The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  The day he was charged with his nightclub brawl, true to form, Guerra sued for $25,000. Dail, perhaps wanting no more of their feud, refused to help police further, after his initial charges. Kim meanwhile, speaking to the Detroit Free Press, despaired at her husband’s idiocy: “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would cheat on a millionaire husband – especially with a nobody in a neighbourhood bar. The fact that he has just jumped to conclusions has gotten him and myself into a lot of trouble.”

  In hip-hop terms, of course, it was barely a parking ticket. Eminem had joined a depressing tradition including such disparate figures as amiable Dr. Dre, whose youthful indiscretions included viciously assaulting Dee Barnes, breaking a hip-hop producer’s jaw, and a nightclub brawl; languid stoner Snoop Dogg, eventually judged a bystander in the shooting of reputed LA gang member Philip Woldemariam by his bodyguard; Public Enemy’s loveable court jester, Flavor Flav, charged with the Angel Dust-aggravated, gun-wielding harassment of his girlfriend; Wu-Tang Clan’s roguish Ol’ Dirty Bastard, whose gun and drug-related crimes led to a notorious, failed spell on the run; even pop-rapper Puff Daddy who, accompanied by girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, was present at a nightclub where a gun was fired during a confrontation in 1999. And Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls’ gangster fantasies were tragically realised, when both were shot dead in real drive-bys.

  Ghetto and gang backgrounds apply to only some of those individuals. Instead, there seems to be something in the demands of hip-hop and its followers, for “keeping it real”, ostentation and machismo, that makes so many of its stars pass through courtroom baptisms. Mild, music-loving Dre and bohemian, Shakespeare-reading Tupac are among those who have forced their personalities into tough guy masks. Eminem (like Tupac, a sneered at stripling as a boy) may have been playing that game, as he glared through his first court appearance. But it was the media outsiders to hip-hop he so hated, with their “Bad Boy Rapper” headlines ready-made to slip round his neck, who really gained as his actions seemed to strip the defence of artistic licence from his work.

  In fairness, though, if you took away the unloaded gun, and Eminem’s name, what he had done was no worse than the average Saturday night stupidity of other men and women. And the pressures which had built up on him before he took that pistol out, and let himself descend into rap cliché, made his personal boiling over no surprise.

  First, there was the home he woke up in each morning. Bought when he had no idea how huge his fame would become, it was on a main road in Detroit, near his old stomping grounds. He had thought it would be a hedge against his success’s eventual collapse, a sensible piece of security in his life. Instead, as the celebrity he grappled with on The Marshall Mathers LP consumed all such normal concerns, it made him feel like he was waking in a cage.

  “The city won’t let me put up a fence,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “Everybody wants to treat me like a regular fucking person. But I’m not a regular fucking person. I’ve gotta have security guards sitting outside my house now because they won’t let me put a fence up. I get motherfuckers coming to my house, knocking on the door. Either they want autographs or they want to fight. We’ve had people getting in our backyard and swimming in our pools. I don’t like having security hold my hand to walk out to my fucking mailbox. There’s something inside me that refuses to believe I can’t walk down the street or be as normal as I want to be. Whenever something good happens, the bad always follows. That’s the story of my life since the day I was born. I should have been out celebrating my record sales. Instead I’m sitting there in jail.”

  “I’ve always had a problem with people staring at me,” he added to Britain’s Star magazine. “And now they have a reason to stare, and I can’t get mad at them. I’m not gonna tell you it’s great to be recognised.”

  His relatives too, the people others looked to for comfort in times of trouble, made him sweat with distrust, draw further in upon himself. His mother was suing him, his grandmother was threatening to. He felt everyone with his blood, except his daughter, was a leech upon his soul. “I’ve got second and third cousins crawling out of the woodwork,” he told Muzik. “I’ve got aunts and uncles crawling out of the slime, screaming they always knew I’d make it and they’d like some money and a car. It makes me sick to the bottom of my stomach, ‘cos nobody in my family ever thought I would be anything.”

  Would he take back the last year, the Detroit Free Press asked him, when his anguish and dismay became apparent. “That’s a real good question,” he considered. “It’s 50-50. Sometimes I feel like I’m living my life for everybody else. I wake up at seven in the morning, and the rest of the day is work. I can’t sleep. I don’t eat. It’s just crazy. These past couple of years have really shot by for me. Shit is speeding now. Before I was famous, everything was moving in slow motion.”

  NME‘s Sylvia Patterson, interviewing Eminem the month before The Marshall Mathers LP‘s release, drew out more of the racing, harried emotions pounding in his head in the weeks leading to his June 3 explosion. Perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that he was being faced, almost uniquely, by a female reporter. But in their short time together, he veered between the unsatisfiable hyperactivity of a child (swinging a hammer at Patterson, screaming in her face, sprinting to a window to holler at the street), the petulant hostility and sexual defensiveness of a teenager (threatening to “rape” her, staring sullenly, speaking flatly), and mature awareness of the state he was in (richer and more famous than he could ever have imagined, criticised and lusted after by strangers who wouldn’t have bothered to spit at him 12 months before). After all the iron control he had poured into succeeding, this was a glimpse of his mind simmering to boiling point.

  Eminem’s barrier to complete meltdown, as his life swung away from his control, was stated several times in this period. “Right now, I feel like I’m on top of the world,” he told Newsweek, discussing his reconciled relationship with Kim. “I did right for my daughter.” “I figured I would secure the shit down at home,” he told The Source, “‘cos realistically, truthfully, that’s what I need. That’s the main thing that keeps my head levelled, having that security at home. I would go crazy if I came home to a house by itself.”

  But the most disturbing holing of the walls Eminem claimed between art and reality came in just this private place, soon after his first court appearance, again through his own rash actions. On June 15, he started the massive, much-hyped Up In Smoke tour of the US, alongside Dre, Ice Cube and Snoop, playing 47 gigs in 10 weeks. The tour movie Up In Smoke (2000) emphasises blunted, schoolboy good times. But on that first concert night, safe among his boys, he couldn’t resist kicking a blow-up doll of Kim around the stage. Back in record stores, his sales inexorably rose. In June, The Marshall Mathers LP hit five million. On July 2, ‘The Real Slim Shady’ became Britain’s number one. And late on the night of July 7, at home with Eminem’s beloved child, as she had been for almost all the last year while he publicised himself around the world, Kim saw video footage of her husband kicking her likeness for the pleasure of a roaring crowd. She slashed her wrists. Paramedics and police were called. She was treated at the scene, and taken to hospital. The next day, she went back home. Eminem was, a spokesman said, “obviously concerned.”

  “Kim doesn’t like the fact [the song ‘Kim’] went on the album,” he had told Newsweek, “but I’m like – this music is a form of expression.” “I tell her, ‘Look, if you piss me off when I’m writing a song you might be in it,’” he had added to Muzik. “I sometimes regret mocking my fans and family on my records,” he would all but repent to The Face that September, months after Kim’s suicide attempt. “I just wanted to make regular people feel more in touch with me, like I was a real person.”

  Instead, the whole episode showed a childish failure of imagination, and demonstrated the awful selfishness Eminem’s mantra of self-expression allowed. He is hardly the only artist to be this way. The British novelist Neil Gaiman has talked of writers gnawing off th
eir own arm for raw material for a story, and standing at relatives’ funerals thinking, terribly, “I can use this.” But few artists have been so nakedly aggressive in strip-mining the feelings of their loved ones as Eminem. “I leave my anger in the studio,” he’s said of screaming through songs like ‘Kim’. What, then, was his wife supposed to do with her anger when she heard it, and knew millions of strangers would, too? Turn it on herself, it transpired. “I just said it – I ain’t know if you’d do it or not,” Eminem had shrugged, self-absorbed, on ‘Who Knew’. But he must have known what emotions he was trampling on when he ignored his wife’s pleas to scrap ‘Kim’. In sculpting songs that tried to get “in touch” with his fans, he was smashing people in his own home. Exploding the harmful emotions mining his head, the shrapnel had lodged in those near him. “I gotta keep some sense of privacy about me,” he had told NME, discussing intrusive journalists. “Some shit just isn’t people’s business.” His wife had been denied that privilege. First he had transformed her life into a notorious song, then a literal punching bag. Outmatched physically, verbally, and in those who would listen to her, it’s no wonder she slashed at her own wrists, doing what damage she could.

  Eminem’s response, in a guest spot on Xzibit’s Restless LP the next year, ‘Don’t Approach Me’, was to turn that into a song too. “If I can hold onto my private life for five minutes longer,” he rapped shamelessly, “I might get my wife to let go with this knife/ Just got in a feud in some parking lot with a dude over Kim/ and she just slit both her wrists over this shit.” Not content with an arm, Eminem, it was clear, would devour a person’s body without conscience, if the thought crossed his mind.

  Still, in August, concrete retaliations for his music and deeds were launched, almost daily. On the 8th, Eminem cancelled his upcoming headline slot at Britain’s prestigious Reading Festival, as he was denied permission to leave the country, with court cases pending. On the 9th, he was offered, and refused, a $2 million out of court settlement with his mother. He also learned that she would be releasing her own song about him, ‘Why Are You Doing Me Like You Are?’ “She needs to make some money,” his grandmother Betty Kresin told a website, “because Eminem gives her nothing.” His now-former bodyguard Byron Williams (clearly dispensed with before events in June) meanwhile published a book alleging serial on-the-road infidelities by his ex-boss.

  On the 16th, little more than a month after his wife cut her wrists, Eminem filed for divorce. On the 21st, his mother filed a second lawsuit against him, claiming his comments about her first were defamatory. On the 22nd, Kim finally struck back at him in public, filing her own $10 million lawsuit – nicely matching the amount requested by his mother – for defamation caused to her by ‘Kim’. On the 28th, the couple settled, for an undisclosed sum, and Kim was granted custody of their daughter. Back in the stores, the counter ticked over again. The Marshall Mathers LP had now sold six million.

  As the lawsuits mounted, and the verbal battles his records had instigated at last began to bruise him too, Eminem’s bitterness against his mother, in particular, grew.

  “Ever since my success, shit hasn’t been all good with me and her,” he told The Source. “She wants to act like it is, and talk all this shit about, ‘I love my son, and this is just a lesson that he’s gotta learn. I love my son, but I’m suing him for $10 million.’ In other words, ‘I’m trying to take everything he worked for away from him but I love my son.’ There’s a lotta shit that I’m bitter for in my past that my mother has done to me that I never forgave her for to this day. And that’s what sparked that whole thing. There’s shit that I’m still bitter about that she won’t admit to, to my face, and all I want is an apology and I can’t get it. To tell you the truth, I could never look at her in the face again.”

  He told Muzik that, as was true even before the suit, he only spoke to her at all to keep ties to his half-brother Nathan, now 14. “When I call him I bite my tongue,” he said, showing the paranoia that sets in with long hostility. “I believe she’s listening on the other extension. I’m sure he’s afraid of my mother and I’m sure she’s doing the same things to him that she did to me.”

  The core of the verbal and legal carnage, the cut wrists and brawls that swirled round him in these months, might be hidden, in part, in the fine print of that NME interview. “If someone does diss me I will fuckin’ demolish your self-esteem,” he said. “I will fuckin’ say everything I can in my fuckin’ power to hurt you and make you wanna jump off a fuckin’ bridge. I think I was given this ability to put words together like I do in order to do this. That’s how I came up, in hip-hop circles, in battles, MCing – and through arguments with my mother, fights with my girl, period, that’s just how I am. I’m a very spiteful person if you do me wrong.” Did he run on vengeance? Patterson asked. Was that his main motivation? “Yeah,” he said at once.

  The balance in his idea of the sources of his art turns the key to it. It was the battles with the two women in his life, at least as much as with other MCs, that had been the perceived proving ground for his unique rage. It was these intimate furies, in cramped apartments and trailer homes, when it seemed impossible that anyone in the world would ever know of them, that were now being replayed on a ludicrous scale, in multi-million-selling songs and lawsuits. No wonder, perhaps, that so many of those songs had such misogyny purring through their veins.

  But there was a further possible cost in the real world to his pouring such feelings onto tape. It applied to the one female he has never criticised: his daughter. The chasm between her and his wife in his head yawns in ‘Kim’’s opening: “[to Hailie] Baby, you’re so precious/ Daddy’s so proud of you/ [to Kim] “Sit down bitch/ You move again I’ll beat the shit out of you!” The potential damage to his baby, despite his love for her, of such hate for her mother, so violently expressed, never seems to have crossed his mind; even after his school sweetheart’s wrists had been stitched.

  The upside for some of those listening to such irrational lover’s fury on record was, as with all his best work, one of identification, unavailable from more circumspect sources. “I guarantee you there’s a lot of people going through this kind of shit with their relationships,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “With their girl, their man. I think a lot of people feel what I’m really saying.”

  But for himself, his mother, wife and child, the quickfire confessions and assaults on his albums were now causing only destruction. “That part is shitty,” he admitted to The Face. “It’s like I did this so that I could be a family to Kim and Hailie and raise my daughter the right way and not cut out on Hailie like my father did to me. And it’s like all this success is working backwards.” For the only recorded moment, he looked nakedly, fearfully bewildered, as if it was finally dawning on him what his confrontational success had cost. “My family is crumbling.”

  With home and marriage failing, his job seeming more like a trial, and the law closing in, his daughter was the only centre that still seemed to hold him. In interviews, her mention could draw out the vulnerability The Marshall Mathers LP, and his subsequent actions, had hidden. “I listen to everything my daughter listens to, and I watch everything that she watches,” he told Hip-Hop Connection. “Hailie listens to both of my albums, and she likes them. Sometimes she’ll say, ‘Daddy put that one song on.’ But she’s a smart little girl and if she hears cuss words, she knows not to repeat them.”

  Eminem was, it seemed, the ideal, responsible parent for Eminem fans. Elsewhere, he gushed about her personality, and her vocabulary, with doe-eyed adoration utterly at odds with any other side of his combative public face. “She’s gonna have everything when she grows up,” he told NME. “She’s gonna be able to go to college and be something I wasn’t. If she never makes anything of herself, God forbid – I want her to do something, be a model, do music, be a doctor, anything – I’m gonna have that money there for her. It’s about her now. We’re here to reproduce. And I reproduced. So now my life is for her.”

>   It was the one thing he and Kim could still agree on. So, on September 14, for Hailie’s sake, they announced they would try to make their marriage work, again.

  August had meanwhile brought a fitting artistic response from Eminem to his troubles. The video to the second single from The Marshall Mathers LP, ‘The Way I Am’, which swiftly gave him his by now expected spot at number one on MTV, worked as a brooding, coherent explanation of his state of mind. Though the song had originally been written as a response to Interscope’s pressure to write a hit like ‘My Name Is’, the lyrics typically made leaps into every tension now clenching his head: fans crowding him, media attention, Columbine hypocrisy, and lawsuits.

  Fittingly the only Marshall Mathers track he pieced together with almost no help, its claustrophobic feel on the album was built from an ominous piano loop which Eminem made his rasped, harried rap cling to at all times, allowing no escape from his mood. The video intensified that atmosphere and, playing on MTV endlessly each day through the mean month of August, as Kim and Hailie separated from him, it seemed like a confession from a cornered man.