by Hasted, Nick
What Dido gave him, most of all, was a voice, mood and sound from a world far from his, the first part in what, with Eminem as superfan Stan and himself, would become a weaving, unpredictable, three-way dialogue. It starts with a crash of thunder, and Dido’s ‘Thank You’ beaming in tinnily, then stronger, as if her voice is transmitting to a place that’s hard to reach, a room submerging in lightning-streaked rain. “My tea’s gone cold, I’m wond’rin’ why-y-y, I got out of bed at all,” she sings. “The rain clouds up my window, and I can’t see at all.” The picture of an English bedsit on a gloomy Thursday is completed by the accent of her pensively accepting voice. Looking at the pictures of her lover on the wall, she feels happy, in the hemmed in way her country’s cold and drizzle have trained her to be. But the voice and the beats are getting louder, as if someone’s turned that radio up as far as it will go. And here, with no warning, comes Stan.
He sounds polite at first as he writes Eminem a letter, reasonable, informed, the kind of fan every artist wants. He likes the most obscure tracks, he’s papered his room with his idol’s pictures, feels he knows him in a way. He wishes he’d had a reply to his last letter, but he understands. Only a harsh, scratching sound, like a ragged typewriter, or rats in the roof, is disquieting. That, and the way the bass, guitars and beats loop claustrophobically, like they can’t find their way out of Stan’s head. When Dido comes back in, her kind voice doesn’t sound as comforting as before.
Verse two, and Stan’s sanity’s taken a dip. “I ain’t mad, I just think it’s FUCKED UP …”, he’s writing now, still with no reply, so forced to pour more of himself onto the page. Stan says his father was a wife-beater and cheater, he cuts himself, his pregnant girlfriend can’t understand, he’s just like Eminem; only Eminem, who he met for seconds at a signing, is his friend. When Dido returns, her tea sounds cold as death. And in Stan’s final letter, the sympathetic detail with which Eminem has entered this wounded fan’s head spins into merciless farce: Stan’s on the freeway, barking last words into a tape, his pregnant girlfriend screaming in the trunk, just like Kim, till he screeches and splashes into the river, unheard tape and all.
The swerve in mood has a logic you can only imagine after it’s happened. And then, when you think surely there can be no more, here’s Eminem himself, replying sensibly, conscientiously, “the real me”, maybe, as he told the LA Times; but he’s too late, as Stan is dragged from the water on TV. Psychodrama, stalker comedy, character study, shaggy dog tale, a sick, cruel joke: that was ‘Stan’, every time the radio played it.
The video, another automatic MTV number one in November, added even more nuances. It starts as a horror movie, with an actor as Stan and Dido as his heavily pregnant girl, arguing in an eerie house. Dyeing his hair blond, Stan peers at himself in the bathroom mirror, wearing a vest that makes him look like the poster image from Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer. But he sees only himself, turning into Eminem. The schizoid role-playing at ‘Stan’’s heart – Eminem impersonating his biggest fan pouring his heart out to Eminem – is now naked, as Stan retreats to his cellar, where he writes surrounded by torn images of his hero, eyes bright, remembering the times he caught real glimpses of the star. We see that Eminem, dead-eyed and self-protecting, as Stan grabs him to hug at a signing.
But it’s a third Eminem, the one shown receiving Stan’s letter in his trailer, who is really a new face for an artist so addicted to masks. This is again “the real me” he’d mentioned to the LA Times, but portrayed with a force the song could not match. More even than ‘The Way I Am’’s video, the minute of film in which he acts out the final verse, studiously writing Stan back, wearing glasses to see the page, is a corrective to all the cruelties and fears he’d unapologetically mined elsewhere; evidence to suggest that that truly was play-acting. As he returns Stan to reality, recommending “counselling”, saying his songs are “just clownin’ “, feeling “sick” when he sees Stan’s crash on TV, these lines leap from the screen: “I really think you and your girlfriend need each other. Or maybe you just need to treat her better.” With Dido’s strong, kind-eyed female presence in the video too, this advice to a fan who’s taken in by ‘Kim’’s cruelties, on what would become Eminem’s biggest hit, is his clearest, overlooked indication that, when at peace, he might not want to harm women, even with his words.
British reactions to ‘Stan’ were particularly acute because it was released as the least likely Christmas single in years. It was unmissable on the radio that December, hard, funny and fresh among a slew of novelty songs and bland boy bands. In the traditional race for Christmas number one, it looked briefly as if Eminem’s astonishing stalker ballad would for once give the position some dignity. But his record company backed down, not trusting seasonal buyers’ sense of adventure. ‘Stan’ was slipped out early in December, securing Eminem’s second UK number one without serious opposition. Bob the Builder’s ‘Can You Fix It?’, a grating children’s song, toppled him in time for the turkey.
Still, it was ‘Stan’ and Eminem people were still talking about as 2001 dawned, and his UK tour neared. As was now routine around the world, his approaching entry was protested against as if he was a real convicted criminal. On January 30, Sheffield University Student’s Union banned the playing, merchandising and promotion of Eminem on its campus, worrying that this would “intimidate” gay students, after three complaints. The stereotypical notion that its gay population were wilting flowers prone to cowering at people playing records was not challenged, and on February 3, the University’s radio station, Sure, was fined £7,000 for playing Eminem. The Swedish manufacturers of the chainsaw he used in his act, Husqvarna, were also perturbed. “We make chainsaws for mature people,” they declared, “who have genuine forestry work to do.” The notoriously unhip and censorious Tory Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe then weighed in with her own condemnation, making both parties look foolish.
But the most striking aspect of the tour as it neared was that everyone had to write or say something. Because ‘Stan’ had been heard so widely, simple Sun-style vilification was no longer supportable. And the thematic baggage and dramatic life Eminem hauled behind him like contraband – the homophobia, the misogyny, the maternal strife, the bullied past, the beatings, the race – was so alive, it forced thought from literary critics and pop pundits, and people in the street. On ITV’s Tonight news magazine, Trevor McDonald interviewed his mother. On Radio 4’s more highbrow news programme of note, Today, his grandmother spoke. By the time Eminem and his entourage stepped onto a private plane in Paris on the 8th, after a gig in the city the night before, with their Manchester date now only hours away, a media thunderstorm not seen in Britain about a pop act since The Sex Pistols was boiling to a head.
Preview reports from across Europe gave clues on what to expect, and titillating gossip. In Hamburg, Eminem got the crowd to chant “Pop the pills!”, before seeming to down two Es. A D12 member called them a gift from Marilyn Manson, also hauling a censor-baiting show towards Britain that month, and a guest of Eminem that night. In Paris, R&B artist Mya watched him parody boy band N’Sync’s ‘Tearing Up My Heart’ as ‘Tearing Up My Ass’, before he and the French told each other, “I love you!”
But it was in Manchester that the jackals, the zealots and the curious gathered in earnest, news crews, protesters and young girls jostling for space outside the MEN Arena, on a crisp winter night. On his plane earlier in the day, Eminem had rested unawares, listening to the Xzibit album on which he guested. He walked down the plane’s steps towards the Manchester ground like a T-shirted Pope, only to be sent back up by Paul Rosenberg, wanting to catch the moment just right for a possible video. When he cancelled his night’s reservations at the Mal Maison Hotel, the day’s first rumour flew. He was fearfully avoiding the city’s nearby gay district, it was gleefully claimed. He had always planned to drive straight onto London, his label countered, barely caring. The fine points of this frenzy of attention no longer mattered.
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nbsp; Around 100 pickets gathered in the early evening, some in make-up, their literal-minded flyers showing why they could not challenge the man waiting inside. “EMINEM HAS GONE TOO FAR!” they warned. “Everyone knows Eminem’s lyrics are oppressive to women, homophobic and they actually make fun of rape victims … Manchester is proud of its diversity, women, gay and straight. Why should we give this bigot a warm welcome?” But their own “rap” was no contest: “Eminem you are not funny, you oppress us to make money.”
The teenagers and younger children, the majority girls, who filed past these protesters, not looking oppressed, had their own voices heard in a Smash Hits survey in the tour’s wake. Were his lyrics offensive? “Nope, they’re normal,” said Sarah of South Wales. “Some, but I guess he’s joking,” said Katie of Wembley. “Only to people who have no life and actually take them seriously,” said Jenna of Sutton. “He makes it clear he doesn’t actually believe in what he raps about.” As to dating the author of ‘Kim’: “Yes! He is the sexiest man on da planet!” “Most definitely, he’s God!” Only Katie worried about getting “beaten up” for liking Westlife, too. Their unfussy good sense put most of the week’s commentators to shame.
Inside, meanwhile, nervous expectation rose by the second. Outkast, the blistering Southern rappers due as support, failed to show, back in America due to family illness. British-Armenian rappers Mark B and Blade stepped into the breach, as the British garage act So Solid Crew, soon to be notorious themselves, would in London. But all that mattered was the moment, at 9.20 pm, when the lights at last went down. Now the crowd knew it was really happening, that nothing could stop Slim Shady striding to them.
All they could see at first was a 25-foot, broken-roofed shack, like the one on The Marshall Mathers LP. “This is the house I lived in when I was 13,” Eminem would tell them later, and most thought it was a joke, a parody of his white trash image, a pretence he’d once lived in a hovel like a Thirties bluesman. To anyone who’d been to Detroit, the parody seemed only slight. He really had brought the broken home he hated with him to Europe, to dance and shout in its ruins. Video screens moved us inside, showing Blair Witch-shaky footage of two young burglars being attacked by a maniac in blue dungarees and horror movie hockey mask, wielding a whirring chainsaw. Then Eminem was standing on the stage, in that mask, with that chainsaw, and the crowd surged forward in ecstatic relief.
But what followed had little of the offence or illicit thrills the storm preceding it had promised. Instead, like in ‘Stan’’s video, the “real” Eminem stepped forward again. He swigged a bottle of “Bacardi”, and declared he would “drink myself to death”; asked the crowd “if I’m amongst some drug addicts”, to a positive roar, before taking two “Es”; appeared strapped to an electric chair; even touched on the Guerra court case, declaring, “Of course I pistol-whipped that motherfucker. Because I’m a … Criminal!” But all the while, he treated his near-child audience conscientiously, letting them swear and pretend they were addicts, ensuring they were in on the joke. He let them touch him, and brought one girl up on the stage. He didn’t tell his fans he loved them, like he did in Paris. But it was there in the soft warmth of his voice. Apart from his daughter, it was hard to believe he loved anyone more. As he told Q when asked if he wanted to explain his lyrics to his fans, “They get it, they know what I mean. I don’t need to explain it to adults and older people, or critics. If anything, I’d like to thank the fans for understanding where I’m coming from.” For a man from a disrupted childhood who doted on his daughter, a mutual bond with these youngsters willing to join him in saying “fuck you” to the world was natural. When they shouted ‘Stan’’s words for him, new depths were tapped in its tale of fan love.
The problem with this increasing revelation of the sensitive, decent man Marshall Mathers felt himself to be, behind the Slim Shady mask others had taken so seriously, was that the emotional impact of this breathlessly awaited show was almost nil. D12 joined him near its start, for 20 minutes, letting him safely disappear in their number; there were set-changes (shack to castle), pantomime crowd participation, even an Eminem cartoon. Everything was safe, as if his art’s jagged edge was being kept from minors. He railed against critics at the end. But once again, he seemed to have listened to them too much. He was so worried about fans falling for his “bad” example that he had sanitised himself. Those who didn’t see him were lucky. They could still believe he was “the world’s most dangerous rapper”. But the Eminem seen live in Britain, as the excesses of 2000 slipped away, was someone more humane, and more ordinary.
His last three days in the country evaporated in gentle anticlimax. Police rushed to his dressing room after that first show, believing, like the concerned, naïve grown-ups they were, that the Es Eminem had necked were real. Once, maybe, they would have been. But Eminem, having slipped away already, explained the next day that the “pills” had been rolled-up chewing gum. The tabloids’ disappointment was naked. Manchester Police Inspector Steve White seized video footage anyway. “I thought it prudent … to see if any offences had in fact occurred that might be in breach of the Misuse of Drugs Act,” he declared, with Dickensian formality.
Eminem was already being driven to London, for two dates at the Docklands Arena. He dined at his exclusive hotel on egg mayo and chicken salad sandwiches, and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, spending the first day shopping for Hailie, and the second in his room with his old D12 friends. Two years of limitless opportunity hadn’t altered the people and things he liked. But two radio interviews showed the relaxed, confident, amused man he was beginning to become.
Asked by Kiss FM’s Matt White about D12 solo careers, he spluttered: “What do you mean? Like the group split up? Like this is a stepping stone for everyone’s solo careers? We’re a crew, we’ll whip your ass! There’s six of us in this fuckin’ crew and we’ll stomp you like there’s 12 of us!” To Radio 1’s Jo Whiley, he was sparkier still. If he had a time machine, when would he go back to? “I’d probably go back to the day I was born and kill my mother as soon as she had me.” Would he let Hailie listen to his records? “Yeah, she listens to it, she walks around the house going, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ She’s my little secretary at home too. She answers the phone, ‘Shady Records!’” Would he get into movies? “I’ve been so busy with doing what I’m doing and I’m so drunk all the time that I can’t possibly …”
By the time he flew back to America, in the early hours of Sunday, February 11, the storm he had aroused had broken, in the dawning realisation that he had given no evidence of evil, or genius. He must have known he could not have the same impact again, and seemed glad of it. His farewell words summed up his time in the tabloid fire. Looking at the papers on his arrival he’d wondered why he bothered. “Why do you guys all hate me so much?” But the fans’ screams had changed his mind. “I totally didn’t expect that reaction. Respect. I love y’all.” He’d come as Johnny Rotten. He left polite like Johnny Mathis.
The closing months of 2000 had meanwhile seen him collect another batch of random, meaningless awards from various US show business corporations. In November, the Rolling Stone and MTV: 100 Greatest Pop Songs list placed ‘My Name Is’ at 67. The same month, Eminem was named Spin magazine Artist of the Year, and picked up two awards each from MTV Europe and Billboard, as well as the “My VH1” prize for Most Entertaining Public Feud (Eminem vs. Everyone). The Slim Shady LP‘s sales clicked over to four million, doubled in its successor’s slipstream. And, in December, Billboard‘s Year-End charts declared Eminem Top Artist – Male, and The Marshall Mathers LP the year’s second-biggest US seller, now up to 7.9 million.
These vacuous bashes, cobbled-together lists and crushing sales statistics placed Eminem in the same global pop arena as Britney, Christina, N’Sync and all the other production-line pop stars he loathed so bitterly. An Internet rumour that he had died in a crash – like James Dean, or like Dylan nearly did at a similar exalted, exhausting stage – was so pervasive that, on December
17, he had had to deny it himself. The story seemed to confirm his sudden worldwide ubiquity.
But it was the biggest music awards of all, the Grammys, which pushed the public’s awareness of him up still another notch at the start of 2001. “You think I give a damn about a Grammy?” he had sneered on ‘The Real Slim Shady’, “half you critics can’t even stomach me, let alone stand me.” The video’s nightmare vision of Eminem attending the awards, squeezed next to a simpering Britney, had been hilarious, but hardly ingratiating. Yet when the awards’ shortlist was announced on January 3, The Marshall Mathers LP was on it, for Album of the Year, part of an unusually risky list for the Recording Academy’s annual prize-giving – Radiohead’s Kid A and Beck’s Midnite Vultures were also there, alongside Paul Simon and Steely Dan. Eminem had three more rap nominations, too. Perhaps ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s brinkmanship had embarrassed the Academy, perhaps Marshall Mathers’ sheer weight of sales had forced their hand. Grammy President Michael Greene certainly sounded equivocal. “This is probably the most repugnant record of the year,” he said, flinching, “but in a lot of ways it’s also one of the most remarkable records of the year.” The nominations might still not have mattered very much more than the countless others Eminem had already absent-mindedly collected – though the Academy talked the Grammys up as their industry’s Oscars, their commercial impact was far less. It was ‘Stan’ which again helped him haul in yet more fans, when it was announced he would perform it at the Awards: as a duet, with the famously gay Elton John.