The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  Shot as a series of shadowy and sunlit scenes intercut so swiftly the screen seemed to strobe, the visual beat was of an erratic heartbeat. Its star’s three personas all seemed to be on hand. That was surely Slim Shady, standing on a skyscraper window ledge at night, gawked at by a curious public, roaring at them like King Kong. And it looked like Eminem, in a darkened room with Marilyn Manson behind him, fearlessly lancing Columbine falsities. But the character we were really shown on screen for the first time was Marshall Mathers. We saw him at a cafe with Kim (played by an actress) and Hailie, taking a seat in the sun to give their daughter a drink, an ordinary couple, not arguing or murdering. And we saw the presumption of a fan sitting down with them as if by right, and the others that swarmed in like locusts when Marshall signed an autograph. His eyes looked vulnerable and exposed. Later, as the scenes of indignity play out (“But I can’t take a SHIT in the bathroom/ Without someone standin’ by it”), those eyes look dead, not resisting what’s being forced on him, but numbly taking it. Slim rages on, as he was starting to in real life: “No patience is in me and if you offend me I’m liftin’ you ten feet … Go call you a lawyer, file you a lawsuit/ I’ll smile in the courtroom and buy you a wardrobe.” But Marshall, at least as he showed himself here, was not really that strong.

  The most striking scenes were of him and Kim at home. For the first time in his art, as the acrimony over its brutalising of his wife climaxed, she was shown as the angry, embattled one, shouting and gesturing at fans as they crowded her baby, and at a passive Eminem in their apartment afterwards. For once, she was more than a pair of legs sticking out of a car, or the name of a notorious song, or a battered blow-up doll. It was a glimpse of why they had ever been together.

  Eminem had only admitted once in print such understanding of his wife’s problems with their changed lives. “Not to defend Kim,” he had told the Detroit Free Press in June, “but I realise what has happened to me has probably been a strain on her, too. It’s a crazy thing to deal with. You’ve really got to be in shape.” In the month that she really left him, a video planned earlier now had the honesty to show Kim raging and packing her bags for that reason, and warmly kissing her husband as she left with Hailie, love at last mixed with hate in what Eminem showed of her to the world.

  The final shots said even more. To the sound of a stopping heartbeat, Slim, who has leaped off that ledge, and snarled unrepentantly all the way down, suddenly realises what he’s done. An image of Hailie flashes in his mind, and he screams and windmills his arms in fear and regret, then finds the ground softening to meet him. His wife, whose own suicidal mood seemed to be anticipated and perhaps explained in this video, art and life in these months too close to prise apart, may have understood. With an ambulance called before her suicide could be completed, and the hospital declaring her safe to leave the next day, neither of them, it seemed, really meant to leave their baby that way. The last shot of all, though, of the surviving Slim staring at us with unreadable menace, lets you take nothing for granted.

  In September, The Marshall Mathers LP‘s sales ticked over again, to seven million. No doubt that video helped, maybe the marital bloodletting did, too. But the record had also gained its own remorseless momentum. The controversies around it were no longer relevant to the various corporate arms which now attached themselves to any music with cash or credibility to convert to their own bland ends, with sponsorship and awards. As Eminem had shown with the “clean” versions of his albums, he did not object. The tortured bad grace with which white “alternative” rock stars like Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder had collected corporate prizes in the Nineties had no relevance to him. Money, success and mutual backslapping had never been a crime in hip-hop, where all three were so hard to get.

  So, in August Eminem collected the Source Hip-Hop Award for Lyricist of the Year and Music Video of the Year. In September, ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s video was nominated for two Billboard Music Video Awards, Maximum Vision Video and Best Rap/Hip-Hop Clip of the Year. In September, too, Eminem won the MuchMusic Video Award for People’s Choice – Favourite International Artist. Somewhere in an Alaskan town hall, or a British video shop, or else some other blank corporate entity, even more ludicrously named and meaningless awards were being struck, to squeeze out a few more dollars from association with Eminem’s intensely personal work. And a few more dollars would be slipped to him for letting them.

  The MTV Video Music Awards, also in September, had no more credence, really, except that more people saw them. Eminem duly won three: Video of the Year and Best Male Video (for ‘The Real Slim Shady’), and Best Rap Video (‘Forgot About Dre’). He was also nominated for two more. Fortified by that many name-checks, he turned up to perform ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and ‘The Way I Am’. But events outside the show were part of an opposite, in some ways complementary, ground-swell, showing yet another way in which the months after The Marshall Mathers LP‘s release had slipped from his control.

  In the streets around the ceremony, protesters from GLAAD and the National Organisation of Women gathered, chanting and carrying banners. GLAAD also voiced their objections in a second anti-Eminem manifesto: “These are the words that kids hear in school hallways before they get beat up. For this kind of language to be put out there without any sense of responsibility on Eminem’s part, or MTV’s part, is simply not something that GLAAD can ignore … We are very disappointed that they continue to support him as heavily as they do.”

  Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, on September 14, the very day Eminem and Kim reconciled, Lynne Cheney, former Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and wife of that year’s ultimately successful Republican Vice-presidential candidate, Dick Cheney, was testifying to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, about the entertainment industry. “They are producing violent, sexually explicit material and they are peddling it to our children,” she declared. She singled out Eminem, for “propagating violence against women” and being a “violent misogynist”, and imagining the “joys” of murdering women he met. She pulled out lines from The Marshall Mathers LP‘s first track, ‘Kill You’, shorn of any context, to put before America’s administrators: “… he’s raping his own mother”, “… painting the forest with blood”, “… Bitch, I’m a kill you”, “… I got the machete from O.J.” Columbine was also mentioned, and Marilyn Manson, the kindred spirit Eminem had made caper ghoulishly behind him, allies in adversity, in ‘The Way I Am’’s video, which played on MTV even as Cheney spoke.

  October saw Canadian officials join the mounting outcry, as the Anger Management tour – pairing Eminem with Limp Bizkit to reach the rock record-buyers Up In Smoke had missed – began in North America. “That’s unacceptable to us in Ontario,” the state’s Attorney-General Jim Flaherty told newspapers, after a complaint by Toronto resident Valerie Smith, as a tour date in the city was booked for the 26th. Smith wanted Eminem’s prosecution under Section 319 of Canada’s Criminal Code, outlawing “communicating statements, other than private conversation, that wilfully promote hatred against an identifiable group”. The legislation’s focus on race and religion prevented a serious challenge.

  A November 2 show at the University of Illinois was also protested against by a group of students outside the venue, whose unsuccessful petition trying to stop the event read: “We, the undersigned, believe that it is wrong for the university to promote and profit from a concert that will include hate speech, encourage violence and defame people.”

  The Marshall Mathers LP had predicted such attacks, of course, as if Eminem knew the critics that had goaded him into making it would eventually be superseded by sober law-makers, those who had come for Marilyn after Columbine, turning their ire on him. It did not take a genius to know he would attract such attention. The final way the real world attacked him for what he said he was in 2000 was merely one more skirmish in an unrelenting, 15-year war between American politicians and pop.

  It was a conflict Eminem had been r
aised in. In his book Night Beat, critic Mikal Gilmore pieced together how rock in the Eighties, when in America its radical Sixties power was assumed to be spent, in fact faced its greatest assaults from conservative forces. Fuelled in part by a 1985 Newsweek attack by journalist Kandy Stroud on “pornographic rock” (Prince, Madonna, etc.), the Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC) had been set up that year to push for the censorship of sex and violence in rock. It was co-founded by wealthy Washington wife Tipper Gore (whose husband Al would be 2000’s Democratic Presidential candidate, leaving the radical American music fan in the year of Marshall Mathers with nowhere to run). The coincidence of the murderer-rapist the “Night Stalker”, then terrorising Southern California, declaring on his capture that Australian heavy metal band AC/DC’s ‘Night Prowler’ had inspired his crimes, the charging of British metallers Judas Priest with the “lethal use of subliminal messages” after a fan committed suicide in Nevada, and the general conservatism of America under Reagan, who judged rock to be about “violence and perversity”, were enough to steamroller the record industry into “voluntary” labelling of offensive content (with the exception of gun-happy, conservative country music) soon after.

  Eminem’s whiteness and lyrical liking for sexist violence made him a combatant in that ongoing battle, a natural enemy of Gore and Cheney. And the American Establishment’s loathing of hip-hop was still more fierce. Violence at the Krush Groove Christmas Party at Madison Square Garden in 1985 had begun media scare stories about the genre. In 1990, when a Newsweek cover story on “The Rap Attitude” called the music “repulsive”, Florida lawyer Jack Thompson orchestrated the arrest of a record store owner for selling 2 Live Crew’s “obscene” music, and of three members of the band for performing it, and pressure from conservative Congressmen caused CDs’ compulsory labelling for “Explicit Content”. What Thompson called “the opening shots of a cultural civil war” had been fired. Ice-T’s dropping by Time-Warner, after he’d recorded ‘Cop Killer’ with his rock band Body Count, Virgin’s dumping of The Geto Boys’ début, and the severing of ties with Death Row by Eminem’s label Interscope, once they’d squeezed its formula dry, were among the casualties of subsequent fire-fights.

  L.L. Cool J had responded to the obvious racism in such crackdowns in 1986, to journalist David Toop. “You know how the press is. Things happen and they blow it all out of proportion ‘cos it’s black kids and it’s rap and they don’t understand neither.” Eminem’s turn in the trenches of this “cultural civil war”, though, showed again what a freakish anomaly his colour, music and mentality made him. With all the troubles spinning round him, he would prove a figure no pressure group or politician could silence, and no record company could drop.

  The lack of real heat in politicians’ tirades at him, compared to the hounding of Ice-T and gangsta-rap, could be explained by his whiteness, on a number of levels. It not only increased his commercial clout, and the number of libel lawyers ready to protect him from censors. His blond, blue-eyed good looks also meant that, to adult whites watching his videos, he gave no worrying reminders of America’s abandoned, intimidating black ghettos (even though that was partly where he came from). The implacably scowling Ice Cube, for instance, would always have a harder time. Eminem’s wounded, young blond features also disarmed at least some of the women and gay men he lyrically lashed out at; as Sylvia Patterson told him, “you’re so terribly good looking, you see.”

  Eminem himself accepted that the racial issues that made the best black rappers incendiary were not for him (a line in ‘Criminal’ goes, “I drank more liquor to fuck you up quicker/ Than you’d wanna fuck me up if I said the word …”, the unspoken “nigga” and its baggage something he couldn’t touch). It was why he had prodded America instead on the raw nerve of its sexual attitudes, and by making his own fraught celebrity his theme. And so, in a way rare for movies and books, but natural for a rapper, he had put his own personality at war with his country’s hypocrites, from the President down. Affronted Senators, students, protesters and pickets vanished into the funhouse reflections he’d prepared for them in The Marshall Mathers LP. Every line Lynne Cheney partially quoted to attack him had retorts waiting for her a word or two later. As he taunted on ‘Criminal’: “… every time I rhyme, these people think it’s a crime/ To tell ‘em what’s on my mind/ But I don’t gotta say a word, I just flip ‘em the bird, and keep goin’ … You can’t stop me from toppin’ these charts.”

  The most popular six months of Eminem’s life had ended with his marriage on rocky ground, three court cases pending, politicians denouncing him, and jail a looming possibility. But his greatest days of notoriety were still ahead. On October 28, he announced he would be touring Britain.

  9

  STAN

  “PARENTS BEWARE! The world’s most dangerous rapper is coming to Britain. Eminem will perform his controversial songs about murder, drugs and violence to women in February.”

  The Sun‘s shamelessly simplified warning, as Eminem dates for 2001 were scheduled in Manchester and London, was followed by a strengthening salvo of “shocked” tabloid broadsides, as his arrival neared: “THE TRUTH ABOUT THE REAL SLIM SHADY: The Astonishing Story Of The Bullied Trailer Trash Nerd”; “BULLY’S BRUTAL BEATING LEFT HIM FOR DEAD”; “RAPPER WAS SHY LONER”; “EMINEM LOVED DOLLIES”; “TOUR SHOCK FOR GAY HATE RAPPER”; “PUBLIC EMINEM”.

  “The show is the most outrageous ever,” The Sun‘s Dominic Mohan brazenly reported from the start of Eminem’s European tour, in Hamburg on January 30. “I predict there will be a storm of controversy here … Take cover, Britain. Eminem’s show should have a health warning.”

  But, rabid as the British tabloid press could be, no one’s heart seemed to be in efforts to make him the nation’s newest folk devil. Comparisons with the last rapper to achieve such notoriety in this country are instructive, and do no-one credit. Snoop Doggy Dogg had arrived in March 1994 to a Daily Star front page screaming, “KICK THIS EVIL BASTARD OUT!” Though the case of Philip Woldemariam’s shooting was still awaiting trial (and Snoop would eventually be found innocent), and though the degree of violence and misogyny on his album Doggystyle which the tabloids (no strangers to sexism) condemned these days sounds mild, the media fury was unrelenting. No detail was sought about Snoop’s life in the mainstream British press, as they did with Eminem, and nothing was asked about his music. Instead, the Star‘s headline was accompanied by a mug-shot of Snoop looking brutal and unrepentant, redolent with echoes of the last black man to be so spotlighted on British front pages: Winston Silcott, who had been accused, and later acquitted, of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock. The stench of unapologetic racism then was powerful.

  Eminem had certainly done nothing to soften impressions before his February arrival. On top of his own pending court cases and lyrical savagery, he had opened a new front of verbal warfare in November, after fellow white rapper Everlast, ex-House of Pain, sneered of him, while guesting on Dilated People’s ‘Ear Drums Pop’, “lift up your panties and show your skirt for the world to see.” Eminem immediately responded on ‘I Remember’, recorded as a B-side for D12’s forthcoming début single ‘I Shit On You’: “I just wish the cardiac would have murdered you” (a typically tasteful reference to Everlast’s near-fatal 1998 heart attack). With his usual city-flattening overreaction, he followed up with D12’s ‘Quitter’ (eventually left off the group’s Devil’s Night LP). Here he told fans to “hit” Everlast “with sticks, bricks, rocks, throw shit at him, trip him, spit on him, treat him like a ho, bitch slap him … Fuck you, fat boy, drop the mic, let’s fight.” “I’m not gonna let someone else diss me on a record and not say something back,” he redundantly explained. “It’s in my blood; it’s a competition thing.”

  But far more decisive in the public’s reaction to him when he touched down in February was the December release of The Marshall Mathers LP‘s third single, ‘Stan’. Once that reached the radio, the tabloids’ already weak outcry was muffled by a louder,
less predictable noise: the sound of everyone in the country who still listened to pop talking, like they hadn’t in years, in consternation, wonder and surprise.

  “It’s about an obsessive fan who keeps writing me and taking everything I say on the record literally,” Eminem told the LA Times. “He’s crazy for real and he thinks I’m crazy, but I try to help him at the end of the song. It kinda shows the real side of me.” “I know I ain’t got it all upstairs, but some people are sick,” he added to Muzik. “There are people who write saying they’re into hurting themselves. They’re cult people, fucking devil worshippers, who say I’m right next to Satan in their thoughts. I’ve had skinheads and KKK members on my case, telling me they love my shit and how I’m one of them.” Even as his manner in concert would show how much he loved most fans back, these “sick” ones at the margins weren’t people he felt any tie to. “As a kid, much as I loved L.L. Cool J, Run-DMC and The Beastie Boys, I wouldn’t have cried, hyperventilated, or had a fucking seizure if I met them,” he told Muzik. “I … would have been real shy.”

  Stan, the single’s progressively more unhinged stalker, had no such reservations. But the song, a 6½-minute, boundary-busting radio event like Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ 34 years before, was a far more intricate, jagged piece of music than Eminem’s summary even started to suggest.

  ‘Stan’’s masterstroke was its extensive sampling of ‘Thank You’ by Dido, one of the most daring, lateral record raids in hip-hop history. Dido Armstrong was then known, if at all, as a singer in her brother Rollo’s British house act, Faithless. Although aggressive marketing by her label and the Eminem association would drive sales of No Angel, the début LP from which ‘Thank You’ was drawn, past one million in the US by the time of ‘Stan’’s single release, when Eminem started to build his track around her’s in the studio, only he heard something right in it.