, even the bad old Detroit days began to look good. “My life wasn’t always depressed and dark,” he decided to tell the LA Times. “I still tend to miss certain things, like running in the streets and hanging out. The good things were just being young and buying the hottest new albums. We didn’t have money. But it was always liveable.”

  The most disorientating change of all was the dollars in his pocket, in part from songs like ‘Rock Bottom’, written when he was destitute. He was too knowledgeable of hip-hop’s history, and the ghetto superstars who’d ended up penniless, not to be wary of his wealth. As his “money is the root of all evil” sermons on Infinite had shown, he was never materialistic anyway. “He never had money, so he doesn’t know what the hell to do with it, and he’s scared to spend it,” Paul Rosenberg told the LA Times. “His idea of splurging is spending $500 or $600 at Nike Town.”