The Dark Story of Eminem

by Hasted, Nick

  As his grandmother had already told the New York Post, in October 2002, Kim had returned to live in Eminem’s mansion. “They’re back together and I think Marshall is very happy about it,” Betty Kresin said. “He loves Kim and Hailie, and Kim is the mother of his child. He is a terrific father, and very family-oriented. I’m not surprised he wants that stability. I want him to enjoy his life. Everybody deserves a piece of the pie.”

  His attempts at relationships during their separation had always seemed sad and half-hearted. He had a brief fling with Brittany Murphy on the set of 8 Mile, where he once again ruined his misogynist rep. “He was one of the first people I’ve met that made me feel comfortable with being every aspect of myself that I would want to possibly be,” Murphy gushed when it was over. “But he came, and went.” Mariah Carey, meanwhile, revealed that they had dated in only the most desultory way, never making love. “Maybe he thinks because nothing happened he’d look bad,” she puzzled, after he dissed her on ‘Superman’, and it was rumoured he would release old, erotic phone-messages from her. “I don’t know what the hell he’s doing. Doesn’t it seem a little bit girly? Like we’re in a catfight.”

  Compared to these brushes with showbiz romance, Kim, who still knew him as Marshall, would always win. The defensiveness in ‘Lady’, trying to guard against the “pattern” of conflict whenever he inched open his heart to her, was understandable. One of the stolen, unfinished raps on the Straight From The Lab EP, ‘I Love You More’, switched tone between tenderness and violent rage, suggesting their relationship’s old bruising nature remained: “Do you hate me? Good, because you’re so fucking beautiful when you’re angry.” They often seemed more like the squabbling, inseparable siblings they were first raised as than lovers.

  Kim giving birth to another man’s child five months before their reunion was announced must have wounded Eminem, of course. But in the early months of 2003, it seemed the dream ending he had imagined for his life as a teenager would come true: his adolescent sweetheart by his side for good, and now with a darling daughter, too. Whatever his protestations, they appeared as a couple around Detroit as he attended gigs and industry conferences, Kim as always staying silent in public, but unmistakably his.

  Then in September 2003, after a year of this latest truce, Kim left again. It was claimed she was furious that Eminem had put Hailie’s life in danger, by putting her on a track on an underground mix tape which continued 50’s, and therefore his, feud with Ja Rule (with its alleged influence on 50’s stabbing). The latest trouble had begun when, on ‘Warrior’s Song (Loose Change)’, Ja crowed: “Eminem, you claim your mother is a crackhead and Kim is a known whore/ So what’s Hailie gonna be when she grows up?” Eminem’s retaliation, ‘Hailie’s Revenge’, brought his 7-year-old into the battle. “Come here, baby,” he said. “Bring Daddy his Oscar.” “OK.” “We’re going to shove it up Ja Rule’s ass.” “Daddy,” Hailie cooed, “is Ja Rule taller than me?” “No, honey. You guys are the same size.” Hilarious as it was, it showed Eminem once again exploiting those around him for raps without thought of the consequences. But parallel events suggested Hailie’s mother had problems of her own.

  On June 10, 2003, at 2.30 am, Kim’s white Cadillac was seen by police driving erratically near 12 Mile Road. When she was stopped, two bags of cocaine were found in her car, and one on her person. Police checks also found her driving licence had been revoked in 2000, and she had previously been arrested for coke possession in July 2001, being released as there was doubt that it was hers. Then, on September 29, police were called to a party at Warren’s Candlewood Suites hotel, after complaints of loud music and yelling. Kim allegedly told them the room was in her name, and that her guests had taken marijuana and Es.

  Charged separately with possessing a controlled substance and maintaining a drug house, she faced serious jail-time, as her ex-husband had three years before. On November 7, she compounded her problems, vanishing from sight when due in court, provoking two arrest warrants. “Her family and her children are praying for her,” her attorney told the press. “We are really concerned.” On November 13, Eminem was temporarily granted full custody of Hailie.

  On November 19, Kim reappeared, posting $53,000 bail. She was made subject to electronic tagging, and drug and drink tests and counselling. On December 19, plea-bargaining saw her admit drugs possession and her driving violations, while other charges were dismissed. She was sentenced to two years probation and regular drug tests, much as Eminem had been. She was warned another slip would mean prison. But unlike her ex-, she could not help herself. On February 6, 2004, she was jailed after failing a urine test, and admitting cocaine use to her probation officer. “She obviously has a drug problem and on her own it wasn’t being addressed,” assistant prosecutor Dan Gillian said. A year of penal drama, including, Eminem alleged, Kim hacking off her tag to go on the run like a true outlaw, or addict, tentatively ended with her October release.

  America’s severe drug laws, separating a mother from her child when she had harmed no one, may have seemed more immoral than Kim’s actions. But her inability to respond to relative leniency by cleaning up even for a short while suggested either genuine addiction, or a fatal feeling of drift, a lack of the will which had let Eminem straighten out. It was a devastating end to their latest reunion. But by now, it was clear only death would separate them for good.

  Mother Debbie, by contrast, seemed almost invisible to Eminem now. There was talk of her appearing in an Osbournes-style reality show, after her son refused point-blank. She then made the news on January 22, 2004, when 16-year-old James Knott pointed a silver pistol at her at an 8 Mile gas station, dragging her out of her car by her hair and stealing the vehicle, before his swift arrest. “I tried to contact Marshall,” she sniffed, “but he apparently must not be in town.” He no longer cared.

  Whatever he thought of Kim’s incarceration, meanwhile, one court ruling at least raised a smile. On October 18, the terroriser of his childhood, De Angelo Bailey, had his suit for defamation in ‘Guilty Conscience’ finally dismissed. To rub it in, Judge Deborah Sevitto appended her decision with a 10-verse rap, refuting “stories no one would take as fact/ they’re an exaggeration of a childish act”. “I don’t know how the Court of Appeal would look at something like this,” said Bailey’s stunned attorney.

  But a more serious threat was coming to Eminem’s placid world, a time-bomb from long ago that would blast the discomfort some still felt at this white boy rapping right to the surface. On November 18, Ray “Benzino” Scott and David Mays, co-founders of The Source, held a press conference to unveil exclusively an unreleased Eminem track, ‘Foolish Pride’. It included these words:

  “I’ll get straight to the point/ Black girls are bitches … All the girls I like to bone have big butts/ No they don’t ‘cause I don’t like that nigger shit/ I’m just here to make a bigger hit.”

  There was much more on the same lines, along with a final verse vaguely lamenting that “when black and white take different sides/ Unity never happens and we will subside”. This “why can’t we just get along” homily was neutralised by rumours of a still more offensive rap, with Eminem calling black people “moon crickets”, “spear chuckers” and “porch monkeys”.

  Eminem released a statement to minimise the damage that day: “Ray Benzino, David Mays and The Source have had a vendetta against me, Shady Records and our artists for a long time. The tape they played today was something I made out of anger, stupidity and frustration when I was a teenager. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend, who was African-American, and I reacted like the angry, stupid kid I was. I hope people will take it for the foolishness that it was, not for what somebody is trying to make it into today.”

  A further apology soon followed, stating, “The song in no way represents who I was then or who I am today. In becoming an adult I’ve seen what hip-hop and rap music can do to touch millions of people. The music can be truly powerful, and it has helped improve race relatio
ns in a very real way. I want to use this negative attack on me as a positive opportunity to show that. So while I think common sense tells you not to judge a man by what he may have said when he was a boy, I will say it straight up: I am sorry I said those things when I was 16. And I don’t want to let anybody turn this into an opportunity to promote their own bullshit agenda.”

  The talk of “agendas” was understood by everybody in hip-hop. Benzino, a veteran if unsuccessful rapper himself, had sided with Ja Rule in his feud with 50 and Em, attacking the latter in ‘Pull Your Skirt Up’, a nakedly race-barbed taunt that could have come from 8 Mile‘s climax, or the real black hostility Eminem had suffered early on. “2003 Vanilla Ice”, Benzino had called him – “Five shades darker you’d be Canibus/ and no one would care about your complicated rhyme style/ … what you know about pimpin’ on the block till you freeze?” Amidst a barrage of responses to the “83-year-old fake Pacino” on ‘I Don’t Wanna’, Eminem goaded: “I would never have said shit if you had kept your mouth shut, bitch. Now what?” Now he knew.

  But the tape could not be dismissed so easily. It was like a recording of every half-admitted suspicion any black person had ever had of this freakish white boy appearing in their midst, gaining their confidence, then stealing one of the last things America let them call their own – hip-hop. Elvis had been the last white person “to do Black Music so selfishly, and use it to get myself wealthy”, as Eminem had reminded everyone on ‘Without Me’, with a wink. On ‘Foolish Pride’, the wink was gone. The rumour that Elvis was a racist had lasted half a century, and was now taken as fact by most young black Americans, without a shred of evidence. Now, here was a tape of his descendant, caught at last cackling behind their backs, when he thought they couldn’t hear. “What else could be Eminem’s Achilles’ heel ?” the rapper himself said, understanding it all.

  A vox pop for a special issue of The Source which cover-mounted CD excerpts of the tape in January found no major rap figure ready to condemn Eminem, except the morally bankrupt ex-con Suge Knight. But the lingering doubt the affair could leave was clear. “He’s definitely equivalent to Elvis Presley in a sense that Elvis only thought that black people were good enough to be his servants,” said Freddie Foxxx. “His goal is to do better than the people he stole from. What else do you expect from a white man? I’m sure he said the N-word a whole lot of times.” Skillz: “If you say the word ‘nigger’ out of anger and frustration and call a black girl a bitch, I’m pretty sure you’ll do it again.” Petey Pablo: “I don’t think you can really apologise for that, because you call me a nigger, then to me, that’s always on your mind and that’s what you think about us. That’s the way you look at me.” As The Source told its readers: “Remember this is a White rapper with the ability to influence millions who is saying these things to other White people behind closed doors.” Like they all are, it went without saying.

  In interviews and press conferences, Benzino floated arguments and theories that were riddled with holes, wondering why, for instance, the storm around Eminem was so much less than for black icons like Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson (charged, respectively, with rape, rape, child molestation and murdering his wife, not the rapper’s crime of saying an awful word). But the wider sense of white conspiracy Benzino conjured around Eminem was not without substance. He compared it to the bleaching of the Middle Eastern Jesus into a white man: “Some people want to culturally keep their image up, and hip-hop has such a strong influence on these [white] people’s kids that they probably first hated Eminem, but now they love him, just so that image can stay intact … that no matter what we do, they can always do it better than us.”

  Benzino and veteran black Detroit rapper and one-time Eminem friend Champtown went further, alleging a gradual “whitening” of the corporate staff at Shady by Paul Rosenberg. Adding to discomfort at Interscope’s Shady-led dominance of rap in 2003, that empire could then be seen as truly colonial. So many scores were being settled by the magazine’s sources, it was hard to give this credence. But the greater charge stuck. In corporate boardrooms and children’s bedrooms, Eminem and Elvis would always be more welcome than Ice Cube and Little Richard. The King would always be white.

  That was not Eminem’s fault, though, and the idea that someone should be cursed forever for a stray, private outburst in adolescence, when set against his clear love for black American culture and deep friendships with black Americans since, was thought policing at its most extreme, as if the tape was an original sin that could never be wiped clean. As Eminem said on a retaliatory mix-tape: “Oh sorry, yo, so so sorry, whoa/ But that was a long time ago/ When I was a Joe Schmo/ Rapping in Joe Blow’s basement/ I apologised for it before, so/ Either accept it or you don’t/ And let’s move on/ If I ain’t shown you that I’ve grown/ You can get the bone/ … Word on my daughter, I told ya/ That I love this culture/ Don’t let ‘em insult ya/ I’ma tell you once more again/ This is the environment I was brought up in.”

  It was as dignified a response as his original apology, suggesting a man too comfortable in himself today to be over-worried by the attack. When The Source‘s special issue hit the stands in January, its headline – “EMINEM: CLEANING OUT WHITE AMERICA’S CLOSET – THE HIP-HOP COMMUNITY RESPONDS TO MARSHALL’S MADNESS” – and a feature comparing him to Nixon because “both were undone by recordings that were never intended to be heard” were too overblown to convince. The links between Eminem and corporate and racist ills in hip-hop which the magazine tried to force home were just too tenuous, making them seem a smokescreen for Benzino’s vendetta. The blatant double-standard in vilifying him for once saying “black bitch”, when misogynist language belittling black and white women (as well as the now malleable word “nigga”) was so thoughtlessly rife in rap, was also inadequately addressed.

  Interscope, no doubt fearing how bad the exposé might be, put Eminem on the cover of rival hip-hop magazine XXL with an interview anyway (headline: “EMINEM: IS THE BEST RAPPER ALIVE A RACIST?”). For the affair to really be the Watergate The Source so desperately wanted, though, the tape would have to have been the smirking, secret thoughts of Eminem now, not the ramblings of the spotty, unformed Marshall Mathers. The date of the recording therefore became a key issue, with The Source producing evidence from the MCA corporation that the tape in its possession had not entered production until 1993, when Marshall was 21 – the age of adult responsibility. Eminem, never at his most reliable when it came to his age and past, maintained it was from 1988, when he was 16. It hardly mattered in the end.

  The most fascinating aspect of the affair, perhaps, was the investigation the magazine conducted, almost incidentally, into previously buried aspects of Marshall’s life in those long gone days. It dragged us back to his Ground Zero, once more. And it found a forgotten story.

  It showed us Marshall at 16, the year after he met his black future partner Proof, and the year he was booed off by black audiences at Detroit’s Rhythm Kitchen. But this Marshall had white rapping partners, too. This Marshall lived in Warren’s white suburb, the side of his life he had always blurred. There, from 1988 to 1993, he was a member of Bassmint Productions, with another MC, Chaos Kid, and two producing brothers, DJ Buttafingaz and Manix. Photos of them in 1991 showed four goofy, badly dressed white kids, clowning for the camera. The scrawny, satirically intense Chaos Kid looked like the contender. Marshall, with his finger up his nose, had not yet met Shady.

  “8 Mile was not a documentary of his life,” the adult Chaos Kid told The Source. “Hollywood would have liked to portray him as a white kid in the ghetto – the only white kid, struggling to come up, with no other white people around him when he first started recording. But we were all white. Eminem didn’t even start working with black producers until ‘95.”

  A picture of Chaos Kid shows him looking at the camera with hungry, nervous eyes, writing on pages filled with words. Not an MC now, back then he too must have had Marshall’s dreams. “For a while, I did
influence him,” he remembered. “But I was about Public Enemy and he was Naughty By Nature.”

  Bassmint Productions performed locally and recorded hundreds of freestyles in, naturally, a basement. “It belonged to the only dude in the neighbourhood who had a turntable and a fucking microphone,” Eminem remembered to XXL. “We would skip school, go to his house, make tapes, do songs. The whole recording process then was to sit down and make goofy-ass songs. None of this was wrote – it was all fuckin’ freestyle. We made a million fuckin’ songs.” As to racism, Chaos Kid remembered opting out of a spoof “Racist Rap Hour”. “I know it’s kind of hard for a black person to understand why white people that are in rap music would do this, but it was a joke. It was never meant to be released to the public.”

  In a letter to The Source after the publication of the piece, which he felt misrepresented him and had been written with “ulterior motives”, Chaos Kid further clarified that those tapes were “suckering rhymes”, meant to be as “goofy/stupid/ignorant/wack as possible. Marshall never used derogatory remarks about African-Americans in conversation – in fact, we both had real songs denouncing racism. Marshall Mathers is not a racist. Although the songs were in bad taste, they were not intended to be taken seriously or even heard.”