“I think Eminem truly is rebellious,” Sia Michel says, “He really does do exactly what he wants to do and for the most part says what he wants to say, as long as it is not racially insensitive. But you can use antifemale feelings as a cheap form of rebellion and, if anything, that’s the conflict some women have, though mainstream culture is so misogynistic that the only way to avoid it would be to live completely apart from it. I think that is why some women are fine with it, but also because they grant Eminem a distance from his lyrics. Most people have violent fantasies or anger directed toward the opposite sex. They see him using them and shaping a story as a narrator, apart from the actual person. The era of women universally disliking anyone who says something that seems antifemale is very much early-nineties identity politics-driven. I don’t see that very much anymore. I’m not saying it’s better this way, it’s just generally the tenor of the times right now. Misogyny in lyrics was written about until it got boring. It doesn’t mean it’s not an issue anymore. In the same way, the racial diversity of bands used to be mentioned in a very positive way, how they were ‘multicultural.’ Now it’s just an accepted norm: D12 has a white guy, and Linkin Park has a Japanese-American rapper, and the best rock guitar player is Tom Morello [Rage Against the Machine], a black guy.”
“What a terrible time to be a young woman,” says critic Sasha Frere-Jones. “Who would you possibly look up to? Who would you possibly be inspired by? I want the female Eminem. We need the kind of woman who can create that kind of excitement.”
It is impossible not to see Eminem and his views, as well as the manner in which they are expressed, as the product of a single-parent, matriarchal home. If the antifeminist backlash is the result of men asserting their power, among them are a significant number of young men who probably spent their childhood answering to their mothers, the only obstacle to the top of the power pyramid. If society, particularly the hip-hop circles that Eminem aspired to, espoused a macho-male hierarchy, Eminem’s stormy days with his mother and his struggle for financial independence took on epic proportions to him, the very real depth of which can be heard in the music. In his most trying times, Eminem was emasculated by society, the hip-hop community that did not support him, his mother’s inconsistent behavior, the contempt of his girlfriend’s family, and his own self-loathing for being unable to properly provide for his daughter. The rage and tension in great Eminem songs such as “The Way I Am” or “Lose Yourself” or “8 Mile” are a palpable clench and release, a siphon to the frustration and ache of those days. “If I hadn’t’ve made it in rap,” he says, “I’d’ve worked at Gilbert’s Lodge. Probably gone postal at Gilbert’s Lodge.” Though Eminem was unlike many of the white kids he grew up around, in many ways he was just like them; a product of an unhealthy single-parent home, and a young man who became a parent too young.
Eminem’s history with Kim and his mother reads like a Sigmund Freud parable. Eminem is the son of a willful, perhaps delusional mother and he married a willful, possibly deceitful woman. He fights with both and makes his revenge a reality—in song and in fantasies. He has used these women as the inspiration for some of his canon’s most distraught and improperly funny episodes. They are, Kim particularly, the key to understanding Eminem. Like a two-sided muse, Kim brings out his extremes: loyalty and revenge, maturity and primal rage.
Marshall and Kim met when she was thirteen and he was fifteen. They were dating by the time he was sixteen and Kim lived with Marshall and his mother on and off for years, before and after Hailie was born.
“She lied to us from the beginning,” Debbie says. “She moved in with us when she was twelve and said she was fourteen. She used to sleep downstairs on a couch and told me a few years later she always snuck upstairs to Marshall’s room. She told me just to hurt me. Kim is a very jealous person. She doesn’t want him talking to anybody or to have any friends. And he has a lot of friends, just like me.”
All of the eleven years that Eminem and Kim have been together in some form or another have been tumultuous.
“We’ve just broken up and made up so many times, man,” he said in 1999, before fame made matters worse. “We’ve got issues, issues. It was fucked way before. We just don’t get along.”
“Once me and Eminem and Bizzare all went fishing,” Proof told me that same year. “Then we went to this club 1212 to perform. We come back and Kim’s thrown all of Em’s clothes out, which was about two pairs of pants and some gym shoes. He spent the night at my grandmother’s with me. This is what I love about Em. He’s like, ‘I’m leaving her, I ain’t never going back, fuck it, I’m leaving her.’ Next day, he’s right back with her. The love they got, man, it’s so genuine, it’s ridiculous. He gonna end up marrying her.”
In 1999, he did, in a private ceremony in his mother’s native St. Joseph, Missouri. In July of 2000, when the Anger Management Tour, that summer’s most lucrative outing, came to Detroit’s Auburn Hills arena, Kim was at home with her mother, Kathleen Sluck, who was watching a video with Hailie when she wandered upstairs in search of her daughter. According to an interview Sluck granted People magazine, Kim’s mother discovered her in the bathroom, ready to cut her wrists. Sluck couldn’t restrain her daughter, so she called 9–1–1. According to the article, the tape of the call captures her imploring Kim to put down the razor and Kim’s reply that she doesn’t want to be here anymore. The hospital reported five lacerations requiring stitches. Soon after, the couple began divorce proceedings.
In 2002, while Marshall was linked, both falsely and kinda not so falsely to a variety of film and music talent (Mariah Carey, Brittany Murphy, Kim Basinger, porn star Gina Lynn), Kim became pregnant by another man, Eric Harter, whom she allegedly began dating in 2001.
“She’s due any day,” Eminem told me in April of 2002. “It’s not mine. But Hailie’s going to have a baby sister. It’s going to be tough to deal with, the day she comes to me and says, ‘Why can’t my baby sister come over, Daddy?’ Those are issues I’ve tried to keep her sheltered from. Of course she’s going to find out shit about her mom and me as she goes through life, but I really don’t want her to learn all the fucked-up shit on my shift. I have no idea who the father is, what that is about or anything, I just know she’s due any day.”
A million young men who act, look, and feel like him: Eminem and his phalanx of look-alikes rehearsing for the MTV Video Music Awards on September 6, 2000.
After delivering her second daughter, Whitney, Kim recovered at the house that Eminem bought after their divorce. By early 2003, speculation held that they might remarry.
“Oh, no, no more marriage,” Eminem also said in April 2002. “I would rather fucking be on a coach flight with *NSYNC at the back of the plane—the last row in them seats that don’t go back. I’d rather be stuck there with the bathroom out of order. I would rather have a baby through my penis than get married again. I’m chillin’ on marriage. Girlfriends, maybe here or there. But no more marriage, dog. I don’t ever want to go through what I went through last year again.”
He went through a divorce, a countersuit, a settlement, a battle for joint custody of his daughter, and soon after, an appeal of the child-support settlement, which allowed Kim $142,000 a year. It seemed to be, given her coming child, an appeal with ulterior motives, particularly in light of the fact that Harter is wanted by the city of Detroit on a felony warrant for possession with intent to distribute drugs and several other offenses—jail time would clearly hinder his ability to provide child support. “I can’t say too much about my family for legal reasons and what happens when I say too much,” Eminem says. “But about that, I really can’t say anything. I just try to keep Hailie sheltered from these things.”
Eminem and Kim shared the kind of first love that is etched in high school desks; one that can be as intoxicating and unstable as a crack habit. It is a love-hate bind on par with Eminem and his mother—it makes for tragic, tormented art and great newsprint, and it isn’t a joyride. Little is known of K
im’s point of view outside of what can be gleaned from her actions. She refuses to be interviewed. I met her circumstantially when Eminem’s fame was still a whiff on the air. I doubt she wanted to meet anyone new, especially a writer, late that night on Eminem’s first night home, just a few nights before he would leave again, this time for a performance at MTV’s Spring Break. She was civil, but hardly friendly; her raised guard was a sensate force field.
Kim’s comments in the press, mostly the Detroit press, have been few. She maintains that she and Eminem do not care to live a flamboyant life; that Eminem’s anger toward his mother in song is very real; that since most of his fans are women, they don’t want to know that he’s married; and that nobody “in their right mind would cheat on their millionaire husband—especially with a nobody at a neighborhood bar.”
“Kim is the person I want to know about,” says Sasha Frere Jones. “She is the one I feel bad for. I might do those things if I were Eminem’s wife, if my husband had people chanting ‘Kill Kim.’ My heart goes out to her. I’d like to read her autobiography. It just seems like their whole thing is nothing but bad. And she’s been sacrificed by her husband. It would be one thing if Eminem were married to Jay-Z, then they could do dis records back and forth. But this poor woman doesn’t get to respond. Jesus, do you imagine it’s easy to live with Eminem? What could she possibly have done?”
The few signs there are point to a woman unprepared for the chaos and distance of a famous partner. One side of her portrait is of a regular girl who wants a life and family. “It’s hard for Kim being the only parent,” her mother told People magazine in 2000, “and handling all the [media] outside her house. She can’t even go in the backyard.”
“This is a lady who prefers to wear jeans and gym shoes as opposed to Versace and Armani,” said Kim’s lawyer, Neil Rocking, in the same article. “A small-town girl who wants to be a mom.”
Whatever the reality, Eminem’s relationship with Kim is a recurring theme in his music; his love for her, and his hatred. “If I was her, I woulda ran when I heard some of those songs,” Dr. Dre says. “That shit is out there. She gives him a concept, though, and that’s cool shit, no doubt.” For all the ups and downs that Kim and Marshall Mathers have had—as kids, as young parents, as husband and wife, as litigants in court—one truth remains: Eminem needs the mania of their relationship to create his music, but Marshall, the man, has a place in his heart for Kim that will probably never be filled by another woman. But that, like everything in this man’s life, is anyone’s guess.
“Divorce is probably the hardest thing that I’ve ever worked through,” Eminem says. “I feel like I’m a better person because I went through it, I feel stronger now, but you know, it was hard at first. I’ve known this chick all my life; she’s the first real true girlfriend that I ever had. I grew up with this person, and then they want to leave you. At first you don’t know what to do. I put the blame on everything. I put the blame on myself, I put the blame on the business, my career. I put the blame on everything except—I don’t know if I should say that—I took a lot of the heat for that. I blame myself for a lot of that shit. But, it’s like, as it progressed and I got through it and everything like that, I step back and I look at the whole picture, I realize that it wasn’t my fault and there’s nothing I coulda did. It was inevitable anyways. Which is cool, because me and Kim, we’re on speaking terms, we can communicate, no hard feelings, fuck it. Didn’t work, you know, after eleven years, it ended up not working.”
This troubled relationship did, however, yield the one constant source of joy in Eminem’s life: his daughter. He will truly do anything for Hailie. All he has achieved is for her, the one person who inspired responsibility in an artist who channels excess. For all the antiauthority, hardcore traits in his art, Eminem’s views on parenting are midlevel conservative. When we first met, Eminem was more worried by the fact Hailie had asked to wear makeup than he was by the pressure of his escalating career. He has said repeatedly that he wouldn’t let his seven-year-old listen to his albums and pointed to the necessity of a parental advisory sticker on his albums.
“People don’t know this about me, but in everyday life, being a father, I limit the swear words,” he says. “I don’t cuss around my daughter. If someone else is around and they say the F-word, she’s heard it before; I don’t say, ‘Hey, watch your mouth around my daughter.’ That would be ridiculous. After all, I’m Eminem, Mr. Potty-Mouth King. To me it’s different when it’s in a song because it’s music and it’s entertainment. Hailie hears it, but you can’t avoid that, it’s just part of life—you’re going to hear swear words and you’re going to hear what they mean; it’s up to you if you want to repeat them or not. I’d rather have her do that than running around beating people up.”
When Eminem isn’t on tour—especially in 2001, when he was in Detroit making The Eminem Show and 8 Mile—he spends as much time as possible with his daughter. “When I’m home, I wake her up in the morning, feed her cereal, watch a little TV, take her to school, pick her up,” he says. “We watch a lot of movies—typical shit.” In the Eminem canon, his daughter is the only woman who receives his undying love, the only one to be the object of his devotion.
Eminem is characteristically clear-eyed about the themes of his songs and how his daughter may feel about it. “When I was six years old, music flew by my head, but I caught it if there was a swear word in it,” he says. “Kids nowadays are a lot smarter than we were growing up, but if there’s a song that I have that has a lot of swear words in a row, I make her clean versions and I play those in the car. At the end of the day, I would give my life for my little girl. If there’s something that I believe in my heart is going to affect her, then I won’t say it, that’s where I draw the line. There’s a couple of things I said on The Eminem Show that I ended up spinning back because I didn’t want her to go to school and have people say, ‘Oh, your mom did this.’”
Eminem knows he will have some explaining to do, as surely as he fears Hailie’s teens will bring out the Slim Shady in him. “I’m sure Hailie is going to come to me and ask me about all of it when it’s all said and done,” he says. “I’m sure she’ll come to me, probably when she’s a teenager—which I dread. I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do when she starts dating. I’m gonna kill boys. It’s gonna drive me crazy. It’s the greatest feeling in the world to watch your seed grow, to watch a life that you created look at the world through another set of your eyes. It also hurts to know that one day she’s going to grow up and be out of the house. But that’s what we’re here for, to create more life I guess.”
The white rapper with a story to tell has piqued the interest of sectors of the media and populace that had hitherto ignored this thing called hip-hop. They finally had a reason to learn about it, whether it was to discover how or why or if it was dangerous that this blond white kid was a hardcore rapper, or to better comprehend American youth, most of whom had something to say about Eminem. In 2002, Eminem explained himself and his roots more clearly than he ever had, through two accessible, engaging, masterful pieces of art: 8 Mile and The Eminem Show. Those Americans that hadn’t done so before, listened, and though they hadn’t shown the same courtesy to generations of black rappers, mainstream America wanted to understand Eminem, to relate to him, to take care of him.
America has adopted Eminem like a troubled foster child whose problems could no longer be ignored. An unlikely cross section of Americans also wanted to define themselves in his image, to embrace him, to find similarities between their lives and his, no matter how tenuous. It was more than celebrity-worship, it was the casting of a white, male icon, one who could only become so because the values of the times made his harshest moments acceptable, virtually unnoticeable. He was also acknowledged because he spoke from, to, and about the moral heart of mainstream America. Eminem’s values were not learned through a life on the streets; they were learned as the oldest child of a single mother who was struggling to get by.
“People now understand that this is a pained guy,” says Shelby Steele. “He didn’t have the best, most classic American childhood. And he’s obviously singing about it. America gives people like that a chance. I think at the beginning they thought he was another Vanilla Ice, a kind of fraudulent figure who was stealing the thunder of rap music, who was being really extreme just for its own sake. Now people sense that there’s something more to it, that it has its own authenticity. He won a point there, won a battle. How long he’ll keep going, I don’t know. But people have given him a chance.”
People had given Eminem and, by extension, what he meant to them, a chance. Maybe in Eminem mainstream America sees what their kids could have been. Positive or negative, there is something about Eminem that reflects our culture back at us. To some, it isn’t a pretty picture. “Eminem is a paranoid male personality with a sense of aggrievement that is out of proportion to reality, which is then projected through his music so that millions of people sign on to the paranoia,” says Richard Goldstein.
The contradictory values embodied in Eminem’s lyrics meet subtly and uncomfortably, titillating, taunting, and aggravating, sometimes all at once. He explores the depth of his most violent fantasies, lampoons every norm and authority, and in his merciless dissection of his own white American family unit, he exposes conditions common to many. Eminem was shunned and embraced for the same act, meaning that America not only has changed its mind since he arrived on the pop-culture scene, America, too, has changed. He is the voice of a generation who loves no one truly (but his daughter). Maybe that fact alone is the reason why America fell in love with him. As Richard Goldstein says, “You find women picking guys who are like Eminem and getting into relationships with damaged guys. The real character Eminem portrays is very, very damaged. A guy who wants to be at the top of a male pecking order is not going to be able to be intimate with you. Is that what young women need in a guy? Will they find him attractive if he doesn’t act like this? It is a danger for young girls who can’t play with these roles.”
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