by Hasted, Nick
To Smith, he added, “I had a wake-up call with my almost going to jail, like, slow down. That was me letting my anger get the best of me, which I’ve done many times. No more.” But to The Face, he ruefully admitted how such confrontation still fed his art. “It’s funny, it’s like I need drama in my life to inspire me a lot, instead of just trying to reach for something. Last year was like a really rough year for me. You know, divorce and trying to raise my little girl. Obstacles are thrown at me – you’ve just got to fall or you don’t fall. And I can’t fall.”
He also talked to Smith about the catastrophe that had happened in his absence, the terrorist assault of September 11: “That was, like, a dark day. It’s a subject I couldn’t really bring myself to make fun about – then I’d just have no fucking morals or scruples at all.”
Whether that contradicted his comments on ‘Without Me’’s video or not, The Eminem Show did anything but ignore how America had changed. Instead, Eminem passed the radical test this presented, in a way few previous musicians had managed. Without the groundswell of support among politicised fans which cushioned Dylan in the Sixties; at a time, in contrast, when the streets of Warren he drove through to his studio in Royal Oak were draped with Stars and Stripes, and dissent had vanished from America’s TVs, he attacked its government and wars directly. There was no easily identifiable anthem on the record, no self-conscious stance. Eminem’s politics just poured naturally out, with all the other shit in his head.
The first few seconds of the album were deceptively peaceful, a theatre curtain being winched open over a classical prelude, then the clearing of a throat. Then came the first word: “America!” It was how The Godfather had opened too, the subject of both, no matter what bloody distractions occurred along the way, made plain from the start. The song was called ‘White America’, and Eminem spat his nation’s name in the Rotten snarl he’d perfected on ‘Renegade’, pronouncing it like a Black Panther: “Amerikkkaaa!” To a heavy rock beat, his next words, dripping with irony, were: “We love you! How many people are proud to be citizens of this beautiful country of ours/ … The women and men who have broken their necks for the freedom of speech the United States government has sworn to uphold …” Darkly, he murmured: “… Or so we’re told.”
He then asked everyone to listen to the lyrics (something he’d never done before), and used them to discuss the politics of his own situation, how his white skin had probably doubled his sales, and how he and Dre had traded fans across the colour line. As he told The Source, “I’m not saying anything different than any rapper has said. I reached into them homes of Middle America because white kids looked up to me, because they looked like me.” It was this suburban fan-base that made Congress and protest groups pore over his lyrics like no one else’s, that made censors want to silence him, and made him feel watched and throttled and paranoid every time he picked up a pen: “Surely hip-hop was never a problem in Harlem, only in Boston, after it bothered the fathers of daughters starting to blossom.” It was the same class and race distinction he’d drawn between Columbine and Detroit before, with the added fear of miscegenation which powerful American music had always fingered; except that white boy Eminem was the contagion now.
At first glance, attacking his country’s Congress just because it attacked him seemed like a self-aggrandising way of thinking. But in the final verse, Eminem showed how seriously he took this battle, and his outrageous position as the channel for a generation’s unfocused rage, “the poster-child, the motherfuckin’ spokesman now, for White America.” It made him have visions of patriotic sacrilege no one without his commercial clout would ever have been permitted to record, especially not post-Twin Towers: “Sent to lead the march right up to the steps of Congress and piss on the lawn of the White House and to burn the [something here so sensitive it’s erased from the printed lyrics, and muffled on record: the Presidential Seal? The Bill of Rights?] and replace it with a Parental Advisory sticker/ To spit liquor in the face of this democracy of hypocrisy/… Fuck you with the freest of speech this divided states of embarrassment will allow me to have, Fuck You!” And then, with the taunting get-out clause with which he’d closed The Marshall Mathers LP‘s provoking misogynistic opener, ‘Kill You’: “Ha-ha-ha. I’m just kiddin’. America, you know I love you.”
It was the 1963 March on Washington or the Million Man March, deliberately devolved into working-class desecration, spitting and pissing on corrupted symbols of power, an expression of utter contempt for a Government whose post-Afghanistan approval ratings were monumental. And another track was still more specifically radical.
‘Square Dance’, set to a parody of the titular white trash beat, hauled off on another enemy made between albums, Canibus (the first black rapper he’d publicly dissed), for much of its length. It said a lot for his sense of democracy that President George W. Bush was treated with equal, if more serious scorn. Eminem had returned, he revealed, “with a plan to ambush this Bush administration, mush the Senate’s face in and push this generation/ of kids to stand and fight for the right to say something you might not like.” He was thinking of the same incoherent army of kids he’d imagined in ‘The Real Slim Shady’, his clumsy, unhappy comrades working in supermarkets and burger bars. But he knew September 11 and Bush had raised the stakes for them all, and that incoherence would no longer serve. In one verse aimed directly at those kids, from the position of an older friend (he admitted to 28 now; maybe it was even true), he laid out a modern Desolation Row, of teenage boys getting their call-up papers at band practice, and others choking from Anthrax-stained napkins, as assassins crashed screaming trainloads of people, and Uncle Sam used the excuse to draft a generation. “You’re just a baby … they gon’ take you ‘fore they take me,” he sadly said, in words reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen’s touching advice to Reagan kids not to join up, on his mid-Eighties tours. “When I say Hussein, you say Shady,” he added, before picturing himself hanged, expunged like that other Bush bogeyman.
The rest of the record returned to his own life, digging over all its details one more time, trying to make sense of the year’s travails. The mêlée in the parking lot with John Guerra was replayed as a movie scene in ‘The Kiss’, in which Eminem sees his girl kissing another man, and leaps out of his car, unloaded gun in hand, before his friends can stop him; in ‘Soldier’, he bragged about what he’d done. But on the D12-assisted ‘When The Music Stops’, he cursed the pressures that made rappers try to live up to their music’s tough images; while on ‘Say Goodbye To Hollywood’ and ‘Sing For The Moment’, he reflected on success with sorrow which had not been there the last time he bullishly discussed it, on The Marshall Mathers LP.
‘Say Goodbye To Hollywood’ begins with the sound of sirens, and handcuffs closing on Eminem’s wrists. To a contemplative tune, he then adds more details to the Hot Rocks fracas: his gun falling to the floor unseen by him, a friend picking it up before bouncers pile in; and his rueful disappointment when Kim doesn’t stand by him. But its biggest revelation was the state of his head as he contemplated jail. How, even as Kim slashed her wrists, he too pondered a second painkiller overdose as he skidded to rock bottom again, his brain pounding from the moment’s pressures, only the example of his absent father staying his hand: “thank God, I got a little girl/ and I’m a responsible father, so not a lot of good, I’d be to my daughter, layin’ in the bottom of the mud.” The “Hollywood” he wanted to flee to survive was two-fold: the futile melodrama of his life, distorting to fit his public image; and fame itself, which for the first time seemed a true curse. The music that had freed him from poverty-stricken despair was now a cage. He’d never have rapped, he declared, if he’d known: “I sold my soul to the Devil, I’ll never get it back.” He and his daughter were now freaks: “It’s fuckin’ crazy, ‘cos all I wanted was to give Hailie the life I never had, but instead I forced us to live alienated.” A harmonica solo outroed his millionaire’s blues.
‘Sing For The Moment’, th
ough written almost as soon as the cuffs were off, was a more considered, moving response to his predicament. It was also the album’s most complete adoption of Seventies rock, building its chorus on the surging guitar riff of Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’, with crashing rock drums.
In it, he replayed the moment when he signed CDs for cops even as he was fingerprinted. But he was more interested here in the implications of his fans’ reactions to rappers’ records and acts. For the first time, he admitted raps could do harm: “I guess words are a mothafucka they can be great/ or … they can teach hate.” Though still dismissive that his lyrics could make someone cock a gun, he bemoaned the mixing of gangster postures with showbiz, the glamorisation of violence that came when ghetto rappers were unexpectedly made stars.
But finally, he rejoiced in rap’s effect on fans, in the transcendent tones last heard in ‘Revelation’. Voice softening as it always did when considering youths as he had been, he imagined fans with nothing, crying in their rooms and wanting to die, hanging on to the rap records that kept them hoping. And Eminem revealed that his hopes for salvation now lay with those fans, just as much as it had rested with his idols when he had nothing. The only afterlife he hoped for was through them remembering his lyrics, the receptacle of his “spirit”. He might curse Satan he’d ever rapped some days. Others, he thanked the Lord.
Money and damnation were also visited even-handedly on his mother, on what became the second single, ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’. Woodblock beats gave it a gentle sound, and its chorus – “I’m sorry, Mama, I never meant to make you cry” – suggested he’d heard of Mathers-Briggs’ lonely despair on her return to Detroit months before to make up with a son who wouldn’t see her, and repented. But against that, the song’s verses were a vicious rejection of any blood-bond she still hoped they shared. Recalling life with her, he repeated now more carefully worded accusations (how she popped “prescription pills”, and convinced him he was “sick”), with the added offences of her CD and court-case. In the last verse, he lured her in, in a voice that whispered and insinuated in the ear, as if he wanted her to huddle to the radio to hear his remote-control, poison message: “guess what, yer gettin’ older now and it’s cold when you’re lonely, an’ Nathan’s growin’ up so quick, he’s gonna know that you’re phony/ And Hailie’s gettin’ so big now, you should see her, she’s beautiful/ But” – voice starting to growl louder, now she’s listening – “you’ll never see her, she won’t even be at your funeral! Ha-ha!” The coup de grâce revisited the terrible moment when he was 20, and she’d wished he’d died, and his uncle had lived. “I am dead,” he snarled, with controlled savagery, like he was cutting a throat. “Dead to you as can be.” It was strange stuff to reach number five in the UK chart.
“Yeah, it’s a harsh record,” he admitted to The Face. “But I feel like my mother has done some harsh things to me. You just try your whole life to get away from that person and make a life for yourself and not have to deal with it any more. And it’s so hard to break away. And they keep coming back to haunt you, trying to weasel their way into your life somehow. That’s my closure song, I guess. It’s like I’m washing my hands of it. I’m cleaning out my closet. I’m done.”
His attitude to other women hadn’t exactly improved either, on the standard-issue rap misogyny of ‘Drips’ (Em is hoodwinked into catching AIDS from a “dirty ho”), and the more personal ‘Superman’, in which he refuses to commit to any of the star-fucking, gold-digging one-night stands that now apparently constitute his sex life. There was something queasily realistic about the slapping and neck-snapping he’s an inch away from giving all of them (even though, as in real life, “I don’t wanna hit no women”, and the songs’ stacked circumstances give him cause). But both tracks seemed born from simple hurt and distrust, in the aftermath of his divorce from Kim.
In Rolling Stone, he had recalled how that scarred him. “Divorce is the hardest thing I went through,” he’d said, “not that I’m bitter or anything like that. I’m a better person because I went through it, but it was hard at first. I’ve known this chick all my life, she’s the first true girlfriend that I ever had. You grow up with this person and then they want to leave you. And at first you don’t know what to do. You know, I put the blame on everything. I put the blame on myself, I put the blame on my career. But as I got through it, I stepped back and looked at the whole picture. I realised it wasn’t my fault and there’s nothing I could have done. It was inevitable. It’s cool, me and Kim are on speaking terms, we can communicate, no hard feelings, fuck it. Didn’t work, you know, after 11 years.” Then he added, more fiercely: “I would rather have a baby through my penis than get married again. I can’t take what I went through last year. I don’t ever want to experience that again.” The degrading of women in songs like ‘Superman’ now came straight from this; he didn’t dare lay himself open to really love another woman, and be let down again. How many times had he been in love, The Face asked him. “Once,” he said. “And that’s enough for me. And when Hailie was born.”
‘Hailie’s Song’, coming straight after ‘Superman’ on the album, made the contradiction between his distaste for women and love for his daughter obvious. It was the sort of shamelessly soppy ballad Paul McCartney used to write about Linda, and Eminem used to write about Kim on Infinite. It was also his first, okay attempt at singing. It was about the pressure he had felt when Hailie was away living with Kim, and the relief of having her back. The only thing that made it unsuitable for a bedtime lullaby for his child was one last verse of bile at her mother (“what did I stick my penis up in?” he wondered, amidst more borderline actionable comments, which couldn’t hide how he’d once felt, and his drained relief those times were done). It finished with a repeat of his ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ promise to never leave Hailie, and a kiss.
“I made it just for her,” he told Rolling Stone. “I’m singing on it, for Christ’s sake, or trying to. I wasn’t going to use it, but I played it for a few people, and a few of them cried, actually. So I said, ‘Fuck it.’ “
In its original form, it was built around a sample of George Harrison’s Beatles song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ – an unlikely connection with old rock royalty which almost came off. “From what I understand, he heard it before he passed and liked it,” Eminem surprisingly revealed. “He was going to allow it. But his wife has control of his music now and she said no, so I had to re-sing it all.”
The Eminem Show‘s finale anyway made far more telling use of his daughter, and pulled together every one of the record’s strands. ‘My Dad’s Gone Crazy’ was one of only three Dre productions (the other 17 tracks were all by Eminem), and the lone one on an often dark, hard album to recall the cheekiness of their first days together. An unlikely duet with little Hailie, it begins with the sounds of a radio announcer discussing fatherhood, coke being snorted, and the creak of a door as Hailie enters to see what Daddy’s doing. He’s “gone cray-zee!” she declares. Dad cheerily admits it, daughter’s soon making chainsaw sounds, and Eminem lays waste to the world once again: declaring he and Dre are gay (“I’ve been lying my ass off all this time!”), insulting gays, imitating his Mum, announcing he’s a genius, and beyond salvation. As typically seesaw Dre beats are built on by thunderous drum-rolls, bells and brass he even, despite what he said to Zadie Smith, uses September 11 as a metaphor for his own writing skill, unable to resist making even that the subject of his satire. In a climactic rush, comes this: “More pain inside of my brain than the eyes of a little girl/ inside of a plane aimed at the World Trade, standin’ on Ronnie’s grave, screamin’ at the sky, till clouds gather, it’s Clyde Mathers and Bonnie Jade …” In those moments, he dashes every doubt that The Marshall Mathers LP could be topped. “You’re funny, Daddy,” Hailie loyally concludes.
Every minor cast-member of the previous two albums – Paul Rosenberg (weary), Steve Berman (shot) – had also already appeared, except for Ken Kaniff. He took the mic after the curtain on the
Eminem Show winched closed. Voice echoing, as if on the wooden Lincoln stage where Marshall Mathers had first performed, he was swiftly drowned out by bird-song, nothing else, really, left to hear. The LP trilogy, and the slice of Eminem’s life it had mined, was done.
Of course, it was number one everywhere. In the US, the first day’s sales slammed it there. Reviews, mostly by writers who had listened once in Interscope’s offices days before its rushed release, really failed to grasp what they’d heard, but went along with the unstoppable flow: “the greatest ‘Show’ on earth,” said NME; “finally, in his own scattered way, in his own mind, at least, Eminem is fighting for something a little bigger than himself,” Rolling Stone saw. But what was most noticeable, as the dust of expectation settled, was how quickly it became possible to forget The Eminem Show had been released at all.
In the UK especially, where only interviews with The Face and Radio 1 were granted, and ‘Without Me’ as the lone single for months, the record was left to sell itself, slipping into people’s homes without a noise in the wider culture. The shock-waves of ‘Stan’ and the 2001 tour were no longer detectable. It was hard to tell, for all the CDs being bought, if Eminem did still matter as he had, only twelve months before.