The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  Everyone watched, too, for more clues to Eminem’s own past, the new details he had confided to Silvers. Basinger’s glamorous but unstable, unreliable Mom showed more tired if incompetent love for her son than Debbie had in Eminem’s memory, though her drunken rages and leeching from slob boyfriends seemed familiar. Her grand offer to hand Jimmy her car for his birthday so he can get to a job he can’t afford to lose the next morning, only for the rustbucket to die when he turns the key, seems a symptomatic exasperation, stored from life, as does Jimmy’s fight with the boyfriend she sides with, because she needs his money while his little sister cowers in a corner. But the melding of fiction and biography made it all guesswork, the forthrightness of his voice on record impossible here.

  The most revealing scenes were of creativity: scribbling on his pad on the bus, or trading rhymes with Future in a sunny street, pleasure brightening his face. Eminem’s whole performance, which carried the film, was built on such simple truthfulness; his high, light speaking voice, unfamiliar smile, and blue eyes capable of soft dreaminess as well as deadness, and his slight, white frame compared to almost everyone around him, made him vulnerable and sympathetic, where the public voice he had built since the times the film recalled could be strident and divisive. In a discreet sex scene with Murphy, the relieved need of his sighed out breath and drooping head as he came was unusually tender and erotic. And in the battle scenes, a lightness of touch quite different from his own raps remained, even in the pitch of desperate intensity of his final, winning confrontation. “Come on, Elvis,” taunts his gigantic black opponent, fanning a pack of race cards. Jimmy’s Eminem-scripted reply simply lacerates his own white trash flaws better than his enemy ever can, a return to the crushed esteem of The Slim Shady LP that success had seemed to bury. The choked silence of Jimmy’s start has been spat out, to clog his speechless enemy’s throat. But, true to the limited triumph of working-class rappers who don’t become Eminem, he follows his victory by going back to his factory shift. The last shot shows a harried, private smile as he wanders away.

  The Toronto screening exceeded everyone’s hopes. The crowd, including Festival attendees Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone and Dustin Hoffman (though not Eminem, gigging in Detroit) roared Jimmy on in the battle scenes, and Hanson left the cinema feeling exhilarated. He told reporters: “The reception took my breath away.” Early reviews were good, too. Eminem then stoked local flames with a surprise, MTV-sponsored live show after an 8 Mile preview at Michigan State University, on October 11. Students queued for eight hours, just in case their state’s most famous school drop-out showed.

  Eminem then added one element of substance to the building hype, by releasing 8 Mile‘s soundtrack on October 29. The talents he’d assembled for it showed his unquestioned hip-hop status now, the distance he’d dragged himself from the desperate unknown the movie recalled: Jay-Z, Nas and Gangstarr were among the stars who contributed mostly strong, battle-style raps. Eminem also produced tracks by rough, Shady Records-signed Detroit rapper Obie Trice, and early copies included a second CD spotlighting Shady talent. Eminem’s silent, sudden transition from Dre’s protégé to Detroit’s new Berry Gordy, picking up the city’s raw music talent, left in the gutter since Motown fled for LA in 1972, was confirmed when he described his A&R policy to Launch. “Every artist I’ve signed so far is from Detroit – and that’s kinda how I’m gonna keep it in the family. So, no matter what Detroit says about me, how much dirt they wanna spread and gossip, I’m doing something for the city. So suck my dick.” Ironically, the one exception to his rule, New York rapper 50 Cent, also on the soundtrack, would soon prove to be Eminem’s most successful discovery.

  The soundtrack’s real thrill, though, was its three new Eminem songs, plus his appearance on two more, a further track on the second CD, and seven producer’s credits (including taking charge of his only commercial rap rival, Jay-Z). It was more than half a fresh Eminem album, four months after the last, and just before a major film. It also marked, incredibly, an instant musical and lyrical break from The Eminem Show. Eminem, having possibly reached the limit of his own life as raw material, had levered open a new part of his brain, to inhabit Jimmy Smith.

  It had been Hanson’s idea to show Jimmy constructing a rap during 8 Mile, littering the movie with fragments of its words and beats, and climaxing with the finished work over the credits. Eminem wrote the track, ‘Lose Yourself ‘, during filming. 8 Mile‘s fictional rapper, in effect, had created its musical centrepiece as the movie was made, a reality-bending first Eminem was built for. “We talked a lot about what rap’s opportunities meant to the character, and what the song needed to express,” Hanson recalled. “And it was a struggle for him. Because his music, up to that point, all came from within, in whatever form he felt right, and it was all extremely personal and self-referential. Here, he was doing something that was also an assignment, and it needed to apply to his emotional life as reflected in his character Jimmy.”

  Released as a single on December 2, ‘Lose Yourself’ was Eminem’s first US number one, and one of his most powerful records. Effortlessly commercial, it was based around a stabbing bass riff suggesting the unreleased, repetitive tension of Jimmy’s life (rock by now integral to his sound) and triumphal Eighties synths, echoing the themes of the Rocky films 8 Mile resembled. Within this hit frame, ‘Lose Yourself’s crafted nature seemed to sharpen and discipline its writer’s wits, forcing him into Jimmy’s head. It was in this song and its 8 Mile companions, more than his performance in the film itself, that Eminem truly reached back into his depressed, almost hopeless past as Marshall Mathers with an actor’s skill. His lyrics re-created his sweaty palms and stalling brain and choking mouth as he failed in the real Shelter, the cold shock of reality reasserting itself as defeat destroyed his dreams again. ‘Lose Yourself’ slipped into Jimmy’s home life too, the subtle separation from Marshall more evident in this apologetic line: “Mom, I love you, but this trailer’s got to go.” How fictional that apology was, and how much a soft corrective to ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’, could only be guessed, in the grey zone of this new writing style. But more innovative still was the verse when Eminem suddenly broke character, jumping into a cautionary vision of his own success’s underside, and possible future collapse: “he’s cold product, they’ve moved onto the next shmoe who blows/ the soap opera’s told.” Reminiscence and premonition, fiction, autobiography and obituary, ‘Lose Yourself’ showed that, even with “the soap opera told”, inspiration still flooded Eminem’s veins.

  Of the other new songs, ‘8 Mile’ was almost as striking. Including another startling series of metaphors for the cramped depression Jimmy/ Marshall suffered before success saved them – asking “am I just another crab in the bucket?”, wanting to jump right out of his skin – what lingered from ‘8 Mile’ was its sound: the wail of a train horn, followed by the click-clack rhythm of old railway tracks, which Eminem imagined trudging down, till his home was left behind. He had begun wanting to be Ice-T. By 2002, Elvis, Aerosmith, and the symbols and sounds of Depression bluesmen and hobos were welcome in his world, too.

  The 8 Mile soundtrack went straight to number one in the US, selling 703,000 and sucking The Eminem Show back into the Top 10. The next week, the final part of Eminem’s extraordinary year of achievement fell into place. On November 7, he attended 8 Mile‘s US première, held, of course, at the Phoenix Theater, the only first-run cinema left in Detroit. Family members he was speaking to and friends were all with him. Ever the responsible father, he put his hands over Hailie’s eyes during his sex scene. By the end of that weekend, the film had made $54.5 million at the US box office. Stepping into a mainstream medium, to be judged by Americans to whom he had until now been just a filthy rumour, reviews too were effusive. Entertainment Weekly‘s critic was not the only one to dub him “a hip-hop James Dean”, while many also grasped the new lessons on US class and race Hanson and his star were trying to teach. Some also noted the disappointing conservatism of th
e plot compared to Eminem’s own unbound records, as in LA Times critic Kenneth Turan’s insightful review: “8 Mile is very much an old-fashioned somebody-up-there-likes-me kind of story, replete with traditional plot devices that … are decades old. This … facilitates the mainstreaming of rap, enabling civilian audiences to feel the safety and security of familiarity that’s simply not on the cards when listening to Eminem’s earlier, more nasty and threatening work … [But] his hostility, savagery and disgust as well as his undeniable musical gifts come from too deep a place to be completely blanded out the way Elvis’ talents notoriously were … Eminem is an actor with a rare gift for rage, and movie careers, even big ones, have been built on less.”

  It was true that the film came most alive in Eminem’s self-scripted battles, and in that sense was a standard pop showcase. But in also crafting Hollywood’s first portrait of working-class Detroit, and the dreams that can thrive there, director and actor could be well satisfied. Eminem was sure of the positive message he wanted to give: “No matter where you come from, you can break out of that cycle. You can make something of yourself.” America’s most politically radical pop star still believed in its Dream, and wanted others to. Even false hope was better than the despair he’d known in his darkest Detroit days.

  In the general surprise at 8 Mile‘s success, there was even talk of an Eminem Oscar. He downplayed his prospects to MTV Asia. “It could or it couldn’t. Steely Dan beat me out one year for a Grammy so, you know … Whatever comes I’ll take, but I’m not looking for that. I just wanted to make an authentic movie about the place where I grew up.”

  But as his movie’s triumph became apparent, the shocked exhaustion at shoot’s end which had made him dread ever making another seemed to fall away. “Now that I’ve had a taste of the movie business, I want some more,” he decided. “I want to do something completely different. I would love to play a comedy character or something. People wouldn’t expect that of me.” His family were, as always, free with their advice. Said grandmother Kresin: “I was one of the first in line to see 8 Mile. Now I would love to see him finish what he started, by making a sequel, showing how he cut his first CD.” With the spectre of Elvis the movie star now looming (an early, relatively good Presley film, Loving You (1957) had been very much in the raw, semi-biopic style of 8 Mile, which hadn’t stopped the sewage that followed), Eminem’s cautious advisers seemed to feel the same way.

  There was one more strangely resonant piece of bad news for the rapper, as 8 Mile‘s takings roared in. It was revealed that on November 7 Kresin’s one-time home in Warren, Eminem and his mother’s bolthole on so many occasions through their lives, had been sold by Debbie’s brother, Todd Nelson (who had previously fronted a cheap video about his nephew, Eminem – Behind The Mask, in which he had claimed to be his rapping mentor). “This is a very emotional thing for me, because this house has been in our family for over 50 years,” Nelson told the Detroit Free Press. He couldn’t be accused of exploiting his relative on this occasion. Short of money, he sold up for $45,000, in an area with an average house price of $90,000. The buyers, St. Clair Shores lawyer Sebastian Lucida and real estate developer Roland Fraschetti, then coolly put their new property up for auction, with a minimum bid of $120,000. By the start of December, the house Eminem had built a replica of to reveal his “white trash” background as he toured the world, situated close to the 8 Mile colour line he’d made notorious, the place where he’d crayoned pictures for his vanished father, and the nearest thing he’d had in his unhappy, unsettled life to visible roots, had a bid for $12 million considered. Nelson observed that Eminem was upset. It was just one more garish sign that he really could never go home again now.

  Instead, he found himself standing at another crossroads. His influence was at its zenith, his powers seemingly at their peak, everything he touched in every medium a dazzling success. He was the biggest and best pop star in the world. His home life was the happiest it had ever been. And yet, the details of that real life became rarer and duller, as his fame continued to grow. The touchstones of all his work, as Eminem, Slim, or Jimmy – the beatings, depression, poverty, arrests, savage maternal and marital scraps – were buried in the past. They had been strip-mined and alchemised and turned into fiction. But they might stay the hot core of a cooling life. “That’s my worst fear,” he confirmed to Rolling Stone, “that I’ll wake up tomorrow and won’t be able to write. That if there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be wack and boring.” As he had in ‘Lose Yourself’, he could imagine the day it all ended. “I’ve felt since my first day of rapping that my time is ticking. That’s how I’ve based my whole career – that this might never happen again. Fans are so fickle and so quick to turn on you. Suddenly, you’re not cool no more, even if at first you’re the greatest thing since sliced cunt.”

  The collaborations of Hollywood could yet soften him into spineless-ness, too, Elvis all over again. And yet, the inexhaustible resource and radicalism of his work in 2002 suggested a happier comparison. Openly battling his nation’s rulers in a time of scared consensus, picking at the sores of sex, gender, race, class and violence, spilling astonishing words as easily as breathing, he was like the great, late poet Allen Ginsberg. Both men are big enough to write about America every time they write about themselves, and themselves when they write about America. Neither subject has an end.

  There was one more thing that may save Eminem from falling. The hurts of his past didn’t only survive in his songs. His struggling, despairing years as Marshall were also a warning of where he might return, and the doubters and bullies he’d meet there. “Vengeance is my motivation,” he’s said. And that work is never done.

  “It’s kinda like that thing where you struggle all your life to get it,” he told The Source, “but it’s just as hard to maintain as it is to get there. I have to keep working if I’m gonna keep being able to laugh at them people who said I wouldn’t be shit. I do feel like, ‘Look what I’ve accomplished, ha-ha.’ At the same time, there’s the feeling that: ‘How do I know that I got the last laugh?’ “

  14

  THE CLOSET

  The next year saw no new Eminem album, and no conclusive answer to how his music would survive contentment. Instead, he slipped behind the scenes, signing and producing some of 2003’s biggest stars, as if rehearsing for his oft-mooted retirement from rapping. By the year’s end, the dramas of his past would stake their claim on him anyway. His whiteness, which he had worked so hard to downplay, would once more cast poisonous doubt on everything he did.

  Such thoughts were far from his mind that March, as the Oscars neared. Wild rumours of a Best Actor nomination for his 8 Mile performance had sensibly come to nothing. One of the favourites to win that award did, though, have a sliver of Shady in his soul. Daniel Day-Lewis’ ferociously intense turn as the demonic Victorian villain Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York had been inspired by an unusual piece of Method preparation. He blasted out Eminem’s ‘The Way I Am’ in his trailer each morning, using its snarling, trapped rage as fuel for Bill’s lupine savagery.

  Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ was meanwhile nominated for Best Song, against competition from the likes of Paul Simon and U2. Strangely, though, he chose the most prestigious awards ceremony of his life to break his habit of attending them all. Rumours circulated that he had refused to tone down his performance of ‘Lose Yourself’ for the organisers – unlikely, in such a career-minded man. At any rate, when his song was announced as the winner by Barbra Streisand – with a gasp signalling either shock, or an approving welcome into her conservative, Old Hollywood world – keyboardist and co-writer Luis Resto stepped up to accept the award. “It means a lot to him, believe me,” Resto claimed backstage. “I just don’t think he expected it.”

  The success of ‘Lose Yourself’ and Eminem’s rumoured boycott of the awards on a petty point were anyway insignificant in the night’s wider context. Headlines were grabbed by docume
ntarist Michael Moore, who used accepting his Oscar for Bowling For Columbine to deliver a raging protest against the just-launched invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain. Forcing anti-war sentiment onto American networks otherwise bellicosely uniform in their patriotism, provoking boos, cheers and frozenly inscrutable smiles from the assembled stars, daring even to attack the President – who he called “fictitious” – in time of war, it was an incandescent moment. Eminem’s disinterest in even attending such a forum at such a time did him no favours. Instead, he saw his music used for the war. The brooding aggression of ‘Lose Yourself’ themed BBC radio’s coverage of the conflict’s first night, as if George Bush and Saddam Hussein were competing rap champions. And Eminem was one of the most requested artists on British and US forces’ radio, joining The Clash’s ‘Rock The Casbah’, another record to have its oppositional intent turned inside out.