Anyone who doesn’t think that media of all kinds affects us is naive. At the same time, anyone who thinks the media directs us is equally naive. In his monthly column, “Terrordome,” on the Public Enemy website, Chuck D addressed the same issue in regard to the negative image of African-Americans presented in the persistently thuggish imagery of mainstream rap videos. “When I was a kid, watching a great football game would send us in the streets afterwards trying to replay what we just saw. Bruce Lee movies had us kids kicking Coke machines in the theater afterwards. A love song made you call your girl. Now, how the hell can a negative image not do the same, especially when that adult stereotype looks so familiar?” Of course, only the truly disenfranchised will make art imitate life, like the fictitious stalker “Stan” on The Marshall Mathers LP. Eminem, of course, said it all in his song, “Role Model,” from The Slim Shady LP, warning the world not to follow Shady’s lead. But he’s also told the world that there are a million kids who act, dress, and feel just like him—and there are. His avowal of all things he is and is not is the stance of a deft battle MC, making him untouchable. He leaves it to everyone else to make what they will of him.
“Eminem is a cultural phenomenon,” says Shelby Steele. “That’s why we like him. So much of rap is cover-up, cover up all that pain, and here’s a guy—he’s sort of marching through it. It’s very much, in a larger sense, like the blues. The blues are when the singer fingers the jagged grain of his worst pain. The singer came home and the house was completely empty. So he makes a kind of clown of himself, and you identify with him. And looking at the pain, there’s a certain transcendence. He’s a compelling figure. The vulgarity and the homophobia and the sexism and so forth, I see those in a context of his life. In black culture, and he was very close to that, there was a lot of homophobia. With a mother like that, you might be a little sexist. Shrinks would say he’s working something out there.”
Conclusion
watch me, ’cause you thinkin’ you got me in the hot seat from a sinner to a saint
I decided to write this book because of a dinner I had in Connecticut three summers ago (2000). We sat outside, on the porch, not many of us. I was the stranger among two families who shared a long history. One of the critics interviewed in this book was there, and as the night grew later, we occupied an end of the table and spoke furiously about music, agreeing to interrupt Van Morrison’s stately tenor to play “Stan” for the others, who were predominantly unversed in hip-hop and Eminem, outside of knowing his infamy. They needed to hear it.
Listening to the song, twice, with them, sitting in the near dark, I watched the curious, engaged, rapt faces, taking in this night’s campfire folk tale, though differently than they enjoyed the troubadours in their record collections. Eminem’s literary storytelling impressed me anew; it was universal enough to capture the interest of a very discerning, musically savvy test group of the populus. I saw the future that night, a microcosm of the generation gap that Eminem would soon hop.
I did not foresee the degree of admiration from unlikely sources awaiting Eminem in 2003. As 8 Mile fever infected the country, a motley crew of new fans gathered around Eminem, singing his praises from the Today show to TRL. Daniel Day-Lewis reported that he blasted Eminem in his trailer to rev himself up for his scenes in Gangs of New York, and even Queen Barbra Streisand “saw herself” in Eminem, one of the many hip-hop-illiterate adults who found hope and heroism amid the remains of the American dream in Eminem’s film debut. Eminem’s new audience became the focus of his story, as he once again uncannily predicted in the art and music of his albums. The new fans related to the elements of Eminem that suited them and held him up as their own multipurpose emblem. I was amazed again at what I’d already admired: Eminem’s well-crafted vision, devotion to his work, and a talent that communicates emotion as only true artists can. In 2003, Eminem outdid Slim Shady, transcending his own celebrated bad reputation and succeeding without his trademark avenger. As Eminem he achieved the ultimate revenge and validation; he truly had, as he claimed in “Without Me,” everyone kissing his ass.
“Now people have begun to see what they couldn’t see before, which is a complicated character,” Dave Marsh says. “How he pulled that one off is the measure of what a great artist he is, and he truly is a great artist. He was able to take himself from a position where he was totally despised by everybody and flipped it, hard. To me, it’s just, ‘wow.’ I don’t know what it does to him. Obviously he has some of the issues worked out better in the script than he has in real life.”
As I began to speak to people about this book, casually and during the interviews, I heard an array of opinions on every level, from the microscopic view of the psychological issues and rhythmic meter at play in the music, to the macrofocus of Eminem’s effect on the near future, when a new generation grows into young adults. Whatever the opinion, there always was one; no one I spoke with was indifferent to Eminem. Neither were any of the strangers I eavesdropped upon. Everywhere I went at the end of 2002, I found it was only a matter of time before I heard someone discussing him.
For my own part, I found myself thinking, writing, and talking more about American society than I was Eminem, and the thematic segues were natural. He was a symbol to that representative American cross section that was holding him so high in 2003; but he was a mirror, too, one I wasn’t sure all of his new fans had peered into.
“There’s a certain sophistication involved with Eminem, because he is literary in a certain way,” Shelby Steele says. “Even his imagery is, in this self-report, the openness of his life with him as a character, there is vulnerability. There’s self-examination, and boy that has a lot more power than the tough-guy thing. He has the bravery of the real artist to put himself out there. That’s the secret that’s distinguished him from the others.”
America likes a hero, and in 8 Mile, Eminem fit the bill. It mattered as little that he was playing a character in the film as it did when he offended so many playing a character on his records—fiction and reality, entertainment and real life, it seems, are almost interchangeable. When I told Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, about the kind of book I intended to write, he said that he expected someone to do so now that Eminem’s public image had changed and his fan base had expanded. The time was certainly now, for the reason of new mass Eminem awareness, as much as the issues Eminem brings to light.
“The thing about Eminem, whether it’s real or not, that people have bought into is his life,” says writer Soren Baker. “I think a lot of people, especially the under-thirty crowd, can identify with not getting along with their mom or being in a single-parent home and trying drugs, maybe not selling them but trying them. And having a problem with their girlfriend or mother of their child but feeling like they love their daughter—everybody can identify, especially the younger people, the people under thirty. That’s something that he’s done that really no other rapper that is as popular as he is has done. He’s made his life the entertainment like the title The Eminem Show would suggest, but he’s also made his life matter to people.”
Eminem embodies the mind-set of our current America in so many ways, from the nearly invisible boundary between his art and his life to the nuances of his character to the elements of our culture that he brings together as much as those he drives apart. Eminem is an artist of contradiction: doting father, gun-toting probationer, innovative performer, anti-celebrity celebrity, potty-mouthed rapper, conscientious producer-CEO in the making, rebel against authority, a good neighbor. He is an oxymoron: the controversial family man. The same attraction of opposites is in his music: undeniably clever humor, base violence, innovative twists of language, disturbing misogyny, singsong refrains, themes of alienation. It should be no wonder then that the mainstream public’s reaction has been a contradiction: complete disapproval, utter praise, talk of censure, votes for an Oscar.
I think this contradiction more than anything is at the heart of America’s love for Eminem. We’re a co
untry heading toward a greater division between rich and poor, where race politics are unpopular and racial identity is as mutable and multifaceted as the stew of cultural influences informing popular music. We are a country in which youth culture is consumed by parents, adolescence extends into adulthood, and upper-middle-class kids speak the slang of the inner cities. Alienation cuts across all sets of our society, and hip-hop speaks to kids of all ages and circumstances. Whether this is the dawn of the kind of understanding and unity that can change the fabric of society or an extension of post-9/11 nationalism is not yet clear, but America desperately wants to celebrate our commonalities, disallow our differences, and move forward.
“So much stuff is getting dragged into this phenomenon surrounding Eminem,” says Sasha Frere-Jones. “You have to step way back and remove him, even take him out of it. Obviously, this is a huge moment for race relations, but it’s kind of hard to see how. I also think that everyone who feels like they’re losing their edge, like a lot of the older people who are into Eminem, think it is their one surefire way to not be wack.”
It certainly is a moment for race relations; and there, too, Eminem represents a unification that may also cause division—a troubling contradiction. He is an unassailable talent and an anomaly, the one white rapper who both got it right and did it his way; the first to eclipse or equal all of the MCs of his day. Eminem is, like Tiger Woods and Venus and Serena Williams, a brilliant, gifted exception who is making history. His wit, rhyme style, and lyrical skill are a contribution to hip-hop culture, a cinematic, narrative voice in that canon. But unlike Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters, three minority players in games that have traditionally been dominated by whites, Eminem is a white person who is dominating a traditionally black game and garnering praise from those who most likely wouldn’t want to hear the same from a black man. Though he’s clearly no friend to the system and has lived and identified with a life more black than white, Eminem’s achievement is a bittersweet victory to some. Whereas Woods and the Williams sisters represent a rebel victory, a toppling of the traditional power structure, and a reversal of race roles, Eminem represents a reversal of race roles and a toppling of one of the only visible power structures (along with professional sports) that is dominated by black men, at a time when more black men than anyone else are in prison. Ours is an era in which racial-identity politics have fallen out of favor, while most of the social conditions that birthed those issues remain. Eminem’s gifts as a rapper, his album sales, the critical praise he’s received, and his portrayal of the hip-hop world in 8 Mile inspire mixed feelings, begrudging acceptance, and anxiety about his influence on the culture among some black hip-hop fans. Celebrating Eminem, for some, is not simple. Perhaps it is for this reason that only four of the sixteen African-American critics, academics, and artists whom I approached for interviews for this book agreed to talk to me. Many did not respond at all to requests made over a period of months. Others enthusiastically consented to the interview but did not respond to any further and persistent efforts to arrange it. “That’s not surprising,” says Farai Chideya. “I think that black people who consistently write about this stuff get tired of nobody listening to them, because mainstream audiences don’t read it. There is this tendency to only value the voice of the white critic, no matter what the situation. I’m happy to talk because I’m just one person and I’m not speaking for black America; I’m speaking for myself.”
One thing is certain: Eminem is going to be willfully unavailable for a while, in light of his banner year, 2003. He’ll be sorting out, in his way, what Eminem means. He is beloved by the mainstream, but Eminem has made it clear already that he has no desire to join it any more than he has; and by all indications, no one minds. He turned down the opportunity to perform at America’s most coveted mainstream gathering, the Academy Awards. He did not attend, yet he won Best Original Song from a soundtrack for “Lose Yourself”; the statuette was picked up by Luis Resto, his keyboard player and musical collaborator. Eminem similarly declined a performance slot and ticket to the American Music Awards. He won four awards that night, all accepted by Mekhi Phifer, his costar in 8 Mile, who at one point showed the audience his cell phone, said Eminem was on it, and thanked them for him.
A retreat is in order for Eminem, whose sense of timing and image management are nothing short of exceptional. He will not be taking a vacation; his year is already full of production work for D12 and Obie Trice, whose projects are the next two albums slated for his label, Shady Records. Eminem hasn’t had more than a few days off in four years; his downtime before his latest record, The Eminem Show, was spent in court and making 8 Mile. “I haven’t had any long breaks or solid rest really since this started,” Eminem says. “When I do get a few days, sometimes I take the family up north, like my aunt and uncle and Hailie. There’s cottages and stuff that we rent, but what happens is that I’ll start writing and I can’t control the thoughts, so even when I’m not writing I’m working.”
Eminem lives in the world he dreamed of, the one he threatened to create when he gave up on fitting in back in Detroit, when he birthed Slim Shady. He is a producer, one of the top rappers making music, the head of a record label, a burgeoning actor, and the owner of a clothing line. He is a perfectionist, as critical of himself as the hip-hop purists waiting for him to make a mistake.
“He’s got to be under so much pressure now,” says photographer Jonathan Mannion, who has shot Eminem for his last two album covers. “He’s got more responsibility and so many more people interested in him and everything he does at every second of the day. That’s got to wear on you, harden you a bit. You know, the Grammys was the first time that I saw him where he just didn’t even seem like he wanted to be around. It was the first time I didn’t see him, like, trying to hide a smile after winning an award.”
“I’ve always felt, since my first day of rapping, that my time is ticking,” Eminem told me in 2002. “The day that I made it, I felt that my time was ticking. I always feel that my next album could be my last, so I have to give it everything that I’ve got. And that’s how I’ve set the standards for myself and that’s how I’ve based my whole career, that this chance may never happen again. I invest my money, and you know, I treat every dollar like it could be my last, every album like it could be my last, every song like it could be my last. That’s how I make my music.”
When Eminem resurfaces, all eyes will be on him. In his absence, he leaves the legacy he longed for, the days of “wilding out and being violent” reminiscent of N.W.A and 2Pac, that was nonexistent in the hip-hop mainstream of 1999. Hip-hop tastes in 2003 are leaning again toward thug-life stylings not seen in years, indicated by the record-breaking debut sales (1.5 million copies in a week and a half) and utter industry dominance of Eminem and Dr. Dre’s Shady Records artist, 50 Cent. Inter-artist conflicts are starting up again, as are incidents of violence, from the tragic death of Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C to drive-by shootings at the offices of Violator Management (who handle 50 Cent and Busta Rhymes among others), Murder Inc. (Ja Rule), and one that nearly injured Snoop Dogg in April 2003. 50 Cent is the ultimate thug, but others are coming, such as Freeway, a rough-hewn Philadelphia rapper who is signed to Jay-Z’s Roc-a-Fella Records.
See what you see: Eminem in 1999.
Even if American entertainment and morals take a turn for the puritanical, Eminem, by revealing his humanity and sharing his life, has been accepted by those he lived to bait. He may choose to lose his new fans by extreme acts of impropriety, but given the content that’s already been presented, he will be hard-pressed to top himself. “He might be such a genius, though, that he is one of those people like Madonna, who have their shit so worked out and are so strong that he could become basically institutionalized in mass culture and still be transgressive and powerful enough that he will still be interesting,” Sasha Frere-Jones says. “He probably isn’t going to be like Bob Dylan, have a motorcycle accident and decide he wants to do thrash, or become Chr
istian, which I think could be totally interesting.”
A listen to the singles Eminem has recorded or rapped on between his studio albums provides some clues to the stylistic changes he is pursuing. Judging by the Benzino response tracks that Eminem recorded at the end of 2002 and his verse on “Go to Sleep” performed with DMX and Obie Trice for the Cradle 2 the Grave soundtrack, Eminem may continue the hardcore style of songs such as “Till I Collapse” and “Soldier” from The Eminem Show or “The Way I Am” from The Marshall Mathers LP. If so, gone will be the characteristic humor, perhaps for good, leaving only the limits of Eminem’s intensity.
Whether Eminem will deliver another episode of his life for us to devour, inhabited by Kim Scott, his mother, those who oppose him, or the light of his life Hailie, is unclear. It is improbable that Eminem’s private and public life will simultaneously reach the feverish peak of 2001, though the Brady/Shady Bunch conditions of Eminem’s new home life could prove to be interesting fodder. An older Eminem may begin to look outward and comment on society at large more than he has in the past. A political Eminem, as moments of “Square Dance” from The Eminem Show indicate, would really be something. One thing Eminem has made clear is that when he has nothing left to say, he will put down the mike.
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