The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  In his childhood, his own letters to his father had never been read by their target; his own grandmother had sometimes been kept from him. Now, like a petty child suddenly turned into an upside-down family’s head, he was using his unexpected powers to repeat these offences, to get back at the grown-ups who’d hurt him. The imbalance of his millionaire adult status right now, and the weakness of his mother in the face of it, wasn’t something he could see, it seemed. But his mother’s actions in the closing months of 2001 showed the damage she was starting to sustain.

  According to a report on Sony’s Musiclub site in January 2002, when he would no longer take her calls, she had moved to an apartment near his Detroit mansion, to try to get close again. Betty Kresin’s comments on what happened next showed she too was still outside the mansion’s warmth: “My daughter was involved in a car crash when she first moved there. She nearly killed herself when she was driving Nate to school. She was taken to hospital in an ambulance, but Eminem wouldn’t change his behaviour or visit her. She even tore her book up in the hope her son and her would get back together. She did make some mistakes, but she just wants her son back. She’s hurting, she’s so sad. And she’s so thin, she looks like she’s just about to die. She misses her son so much. She’s living in a condominium as close as she could get to his house, but he’s as hard-hearted as ever.” Whatever wrongs his mother had done him, Eminem’s apparent inability to see her as a fellow, hurting human being, with flaws and motivations of her own, showed how much he was still a child when it came to his family. The irrepressible, disproportionate vendettas which made his records so much fun when applied to Britney Spears also tasted sour when turned on a mother withering from them. This was still the stony place in his heart, untouched by his achievements, the ground where he was worst and weakest.

  In every other respect, though, the Eminem glimpsed in this time out of the spotlight seemed to have matured appreciably. However much he rapped about the probation conditions which had narrowly kept him out of jail not taming his wildness, he had in large part obeyed them. He knew very well how close his day of Slim Shady madness the previous year had come to ruining him. Keeping clear of drink, drugs, guns and “assaultive behaviour”, at least in public, and maintaining a new fitness regime, he was in better shape physically and mentally. He was also more understanding of the price of his fame, as he told Q, when considering the familiar complaint that he couldn’t play basketball where he used to any more, as the people he had played with now just stared, and asked for autographs. “Gotta build a fucking basketball court in the backyard,” he laughed. “That just might be the way ahead – all the shit you want to do and miss doing, you just go and do it in your own backyard. Then you shut up and respect it.”

  As Jennifer Yezvack told me when she took my order at Gilbert’s Lodge when I first went to Detroit, Eminem anyway continued with the places, people and acts that were natural to him, in spite of his fame. He had not become an alienated celebrity, severed from his roots, lost and mad. Instead, in short, chaos-trailing bursts, he still hung out with the friends who had loved him when he had nothing, and went to the movies, or the clubs. “He goes to all the right places where the hip-hop fans go to,” Detroit promoter Michael Saunders confirmed to NME. “It’s not like he’s from Detroit but you never see him. He’s here all the time. You would not believe he’s on MTV by some of the venues he goes to.”

  Though the spectre of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia of live-in home-town disciples (who had eventually asphyxiated his sense of the outside world) loomed when you looked at Eminem’s Detroit Dirty Dozen, the latter crew seemed vastly healthier. Only Eminem’s immutable diet really recalled the King. “Everyone wanna eat filet mignon,” Swift laughed to Spin. “He still hollerin’ about Taco Bell.” The material temptations of his status, out of reach so long, simply meant nothing to him. “A lot of motherfuckers are living way better than me,” he told Spin indifferently. “Their houses make mine look like shit.”

  His peaceful, reflective state when away from his parents was summed up in Q: “I’ve made plenty of mistakes in the past, I’m only a human being, but I learned from my mistakes, and I’m definitely old enough to know right from wrong. I’ve got some regrets, but that shit is all besides the point as long as I know I’m raising my daughter right, and she doesn’t have to live in a ‘hood any more, and go through the things that I went through.”

  While Eminem got his head together and was briefly almost forgotten, the pop world he would have to come back to was of course moving swiftly without him. In hip-hop, only Eminem’s ties to him had kept Dre’s production style (changing and improving though it was) really current. The likes of Timbaland and The Neptunes had developed techniques based on skittering, micro-sliced beats which made Dre sound slow. It was a single by Timbaland’s main accomplice (and Eminem fan and one-time collaborator) Missy Elliott, the skeletally funky ‘Get UR Freak On’, not D12, which had defined the form in 2001. That year, Timbaland also unveiled his own million-selling white rap protégé, Bubba Sparxxx. His Dark Days, Bright Nights LP and hit ‘Ugly’ had no similarity to Eminem (except for the unusualness of a white rap point of view). Nor was he quite good enough to challenge for his predecessor’s crown. But in interviews, he thanked Eminem for breaking the curse of Vanilla Ice, as Eminem had thanked 3rd Bass: “He gave credibility back to the institution of white people being involved in hip-hop.” The arrival of a second black rap entrepreneur with a money-making white boy in tow, so opposite to the arrangement which had previously held in American music, was perhaps still more significant.

  The Southern funk of rap veterans and Eminem tour alumni OutKast and their massive hit ‘Miss Jackson’, and the sonically astonishing re-imagining of New York’s ghettos as electronic iron tombs to be transcended in Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, indicated underground currents. Jay-Z, who by year’s end had registered his third straight US number one LP, The Blueprint, and 12 million sales, remained Eminem’s biggest commercial rap rival. White rock fans meanwhile, though still in thrall to the brainlessly macho nu-metal, were also favouring Slipknot, whose deliberately obscene style, and assumption of enough intelligence in their depressed, rebellious teen fans to understand its subtleties better than their elders, was precisely in Eminem’s vein. The success of acts like Nickelback and POD in early 2002, with their songs of white broken homes, wife-beating and teenage suicide, also showed Eminem’s heartland constituency was not changing in his time away.

  The only seismic change in America as the follow-up to The Marshall Mathers LP gestated, in fact, had nothing directly to do with music. The terrorist obliteration of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 briefly made the solipsism of most modern American art seem foolish. The hysterical self-absorption of Eminem, as much as the narcotised materialism of many of his rap contemporaries, was brought into sharp relief by the sight of their fellow Americans windmilling to their deaths from high windows, or being squashed to paper thinness in rubble. The dark cloud of dust, stone and glass which rolled through New York City, coating it black, made even Cannibal Ox’s hellish vision of the city, or Eminem’s bullet-riddled Amityville, look tamely pleasant.

  In the atrocity’s immediate aftermath, there was much talk of an end to senseless violence and “negative” feelings in movies and music, that America’s seemingly unquenchable taste for such art had been gorged by the real thing to the point of vomiting. That soon passed, of course. Six months later, the music and movie charts looked the same as ever. But for Eminem, who on Marshall Mathers had sometimes seemed ready to wrestle his country till one was bundled to the floor, the attacks had to be dealt with. Would the man who had dared compare Columbine unflatteringly to the forgotten carnage in Detroit’s ghettos be so bold, or feel the same, about New York’s 3,000 dead? He had called himself a “political rapper”. In a nation being kept in a state of insular panic well into 2002, hyped up for a phantom war by regular TV news stories showing gas-masked preparation for apocalypse,
how far would he be able to take up that mantle? Appetite for the total freedom of speech he had advocated for so long had suddenly tumbled in America. Would he rise to the challenge, risk the martyrdom of a Lenny Bruce or Muhammad Ali, become truly great? Or fold? Or simply, and typically for his generation, find he still cared more about exploring his own fucked-up head, and the fucked-up family which orbited it?

  The only instant reaction by any pop figures, oddly, anyway came not from him, but the other five members of D12. Stranded in London when planes to America were grounded after the World Trade Center was hit, they collaborated with Damon Albarn’s pop-rap band Gorillaz and ex-Special Terry Hall, on a track called ‘911’, which was released to download on the Internet within a month. “We had organised the collaboration beforehand,” Albarn explained, “and the terrorist attacks added a different context, to say the least, to what we did together.” Over sinuous Middle Eastern instrumentation and an ominous bass, D12’s disparate personalities worked to good effect, summoning the moment’s anger, helplessness and confusion. The traditional rap response of verbally gunning down all enemies, even before their names were known – “whoever did this, we gonna getch’all” – dominated. But Kuniva also sounded lost and frightened, imagining himself in ash-blinded New York: “so much smoke you can’t tell the difference between night and day/ next time you hear a verse from me, you might be caged”. Most affectingly, the track caught the spacey drift of five young men from Detroit stranded far from home, losing themselves in chaotic dreams of showering glass, perhaps putting themselves in those Tower-toppling planes: “I ain’t never going home, ‘cos I’m too far gone/… as I sit in my seat and remain calm, I close my eyes.”

  “You don’t have to tell me the world is fucked up” was the nearest thing to a political statement from the rappers. Hall’s muezzin wail and Albarn’s chant of “we are one” in the chorus were attempts at balance from the Britons in the studio, at a time of heated jingoist rhetoric. The only hole in the track was where Eminem, still missing, should have spoken.

  He did make two, relatively unremarked appearances without D12 in 2001. But neither really indicated new directions. First, there was that guest spot on Xzibit’s Restless, in which he tastelessly complained about Kim’s suicide attempt (“she just slit her wrists over this shit”). His part on ‘Renegade’, on Jay-Z’s massive-selling The Blueprint was little more revolutionary. But this meeting between the world’s most popular black and white rappers did reveal both were aware of their complementary roles in racially schismed America. Jay-Z, sometimes criticised for his money-loving raps, described how he was still “influenced by the ghetto”, and “bring ‘em a lot closer to where they pop toasters/… I’ll bring you through the ghetto without riding around”, perfectly capturing the voyeuristic relationship white suburban kids felt to the black rappers they worshipped. When Eminem spoke, he didn’t have to mention he had come from that world to meet Jay-Z in the studio. He simply admitted he also had an influence, then launched into one of his most surprising and challenging lists of what that might be: “maybe it’s hatred I spew, maybe it’s food for the spirit/ maybe it’s beautiful music I made for you just to cherish.” And yet still “I’m viewed in America as a motherfucking drug addict”, sparking another assault on his mother’s generation, and Bill Clinton’s: “Like you didn’t experiment?/ That’s when you start to stare at what’s in the mirror/ and see yourself as a kid again and you get embarrassed/ stupid as parents/ you stupid do-gooders/ too bad you couldn’t do good at marriage.”

  It was as incisive a dismissal of the hypocrisy of baby-boomer authoritarians, the faded, smug rock’n’rollers his contemporaries were displacing, as could be managed in so short a space: he stripped them back to their own hormonal, experimental, raging adolescences, when their faces were as twisted, silly and slapdash as his; then he left them mired in their messy attempts at maturity. It was a Biblical switch, staring out from their mirrors to ask if they were without sin. His religious description of his own work (“food for the spirit … beautiful music”) then led to a second verse which imagined him as “Jesus Christ … Satan, a scatterbrained atheist”, battling whole Christian sects. The fresh quirks in this short performance were added to by a chorus in which he screeched “I’m a re-ne-ga-yaade!” in a rising howl borrowed from rock’s former Anti-Christ, Johnny Rotten. It seemed he was now consciously exploring his lineage beyond rap. Producing the track alone for Jay-Z, its synthesised choirs, sombre strings and organ were also quietly effective.

  The year’s last sliver of Eminem output was a video compilation of the cartoons that had interrupted his gigs, The Slim Shady Show, released in November in the UK, just in time for Christmas. Originally made for MTV at the station’s request, but fresh to most British fans, they were the worst thing he had put his name to. Relating the adventures of inept Marshall Mathers, evil Slim Shady and their friends (including Ken Kaniff), its animation was cheap even by MTV standards, and the pall of laughlessness that descended whenever they were screened at British shows was now stretched over 60 minutes. Hired scripter Matt Cirulnick gamely trotted out the usual targets, from Christina Aguilera to Kim (whose silicon breasts Slim rips off, having paid for them pre-divorce, the only interesting gossip, or slander, on view). But with Eminem and Paul Rosenberg as Executive Producers (for their own Shady World Productions), and Eminem as lead “Voice Talent”, the buck for the farrago stopped at Slim’s door. “If I read the script, and I’m not feeling it, I’m not gonna do it,” he told a “Making of” documentary, revealing how much he could misjudge a foreign medium. Still, it was his first vocal acting job, helpfully played out in a recording studio. He liked slipping “into character”, he explained of his technique. “You see the line, and just run with it.”

  Other news around him had thinned to a drizzle. In September, ‘Stan’ was nominated for five MTV Music Video Awards. In December, with staggering cheek, De Angelo Bailey, the bully who had concussed the child Marshall Mathers by shoving him in a snowbank, resurfaced to sue Eminem for $1 million, claiming ‘Brain Damage’ had harmed his reputation, and hampered his ambitions in the music industry, apparently being pursued from his current position as a Detroit dustman. His lawyer said Bailey “completely denied” the song’s allegations, despite merrily elaborating on them to Rolling Stone in 1999. Following in the footsteps of Eminem’s mum, he also released a CD, threatening to break down the gates of his one-time victim’s new home and kill him, which didn’t really help his case. “He got my address wrong,” Eminem sighed to The Face, in mock-despair at his now-impotent tormentor’s carelessness. “He’s making himself a public figure, which is where my mother fucked up. But,” he added, with the mature perspective he was now gaining in non-family matters, “if you have nothing else and you haven’t made nothing with your life, then what the fuck? If Eminem says my name on a record, why not get money? I’d do it.”

  By year’s end, though, such minor distractions ceased to matter. The stasis that had settled around his artistic life after The Marshall Mathers LP at last began to shake. A follow-up album was nearing completion. What’s more, a film with strong autobiographical elements, first called Detroit, and finally 8 Mile, was due to wrap in December, with its own soundtrack album being written by Eminem and Dre. The next testing stage in Eminem’s career was suddenly thundering down the track. 2002 would secure his crown, or dash it.

  8 Mile was the main reason there had been any gap at all in his previous headlong rush. It had begun as a casual idea for a hip-hop equivalent of Saturday Night Fever or Purple Rain, during a conversation between Jimmy Iovine and Brian Grazer (producer of The Nutty Professor and A Beautiful Mind). Two other rappers were considered, before Grazer saw Eminem’s range of expression at the 2000 MTV Music Video Awards. Eminem had meanwhile been interested in an acting role beyond those hapless cartoons for some time, and there had been rumours of films before, no doubt floated by hopeful producers (Lazarus, in which he would have played an
evil dead rapper returning to life, was typical). “Eminem had a lot of scripts. He didn’t want to do a jokey movie,” Bizarre confirmed to the Launch website. When Eminem agreed to meet Grazer, he was at first offputtingly aloof, not looking at him or saying much for 15 minutes, distrustful, perhaps, of Hollywood temptations. But when he did start to speak about his life, Grazer found him “articulate” and “passionate” about the subject, and “humble”, and “damaged”, he told Premiere. Eminem, a man who had never finished a book, forced his way into the script by Scott Silvers (The Mod Squad), and the deal was done. “It was a good enough script for me to put my music on hold for, like, four, five months,” he confirmed to Premiere, with a suggestion of the sacrifice that was to him in this central time in his musical life.

  Curtis Hanson, of LA Confidential and Wonder Boys, agreed to direct, having decided his untried star’s potential was worth the risk, and immediately 8 Mile‘s credentials climbed. The script, as it developed, seemed to adapt aspects of Eminem’s life with all the freedom a movie might take with some literary source, but the resultant fiction still let him draw on strongly personal memories: he would play Jimmy Smith, Jnr, a Detroit factory worker living in a trailer park with his mother (Kim Basinger), who has a fractious relationship with his girlfriend (Brittany Murphy), and hip-hop dreams he starts to realise, during one week in 1995. But neither Hanson nor Eminem wanted the rapper to simply play himself, and pushed hard together for something more. There was a generous six-week rehearsal period, during which the 57-year-old Hanson, a Hollywood veteran, became the first man since Dre to mentor Eminem in a new art. For a second, briefer time, he had a father figure to test himself against. “He was good to work with because he was real,” he told Premiere. “Curtis didn’t sugar-coat anything. If something sucked, he would say that it sucked. At first I would take it to heart – like, ‘Damn, how could he say that to me?’ And then I would take it in.”