The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  Removing his blond bleach and disguising his tattoos, Eminem also worked to smother the inflections and rhythms he had developed on record. Effectively, he was killing Eminem and Slim Shady when on set, and replacing them with still another persona, this time with an actor’s sense of craft. Hanson’s instructions before filming had included handing Eminem a stack of films containing great breakthrough performances from young actors like James Dean, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. Hanson said his star had shown a special interest in Dean, astonished at his iconic fame after just three films. But, Eminem confessed to Premiere, he had, not for the first time, ducked his homework: “I was so into this movie, I didn’t wanna see what other people had done. I didn’t wanna copy anybody or anything. I felt like as long as I felt real in a scene, that’s all I needed.”

  8 Mile‘s filming through late 2001 returned Eminem to his childhood heartland, places he had barely left even now. The Continental Mobile Home Village on the 8 Mile border of Warren, almost identical and adjacent to the trailer park where Eminem had grown up, was the major set, its residents cordoned off by Warren police, or compensated by Universal Pictures, as a neighbour they had never noticed came back with power and wealth at his command. Their homes and bodies were now extras in a Hollywood movie about a place which, until Eminem, America had ignored. It was something about which Warren, like the principal of Eminem’s school there when I talked to him, could feel only confused and uneasy. The production put millions into the local economy. But, like so many Eminem had used in his art, they worried they would somehow be sullied. There were a few pickets. When a building in Highland Park, in downtown Detroit, was burned down (with injuries to four crew-members), as part of a scene in which it’s torched, after a rape behind its walls, there were complaints that the area was being given a bad name. “The fucking white trash capital of the world?” Eminem asked The Face, exasperated. “I’m white trash, so what the fuck? You can’t tell me. I grew up in it.”

  As Hanson’s cameras explored the empty lots and industrial husks of Detroit almost as much as Warren’s trailers and trash, true to the city’s theme of division which the road he took his title from expressed, sensible residents should have been calmed. Hanson, a long-time friend of Robert Towne, writer of the legendary cinematic excavation of LA Chinatown, was fascinated with urban America too, as proven by his own LA Confidential. By bringing such an insightful director back to his home, as much as by making his records, Eminem was putting the broken city he loved back in America’s thoughts. Once it had been known for Henry Ford’s residence there. Then, for the slow closure of Ford’s factories. Now, the refusal of the country’s most infamous pop star to leave it behind seemed like one of Detroit’s few signs of hope.

  Taryn Manning, who played Jimmy Smith’s bitter ex-girlfriend (and had also appeared in Britney Spears’ rather different vehicle, Crossroads), watched Eminem as he worked in Warren. She sensed he was under great pressure. “He just knows he has the power to create something that could have a lot of longevity,” she said. “He can feel it inside. He’s focused. He’s intense. He’s also really goofy.” Part of the strain came from Eminem having to co-create the movie’s soundtrack with Dre, a task far from complete as he started to act. “Any downtime, he was writing,” Manning said. “You could see him formulating stuff in his head.” The composition of a second album for 2002, even as he finished his first major film, showed the drive behind Marshall Mathers had not withered. But it was Eminem’s first release of the year, Marshall Mathers’ belated, official follow-up, for which the world was really waiting, still.

  Interscope let intimations of its content trickle out in the early months of 2002, preparing the atmosphere for their artist’s return, delicately building expectations. The title, it was confirmed in February, would be The Eminem Show. Nothing Mathers had been considered. Eminem had produced it himself, with the help of Dre and the Bass Brothers. It would be, Marky Bass told a fan website, more “serious”, the same thing insiders had said of Marshall Mathers. “It’s better,” Bass continued. “He’s matured since the last one, and he’s been through so much since then, good and bad. He kept going and wrote a fantastic album. He’s a tough kid – it’s brilliant.”

  “I do feel he has matured as a lyricist,” Dre chipped in, to MTV, “but I don’t know if saying he’s moving in a different direction is accurate. His stuff is really crazy to me because just when you think, ‘Okay, he has run out of stuff to say, he can get no crazier than this,’ something comes out of his face that gives you chills. Makes the hair crawl on your skin. So I think the shock value of Eminem is definitely going to still be there.” With this new stimulus, rumours flew around Eminem’s name again, but this time with a force near to fact, as Interscope leaked and manipulated news, till the day when the waiting would be over. There would be a Seventies rock direction. Eminem would appear as bin Laden in a song. Kim would be back again. “Ohhh, Kimmy, Kimmy,” Bass teased. “You’ll hear all about her on this one. Is she at the bottom of the lake, or is she in Bel Air? You’ll find out …”

  In March, Eminem himself broke his silence, to The Source, but said nothing about the album, except the idea behind it. “The concept is my life becoming a show,” he told them. “All my personal shit people are able to know about. Nothing I do is behind closed doors, so it’s kinda like The Truman Show, Springer Show. The album is more personal than I’ve ever gotten.” The same magazine contained an advert for the record: red curtains, a spotlight, an empty stage, and the words, “Coming This Spring”, the show now so real you could almost touch it.

  The release date was pushed back. First it was April. Then May. Finally, June 3 was set as the day The Eminem Show would start. The few copies in existence were being kept under the tightest security. Almost no one at his own label had heard it, a few weeks before the world would. But nothing Interscope did could control what happened next.

  The Marshall Mathers LP had briefly made its maker the most notorious and brilliant man in pop. But the two years since had cooled everything. In his show and other actions, he had worked to dismantle his monstrous image, and succeeded. He was now a veteran artist in hip-hop, a genre more dismissive of the past than any other. He was a pop star in an era when attention spans flickered at light speed, and the durability of a Sixties star on the streak of genius he had so far ridden seemed impossible. He had imprinted British culture with fear and fascination not seen since the Sex Pistols, for a couple of months. Since that heady instant, he had worried no one. To still be the force The Marshall Mathers LP had made him would need not only an astonishing record, but for him to buck the nature of his times.

  And so, the show began.

  12

  EMINEM

  The first reaction was disappointment. When ‘Without Me’, Eminem’s first solo single since ‘Stan’ came on the radio, he sounded like a man implausibly low on material. After the suicide attempts, divorces, brawls, lawsuits, terrorist outrages and wars of his time away, it was a song consumed with himself. Built around a lyrical reference to Malcolm McLaren’s hip-hop proselytising early Eighties single ‘Buffalo Gals’, and ‘Purple Pills’’ sax riff, it had the childishly bright, bouncy addictiveness of his previous, album-introducing worldwide pop hits, ‘My Name Is’ and ‘The Real Slim Shady’. It just seemed to lack anything new to say. “Guess who’s back? Back again?” a voice taunted before the first verse began. Interscope had ensured everyone knew that answer. The question that needed asking in return was: why?

  “I just settled all my lawsuits. Fuck you, Debbie!” seemed to throw down a gauntlet, and a queue of other enemies were slapped: Limp Bizkit, Moby, Canibus, the FCC and, most memorably, Lynne Cheney, who was tactfully warned that the famously delicate heart condition of her Vice-President husband Dick was “complicating”. But as Eminem repeatedly rapped “we need a little controversy, ‘cos it feels so empty without me”, it seemed a perfunctory, insufficient reason to return. Even his bragging of
the “revolution” he could start with his lyrics “infesting” teenagers’ ears, “nesting” in suburban parents’ homes, said nothing new. Only two references to Elvis Presley, who his life paralleled in so many ways, suggested a fresh, fascinating awareness of this fact. Elvis’ first appearance was as an embarrassment, still on the unfashionable stereos of parents, who Eminem’s teen fans drown with their own hero’s hollers. But Eminem himself was more wise to the chain he linked: “Though I’m not the first king of controversy/ I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley, to do Black Music so selfishly/ and use it to get myself wealthy.” Superficially embracing the black rap view standardised by Chuck D of Elvis the culture-thieving “flat-out racist”, and dumping himself in the same bracket, Eminem’s understanding of the eruptive, miscegenating, parent-appalling force of himself and his ancestor a half-century before was clear.

  Another American hero sucked into ‘Without Me’ was Batman, as Eminem imitated the TV show’s theme, and presented himself as a superhero come to save the pop world from his own devastating absence. His life-long fascination with comic-books then spread to the accompanying video. Shot largely as if it was a comic, complete with speech balloons, it co-starred his half-brother Nathan, who sneaks a Parental Advisory-stickered Eminem CD home, while Rap Boy (Eminem as Robin) and Rapman (Dre) bounce their heads to the beat. TV was also sampled and satirised once more, with Nathan as young Eminem and Eminem as a blonde, big-haired Debbie clone on a Springer-like show, then, with the nearest thing to real controversy, a cut to live “ENN” footage of Osama bin Laden (Eminem again, in joke-shop beard and Stars-and-Stripes-patched turban). Found and threatened in his cave by D12, they all make up and dance to ‘Without Me’.

  No one was really offended, but Eminem explained anyway: “With the Osama thing, I was trying to make light of a bad situation. If we don’t address the issue, that’s not a healthy thing. Although this will not take away the pain of what happened, I’m trying to lighten the mood a little and help us get past it.”

  Whatever its merits, ‘Without Me’ predictably went straight in at number one in the UK on its May 20 release, and number two in the US. But Interscope’s carefully escalating build-up to The Eminem Show had already been thrown into sudden disarray. By May 11, nearly a month before the album’s official release, one of the few, jealously guarded copies in existence had found its way onto the Internet, where it was downloaded, bootlegged, and for sale on New York street corners for five dollars within minutes.

  Interscope tried to be sanguine about what was an industry-wide problem (Oasis’ Heathen Chemistry had been downloaded three months early). Eminem was understandably less open-minded. “I think that shit is fucking bullshit,” he announced. “Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him, because I picture this scrawny little dickhead going, ‘I got Eminem’s new CD! I got Eminem’s new CD! I’m going to put it on the Internet!’ Anybody who tries to make excuses for that shit is a fucking bitch. I’m sorry; when I worked nine to five, I expected to get a fucking pay cheque every week. It’s the same with music; if I’m putting my fucking heart and time into music, I expect to get rewarded for that. I work hard, and anybody can just throw a computer up and download my shit for free.”

  The underground, illicit spread of the album forced Interscope’s hand anyway. On May 27, billboards sprang up around London, advertising: “THE EMINEM SHOW. OUT NOW. BECAUSE THE WORLD COULD NOT WAIT.” The posters showed the record’s sleeve: a spotlit mic-stand on a wooden stage, with velvet, gilt-tasselled curtains parted, in this typical theatrical scene, just wide enough to reveal a besuited, sharp-shoed Eminem, sitting with his head in clasped hands, lost in thought, waiting to go on.

  When the fans who flooded record stores that day took The Eminem Show home, a week early, they found the theme of its title – of Eminem’s whole life as an exposed, Truman Show-style performance, just as he’d said in April – spread through every part of its package. When they flicked through the CD booklet, it was illustrated with closed-circuit TV pictures positioned in every part of his gated, exclusive new Detroit residence – in the mailbox when he reached in for letters, by the swimming pool as he and Hailie played, in his walk-in wardrobe as he picked from a wall of shoes and row of jackets; as he put out the trash in his yard, and scribbled raps in his clean white kitchen, CD headphones and spectacles on; even as he recorded The Eminem Show with Dre. 3:23AM.04-09-02 WORKINPROGRESS>VIEW354>STUDIOSCREENWITHDR. DRE ran computer type alongside, letting you know the very second of his life you were spying on. A skulking, hooded paparazzo was shown too, pointing his long lens at the house, suggesting by whom the rapper felt stripped. But in showing us his new home, Eminem was of course doing more to help us picture the mundane details of his life than any Hello! shoot or celeb-snapping helicopter dive. The booklet’s final images then twisted the satire inside-out: in open-necked office shirt and loosened tie, Eminem looked up from the business pages to coldly inspect us. In the darkened room (BACKSTAGE), a bank of TV screens let him watch each showbiz snapper. The very last page showed the MAINCONTROL-ROOM of the TV station running The Eminem Show. But Eminem was running it. Like all his best lyrics, he had spun his feelings of celebrity intrusion and insanity around, until self-pity was shredded, and he controlled what we thought.

  When you put the album itself on, nervously, after such long expectation, that almost arrogant grip did not loosen. ‘Without Me’’s disappointment was forgotten. Eminem had refined and focused all he’d done before, and matched every hope. The Eminem Show, intended as the close to a loose sort of trilogy, did not try to retrieve the raw shock of its previous instalments. He had become more dangerous in a harder, more lasting way: by getting better.

  So sure was he of what he’d done that his thoughts on what you were listening to were hard to find. After previous media blitzes, and in a year which would also include a soundtrack album and major film, only four carefully spaced print interviews were permitted. They gave only the barest of insights.

  To The Face, he considered the production style, which built on changes begun with Devil’s Night. “I just took the record on as my own project,” he said. “I know how to produce now. I’ve soaked up everything. When I first got with Dre I was like a sponge, asking him questions. What is this called? What’s this button do? And now I know how I want my shit to sound. I was trying to capture a Seventies rock vibe for most of it. We treated this record like it was a rock record, as far as how it’s produced. It’s, like, loud. There’s a lot of guitars in it. There’s a lot of hip-hop shit, too. I tried to get the best of both worlds. But I listened to a lot of Seventies rock growing up, when I was real little,” he added, something which – perhaps in denying his “little flower child”, Hendrix-adoring mother – he’d never admitted before. “When I go back and listen to them songs, you know, like Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith or Jimi Hendrix … Seventies rock had this incredible feel to it.”

  To White Teeth author Zadie Smith in Vibe, too, it was sonic shifts he wished to discuss. “I learned how to ride a beat better, that’s what I wanted to focus on,” he told her. “It’s not easy. Sometimes I’ll spend hours on a single rhyme, or days. Even if I have my ideas stacked, if I’m flooded with ideas, I’m always trying to figure out how to make it better, make it smoother.” To Rolling Stone, he added, “I’m paranoid as fuck about anything of mine sounding like a track I just did or anything out there. I practically live in the studio, apart from spending time with Hailie.”

  But he also looked back for Rolling Stone on some of the swirling turmoil in which The Eminem Show had been composed. “I have songs on the album that I wrote when I went through that shit last year, with a possible jail sentence hangin’ over my head and all the emotions going through the divorce. I went through a lot of shit last year that I resolved at the same time, all in the same year. And yeah, that’s when the album was wrote. I was in that shit, and I didn’t know what was going to happen to me
– I thought I was goin’ to jail. But the scariest thought was, ‘How am I going to tell this to Hailie?’ What am I going to say – ‘Daddy’s going away and he’s been bad, and you have to come visit him in jail’? I never told her anything, because if there was a slim chance that I could get off, then I didn’t want to put her through that emotionally – being scared. She hates when I go away, any time. The first song I wrote for the album, ‘Sing For The Moment’, is that frustration and all that shit. There I was, in the fucking precinct getting booked, and the police were asking me for autographs while they were fucking booking me, and I’m doing it, I’m giving them the autographs. But I’m like, ‘My life is in fucking shambles right now, and you look at me like I am not a fucking person. I am a walking spectacle.’ I signed it. ‘They’re the police, and I’m sure that if Marshall is a good guy, word will get around, so okay, fuck it, lemme do it.’”