“You have to ask yourself how hungry you are,” Paul Rosenberg says, sliding into the next booth with a tray of dubious snacks. I see marbleized pizza in a triangular paper dish and a basket of amorphous breaded blobs.
“What is that shit?” Eminem asks.
“They’re calling it fried chicken,” Paul says.
“Nah, I can’t fuck with that.”
Behind him, three girls in a pack try to determine if Eminem is Eminem. He doesn’t notice.
“So, like, I was telling you about JLB, the radio station in Detroit,” he says. “I dissed them on the record because when I was coming up, those motherfuckers showed me no love. They had two local favorite rappers. One was the cousin/niece of the program director and shit. They got airplay for, like, three years and never fucking got a record deal or nothing. I got friends who work at the station and one of them told me when I had Infinite out that one of the DJs played it and Frankie Darcell, the program director, when he found out I was white said, ‘We ain’t playing this record, what the fuck is a white person doing with this.’ And that was it—he took my record off. Believe me, I had my boys begging to get it played. I ain’t just mad at them for that. There were so many dope MCs when I was coming up and they would never fucking play them. Their saying is ‘Where hip-hop lives.’ I told them in the Detroit papers: If JLB is playing my song now, fuck them. As soon as I get home, I’m telling the motherfuckers to take my shit off the air. I don’t want them to play it. Fuck those fuckin’ ragged-ass fucks. No help from them at all, motherfuckers.”
That was then: Eminem when he was M&M, peforming on the Detroit talent show circuit in 1996.
Eminem stretches out sideways in the booth, with his legs on the bench. Last night, he won over a doubtful black crowd; fended off a rabid, mostly white one; and today is heading to his racially divided hometown, which has an underground that knows him and a mainstream that didn’t want to.
“Man,” he says, looking sidelong at me, “the respect level I get now, I never got before. I couldn’t play at or even get into a club like the one last night just being Eminem before all this shit with my video being out. It’s fucking bananas. It’s some scary shit because you can fall just as quick as you get to the top.”
A black food-court employee walks by our booth to pick up two trays from the top of the closest garbage can. He eyeballs us on his way back to the kitchen and returns a minute later.
“Uh, what’s up?” he says.
Eminem turns to look. “Nothing man, how you doin’?” he says.
“Um, are you …? Uh, I was just wondering …”
“Eminem?”
“Yeah! What’s up nigga! Yo, your shit’s tight, yo. All about the mushrooms and shit!”
Eminem sits up and laughs in short snare-drum blasts, “Ha-ha.”
“Hey, can you sign this?” the guy asks, holding out a paper plate. “It’s to George Ito and Wah, that’s W-A-H.”
Above his signature, Eminem writes “Do you like violence?”
The group of teen girls are convinced now; they’re in conference to choose a plan of action. Another uniformed employee walks over.
“Can I get a signature, too?” he says.
“No problem, what’s your name?”
“Daniel.”
To show his appreciation, Daniel gives handshakes and hip-hop half hugs to everyone in the two booths around Shady, almost including a third booth of two men who aren’t with us.
“Man, Paul waking me up this morning was my worst nightmare,” Eminem says. He looks alert enough, but washed out. “Him waking me felt like somebody crushed my back. It was daylight when we left the club. I got two hours’ sleep, if that. Paul, he gets home, he goes into instant snore mode. Paul, your life is over.”
Paul nods from behind Blaze magazine. Beyond him is another autograph-hunter, this one from Pizza Hut, and judging by the piece of pizza she’s biting into, she’s on break.
“I think we’ve been discovered,” Eminem says.
“Which one of you is Slim Shady?” she asks, chewing and looking at us.
“Uh, that would be me,” Eminem says.
“Can I get a signed picture?” she asks.
“I don’t got any pictures,” he says.
“Where you from?”
“Detroit.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Back to Detroit.”
“Will you sign this for me?” she asks, holding out an unused, unfolded slice-to-go box.
“That’s a bugged-out song you made,” she says.
“You should get the album,” he says. “What’s your name?”
She extends her name tag.
“Rashida,” he says.
“What are you writing? Here, will you sign this one for Jimmy?” She holds out another box.
On both, Eminem writes “High, my name is Slim Shady.”
It is time to leave, just in time—the fans and the curious are growing. We pass the three white girls, still huddled near the doorway.
“Are you a singer?” a brown-haired one asks.
“Nah,” Eminem says.
“Slim Shady?” another asks.
“How you doin’?” he says to them, smiling wide. “I should just have cards ready to give out,” he says as an aside to me.
I’m not sure if the variations in race, sex, age, and background of the curious he has met today alone have registered with Eminem. They’ve approached him, mobbed him, sought verification of his identity, or solicited him on this trip in ways he has only seen, perhaps, in his dreams. I think that the encounters I’ve witnessed must be more amazing to me right now than they are to him, not only because I’ve never seen anything quite like this, let alone at such close range, but more because he is too busy living for every second of right now to analyze it. I have a feeling that he wouldn’t notice anyway. The vision of music Eminem is tapped into and the hip-hop creed he believes in doesn’t see differences. It sees only people, and that makes anything possible.
RACE PLAYS INTO EMINEM’S STORY just as it does throughout American history in the post—Civil Rights era. The divide of, the struggle of, and the prevailing opinion on both sides were more clear when patriots such as Martin Luther King Jr. stood up to be counted; now, more subtle differentiations between the races exist, overlapped by subdivisions of class and the practices of the ruling autonomy—our national government and the corporate institutions that run America. Eminem is the product of a white background as well as a black culture, and he was alienated from both groups when he was growing up. He was picked on for “acting black” by white kids in the trailer-park suburbs; he was jumped for simply being a white kid on the streets of the city. In hip-hop, his talent triumphed over stereotype, and as he gained national recognition, the handicap of his color became an asset beyond his estimation. Eminem personifies city and suburb, archetypes of black and white culture, and the common ground where they have met for fifty years: pop music. He also represents the current paradigm of race consciousness in America, whereby skin color is almost of secondary consequence to one’s racial identity, where racial association seems to be more defined by behavior than color.
It cannot be said that Eminem is a white musician poorly imitating black music. He represents a synergy of black and white styles so completely that he destroys convention by transcending it, as only a few artists in pop music have done. In 1956 America, just two years after state legislatures were ordered to end segregated schooling, Elvis Presley brought black music into American homes with “Heartbreak Hotel,” the song that remained number one on the pop charts for eight weeks, and his explosive stage presence stamped the music with an image. Presley was censored on his infamous television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, during which his sexually suggestive swiveling hips were kept out of the camera’s eye. Much has been made of Presley as an American icon, more for the pop-star excess that killed him than his talent, but also regarding the debate whether or not and to what degree
he stole, supported, or assisted black culture for his own gain. The racial implications of Elvis as a pop-culture symbol often overshadow, particularly today, his early musical innovations born of the racial overlap in Southern folk music as well as his talent and charisma. Like Eminem, Presley possessed a deep gift. He had a rich, versatile voice. The fact is that he did not choose to be born white, though he surely benefited from it. Presley’s early era was innovative, combining black and white, country and western, and R&B into the vibrant rockabilly that touched a nation of teenagers while a nation of parents feared the immorality of it all. Elvis wasn’t alone in blending musical styles across racial lines. Chuck Berry, truly the father of rock and roll, developed the style in St. Louis blues clubs by adding a black flavor to white hillbilly music: “Maybellene,” essentially the first rock-and-roll song ever recorded (1955), was Berry’s interpolation of a hillbilly folk tune called “Ida Red.” The true legacy of Elvis Presley seems to be that he made the boundaries between black blues, white pop, and country and western irrelevant.
By the late sixties, rock and roll had become psychedelic folk music, the soundtrack of American dissent. Amid the backdrop of the Vietnam War, there was racially motivated violence following the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act prohibited states from denying black citizens the right to vote, among other injustices. During that time, Sly Stone, a Texas-born Bay Area DJ who sang soul and doo wop, formed Sly and the Family Stone. At the height of the hippie era, the group was an idyllic rainbow coalition, blending psychedelic rock, soul, R&B, and pop without pause. Their members were black and white, men and women; and Sly’s lyrics set a revolutionary precedent of social awareness and commentary, a vision as utopian as it was realistic. Sly and the Family Stone redirected the message of soul, R&B, and funk music forever. Sly Stone, like James Brown, brought hard funk to the mainstream and infused it with an agenda of social commentary followed through in the seventies by Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and countless others. In a tumultuous societal climate, Sly and the Family Stone’s very membership challenged Americans on both sides of the race issue, as well as the lip-service equality laid out by our Constitution. In the late sixties, when the Family Stone’s white players took the stage at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, they were greeted with boos, and although Sly calmed the crowd, a near riot followed the band into the street. When the Family Stone were inadvertently caught in the Detroit riots of 1967, while gassing up their tour van, the black members were held at gunpoint by the National Guard. Sly’s rumored affair with Doris Day, which circulated after he covered her hit “Que Sera, Sera,” as well as his marriage to a white woman in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden crowd in 1974 brought the reality of racial integration to the mainstream in bold strokes.
In the eighties, Prince redefined pop music with his third album, 1980’s Dirty Mind. Playing nearly every instrument himself and recording it in his home studio, the Minneapolis native blended funk and soul with the New Wave and dance-pop styles of the white artists of his day. Prince’s sound dominated the decade: in his own work; the songs he wrote for other artists; covers such as Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U”; and the spectrum of acts, from Madonna to Terence Trent D’Arby, who learned from Prince’s template. Prince also toyed with gender preconception with an overtly sexual, androgynous image and stage gear that ranged from motorcycle jackets to high-heeled boots and skintight lace jumpsuits. Prince as a black man fronting a mostly white band, giving white music a black angle—and enjoying critical acclaim and commercial success—must have affected a young Eminem in the early eighties as much as the Beastie Boys did a few years later.
Elvis, Sly Stone, and Prince, like Eminem, are not your average artists or individuals. They are driven to express in their own terms, in spite of convention; to stand up and be heard apart from the pack. They were unique among the popular music and entertainers of their day, truly gifted innovators with the versatility and vision to challenge and alter perceptions in music—and by extension, society—and to set a new precedent. Artists of this caliber are signposts in American culture, reflections of their times, even if they, as Elvis did once he went Hollywood, change their musical trajectory. They were not the only artists to bring together black and white music the way they did, but each of them possessed the talent and a unique point of view realized enough to inform their image. All of them bore, from the start, performance personas that powerfully communicated the confluence of influences in their music. Elvis was a dreamboat rebel, a white-pop outlaw with the pompadour of black rock and rollers. Sly and the Family Stone were flamboyant, urban hippies, combining the garb and ideals of the middle-class kids who “turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,” with a physical manifestation of what those ideals meant. Prince’s feminized, overtly sexual ladies’-man image was as complex and liberated as his musical scope, turning New Wave black with his racially and sexually mixed backing band.
Eminem is hip-hop’s signpost artist, the one gifted enough to blend black and white musical and cultural elements without compromising the integrity of the music. We are at a time in America in which blacks and whites and all races have culturally met on a wide patch of shared ground, where white rock acts freely appropriate rap and where black artists front an image of capitalism reminiscent of Donald Trump. Eminem stands squarely in the middle: accepted—and debated—by both sides. At the same time, his “meaning” is deeper. His achievement is doubly significant in spite of the cultural overlap of the times, because of the ingrained race identity inherent in hip-hop. In the thirty years of the music’s history, and in spite of a few respectable white MCs, hip-hop remained uniquely black in image until Eminem.
“My feeling about hip-hop was, and I mean this as a white rock critic, ‘oh good, finally something white people can’t steal,’” says Dave Marsh, one of the founding fathers of pop-music criticism, who has written books on Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, among others, including two best-sellers on Bruce Springsteen. “I never wrote that about hip-hop because I didn’t want to sound fake, but I thought it. Beyond whatever the nuances of the music are, which are hard enough to know if you didn’t grow up in that culture, there was the authenticity of race involved. As much as I hate the identity politics of it, it’s very valuable in hip-hop because it puts white people at the disadvantage they need to be at. Eminem has now shown that authenticity has very little to do with what you look like.”
A white man in a black man’s game: Eminem at The Source Awards in Pasadena, California, September 15, 2000.
The threat to this racial identity in hip-hop—the only arena aside from sports in which young black men dominate—will be problematic in the years to come. Eminem’s success, while undisputed in terms of his musical abilities, will surely raise issues of resentment for some black fans and may spark opposition to other white rappers (if any emerge that are on par with Eminem’s song craft) and even to the participation of white hip-hop fans in the culture. It is an understandable, perhaps unavoidable predicament. Eminem is the first white rapper of true skill who is worthy, beyond his commercial success, of a place in the hip-hop hall of fame, alongside the game’s great black lyricists. He has managed to be hardcore, confessional, and humorous in songs with articulated structure. In contrast, most of today’s black MCs revel in a commercially successful formulaic bling-bling or thug aesthetic. Those who complain that because of his color, Eminem is allowed to release rap that black artists could not are generally right. While such statements negate Eminem’s truly gifted way with melody and song construction, focusing instead on his often taboo subject matter, they touch upon the fact that rap has fallen into a rut and that innovation is not rewarded by fans or embraced by the record industry. Then again, tradition also holds that a white rapper should do nothing but suck, so perhaps a change is not far off.
It isn’t Eminem the person or artist whom the artists (for the most part), executives, and pundits of the black hip-hop community oppose; it
is Eminem as a symbol of institutionalized, corporate white domination in a genre reserved for blacks that is hard to accept. In this light, Eminem’s popularity is a product of the white system. Denying that Eminem enjoys greater commercial success and a more diverse fan base because of his color is ridiculous; Eminem himself has made the point repeatedly in song (“Without Me,” “The Way I Am,” “Square Dance”) and in print. His popularity with white fans who don’t usually listen to hip-hop is, it can be argued, ethnocentrism, or the preference toward members of your own group. Ethnocentrism isn’t synonymous with the negative implications of racial prejudice, but isn’t terrifically far from them. While true to the hip-hop art form, Eminem is more accessible to his peers because his stories of white angst don’t pass them by; they’re told in Eminem’s distinctive voice with less slang than most black rap. Holding a white fan’s preference for a white rapper against Eminem is as ridiculous as claiming that he does not sell more records because of his color.
“The thing that still bothers me most about the ascension of Eminem is that we live in a country that is obviously majority white,” says Farai Chideya, journalist, founder of popandpolitics.com, and author of The Color of Our Future. “White people, in general, react better to white people as role models and public figures. And there was a long wait for the great white hope of rap. When he did appear, the problem for me was that he received all this analysis and psychoanalysis that black rappers never got. If you look at somebody like Tupac who now has been given this kind of psychoanalysis posthumously, when he was alive he was a ‘bad boy,’ that’s all people thought of him. There was no effort in the media to deconstuct who he is or where he comes from. But as soon as Marshall Mathers appeared they all said ‘Oh, this troubled white youth. May we lay you down on the couch? What is your problem?’ To me it really highlighted the issue that nobody gave a rat’s ass about why young black men felt like expressing themselves in this way, but as soon as a white guy did it then there was an effort to understand.”
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