The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  When I saw you playing with [his daughter] Hailie back in February, you were so respectful. A lot of people talk down to little kids, but you talk to her like she’s intelligent.

  Thank you for seeing that. I just want her and my immediate family—my daughter, my niece and my little brother—to have things I didn’t have: love and material things. But I can’t just buy them things. I have to be there. That’s a cop-out if I just popped up once in a while, didn’t have custody of my daughter and my niece.

  Do you have full custody?

  I have full custody of my niece and joint custody of Hailie. It’s no secret what’s been going on over the past year with my ex-wife [Kim]. I wouldn’t down-talk her, but with her being on the run from the cops I really had no choice but to just step up to the plate. I was always there for Hailie, and my niece has been a part of my life ever since she was born. Me and Kim pretty much had her, she’d live with us wherever we was at.

  And your little brother lives with you.

  I’ve seen my little brother bounce around a lot from foster home to foster home. My little brother was taken away by the state when he was eight, nine.

  You were how old?

  I was twenty-three. But when he was taken away I always said if I ever get in a position to take him, I would take him. I tried to apply for full custody when I was twenty, but I didn’t have the means. I couldn’t support him. I watched him when he was in the foster home. He was so confused. I mean, I cried just goin’ to see him at the foster home. The day he was taken away I was the only one allowed to see him. They had come and got him out of school. He didn’t know what the fuck was goin’ on. The same thing that had happened in my life was happening in his. I had a job and a car, and me and Kim, we bounced around from house to house, tryin’ to pay rent and make ends meet. And then Kim’s niece was born, which is my niece now through marriage. Watched her bounce around from house to house—just watchin’ the cycle of dysfunction, it was like, “Man, if I get in position, I’m gonna stop all this shit.” And I got in position and did.

  So you have joint custody of Hailie, but she lives with you and spends most of her time with you and not with Kim.

  I don’t know if I’m inclined, or allowed, to say more than what is fact. In the last year, Kim has been in and out of jail and on house arrest, cut her tether off, had been on the run from the cops for quite a while. Tryin’ to explain that to my niece and my daughter was one of the hardest things I ever had to go through. You can never let a child feel like it’s her fault for what’s goin’ on. You just gotta let her know: “Mom has a problem, she’s sick, and it’s not because she doesn’t love you. She loves you, but she’s sick right now, and until she gets better, you’ve got Daddy. And I’m here.”

  There are two songs about Kim on ‘Encore.’ In “Puke,” you hate her so much she makes you want to vomit. Then in “Crazy in Love,” you’re like, “I hate you, yet I can’t live without you.”

  It’s a love-hate relationship, and it will always be that. We’re talking about a woman who’s been a part of my life since I can remember. She was thirteen when I met her. I was fifteen.

  What was it like the first time you saw her?

  I met her the day she got out of the youth home. I was at a friend’s house, and his sister was friends with her, but she hadn’t seen Kim in a while ’cause she was in the youth home. And I’m standing on the table with my shirt off, on top of their coffee table with a Kangol on, mocking the words to LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad.” And I turn around and she’s at the door. Her friend hands her a cigarette. She’s thirteen, she’s taller than me, and she didn’t look that young. She easily coulda been mistaken for sixteen, seventeen. I said to my friend’s sister, “Yo, who was that? She’s kinda hot.” And the saga began. Now there’s the constant struggle of “will I ever meet somebody else that’s gonna be real with me, as real as I can say she’s been with me?”

  You get deep into your feelings about President Bush and Iraq on ‘Mosh.’ Do you think the war in Iraq was a mistake?

  He’s been painted to be this hero, and he’s got our troops over there dying for no reason. I haven’t heard an explanation yet that I can understand. Explain to us why we have troops over there dying.

  There is no good answer.

  I think he started a mess. America is the best country there is, the best country to live in. But he’s fuckin’ that up and could run our country into the ground. He jumped the gun, and he fucked up so bad he doesn’t know what to do right now. He’s in a tailspin, running around like a dog chasing its tail. And we got young people over there dyin’, kids in their teens, early twenties, who should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam II. Bin Laden attacked us and we attacked Saddam. We ain’t heard from Saddam for ten years, but we go attack Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers.

  Are you voting?

  I’m supposed to hand my absentee ballot in today. I’m going for Kerry, man. I got a chance to watch one of the debates and a piece of another one. He was making Bush look stupid, but anybody can make Bush look stupid. I’m not 100 million percent on Kerry. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I hope he’s true to his word, especially about his plan to pull the troops out. I hope we can get Bush out of there, and I hope Mosh wasn’t too little, too late. That can sway some of the voters or open people’s minds and eyes up to see this dude. I don’t wanna see my little brother get drafted. He just turned eighteen. I don’t want to see him get drafted and lose his life. People think their votes don’t count, but people need to get out and vote. Every motherfuckin’ vote counts.

  There’s a song on ‘Encore’ called “Like Toy Soldiers” where you get into issues around the battles you’ve had recently. It made me think about how you’re a battle rapper who came up in an era where battling was pure, and now it’s like, “Damn, if I really go too hard, somebody might get shot.”

  Someone might die.

  It’s gotta be ill to not be able to just battle out like you want to. Battling has been such a great part of hip-hop history.

  It’s sad. But I’m not gonna sit back and watch my people be hurt. It’s like a Bush thing: You’re just sending your troops off to war and you ain’t in it. You’re fuckin’ playing golf and you sent your soldiers over to get killed. As you get older, you start to think that if you’re just beefin’ to be beefin’ or tryin’ to sell records, that’s not the way to go. Because what usually ends up happening is somebody’s entourage gets hurt. And it’s not worth it. Battling always started out like a mind game: who could psych who out, who could look the scariest. Then it became people saying, “This is my life you’re fucking with. This is everything I stand for, this is my career. If my career is gone tomorrow, then my life is gone tomorrow.” That’s how people end up losing lives.

  Last year, ‘The Source’ uncovered a tape that you made when you were sixteen where you said “nigger.” What was that about?

  This is what we used to do. I’d go in my man’s basement and do goofy freestyles, and we’d call ’em sucker rhymes, and the whole point of the rap was to be as wack as possible and warm up before we actually did songs that we wrote. And that ended up just happening to be the topic that day. I just broke up with a black girl, and the rest of the story I address on the album. I’ve got a song called “Yellow Brick Road,” and it basically explains the whole story from beginning to end, how the tape derived.

  When it came out, were you pissed?

  I was angry at myself. I couldn’t believe that I said it. The tone that I’m using, you can almost tell that I’m joking, but the words are coming out of my mouth. If there was never no Eminem, it wouldn’t be so shocking, but given who I am and what I stand for today, then what else could be Eminem’s Achilles’ heel?

  In our generation the word “nigga” is used by black and white kids as an expression of love, but even now you won’t say it.

  Yeah, it’s just a word I don’t feel comfortable with. I
t wouldn’t sound right coming out of my mouth.

  Do you see a similarity between “nigger” and “faggot”? Aren’t they the same?

  I’ve never really seen it that way. Growing up, the word “faggot” was thrown around. The two words were thrown around, they were always thrown around. But growing up, when you said “faggot” to somebody it didn’t necessarily mean they were gay. It was in the sense of “You fuckin’ dick.”

  But you don’t see these two words doing the same thing?

  I guess it depends on if you’re using it in a derogatory way. Like, if you’re using the word “faggot” like I just said, in the way of calling them a name, that’s different than a racial slur to me. Some people may feel different. Some white kids feel comfortable throwing the word around all day. I don’t. I’m not saying I’ve never said the word in my entire life. But now, I just don’t say it in casual conversation. It doesn’t feel right to come out of my mouth.

  Let’s talk about your process as a writer. How do you come up with hooks?

  I think the beat should talk to you and tell you what the hook is. The hook for “Just Lose It” I probably wrote in about thirty seconds as soon as the beat came on. It was the last record we made for the album. We didn’t feel like we had the single yet. That was a song that doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just what the beat was telling me to do. Beats run through my head—and rhymes and lyrics and wordplay and catchphrases. When you’re a rapper, rhymes are just gonna come at you. Those words are usually inside that beat, and you gotta find them.

  Have you ever tried the Jay-Z method of not writing the rhymes out, just coming up with them in your head?

  Yeah, I’ve done that. If you’ve ever seen my rhyme pads, my shit is all over the paper, because it’s a lot of random thoughts. But a lot of times I’ll be short a couple of bars, and I’ll have a couple of lines wrote down and then I just go in the booth and try shit, and see what I’ll say. I’ll lose my space on the paper and just start blurting out, and it’ll just come out. Music for me is an addiction. If I don’t make music I feel like shit. If I don’t spend enough time at home with my kids I feel like shit. Music is my outlet, my kids are my life, so there’s a balance in my life right now that couldn’t be better.

  So you were a teenager when you first heard the Beastie Boys, and they allowed you to feel like, “Oh, I could be part of hip-hop.” 3rd Bass probably gave you more of that sense.

  Yeah, but then along came the X-Clan. I loved the X-Clan’s first album [To the East, Blackwards, 1990]. Brother J was an MC that I was afraid of lyrically. His delivery was so confident. But he also made me feel like an outcast. Callin’ us polar bears. Even as militant as Public Enemy were, they never made me feel like, “You’re white, you cannot do this rap, this is our music.” The X-Clan kinda made you feel like that, talking [on Grand Verbalizer, What Time Is It?] about “How could polar bears swing on vines of the gorillas?” It was a slap in the face. It was like, you’re loving and supporting the music, you’re buying the artist and supporting the artist, you love it and live it and breathe it, then who’s to say that you can’t do it? If you’re good at it and you wanna do it, then why are you allowed to buy the records but not allowed to do the music? That was the pro-black era—and there was that sense of pride where it was like, if you weren’t black, you shouldn’t listen to hip-hop, you shouldn’t touch the mike. And we used to wear the black and green.

  You wore an Africa medallion?

  Me and a couple of my other white friends. And we would go to the mall.

  Whoa.

  I remember I had the Flavor Flav clock. The clock was so big and ridiculous, it was the perfect Flavor Flav clock. It was fuckin’ huge. And me and my boy are in matching Nike suits and our hair in high-top fades, and we went to the mall and got laughed at so bad. And kinda got rushed out the mall. I remember this dude jumpin’ in front of my boy’s face and bein’ like, “Yeah, boyyyeee! What you know about hip-hop, white boyyyeee!”

  You must’ve had drama with the Africa medallion.

  I’d be tryin’ to explain to my black friends who didn’t really feel like I should be wearin’ it, like, “Look, I love this culture, I’m down with this.” But you’re a kid, so you’re not really sure of anything, you haven’t really experienced life yet, so you don’t really know how to explain yourself to the fullest. You’re tryin’ to find your own identity and you’re stuck in that whole thing of, who am I as a person? Walkin’ through the suburbs and I’m getting called the N-word, and walkin’ through Detroit I’m getting jumped for being white. And goin’ through that identity crisis of, “Am I really not meant to touch the mike? Is this really not meant for me?”

  And all this is inside you as you’re coming up as a white rapper trying to enter this black culture.

  Even growing up as a kid, being the new kid in school and getting bullied, getting jumped. Kids are fucked up, kids are mean to other kids. School is a tough thing to go through. Anybody will tell you that. I didn’t really learn how to fight back till seventeen, eighteen. I reached my peak around nineteen, where people would call me and say, “Yo, I got beef with such and such—can you come help me out?” They knew I’d fight. I had a friend named Goofy Gary. He’d call me and say, “Yo, I just got jumped up at Burger King.” And I’d say, “All right, Proof, we gotta go fight for Goofy Gary. Let’s get in the car. C’mon.” Then I found myself being the aggressor, which was a little strange from the few years prior to that being the loner kid who didn’t fuck with nobody, wasn’t lookin’ for trouble.

  Used to be Eminem was in the police blotter from time to time, but since that case you’ve made a conscious change.

  Yeah. When I got off probation I remember sayin’ to myself, “I’m never fuckin’ up again. I’m-a learn to turn the other cheek.” I took on boxing just to get the stress out. Plus I chilled out a lot as far as the drinking and the drugs and all that stuff. Just chillin’ out on that made me see things a lot clearer and learn to rationalize a lot more. Sobering up, becoming an adult and trying to just become a businessman. Not sayin’ that I don’t still got it in me. Not sayin’ I’m not still down for mine. But things changed.

  What I want to do is make records, get respect, have fun, enjoy life and see my daughter grow up. I don’t feel like I portray myself as a gangster; I feel like I portray myself as somebody who won’t be bullied or punked. If I feel like I’m being attacked and somebody comes at me sideways with something I didn’t start, then that’s a different story. But I just try to do what I do, get respect, and that’s it. If I can make people laugh and spark some controversy, good. It is entertainment.

  BONO

  by Jann S. Wenner

  November 3, 2005

  What was your childhood in Dublin like?

  I grew up in what you would call a lower-middle-class neighborhood. You don’t have the equivalent in America. Upper-working-class? But a nice street and good people. And, yet, if I’m honest, a sense that violence was around the corner.

  Home was a pretty regular three-bedroom house. The third bedroom, about the size of a cupboard, they called the “box room”—which was my room. Mother departed the household early; died at the graveside of her own father. So I lost my grandfather and my mother in a few days, and then it became a house of men. And three, it turns out, quite macho men—and all that goes with that. The aggression thing is something I’m still working at. That level of aggression, both outside and inside, is not normal or appropriate.

  You’re this bright, struggling teenager, and you’re in this place that looks like it has very few possibilities for you. The general attitude toward you from your father—and just the Irish attitude—was “Who the fuck do you think you are? Get real.” Is that correct?

  Bob Hewson—my father—comes from the inner city of Dublin. A real Dublin man but loves the opera. Must be a little grandiose himself, okay? He is an autodidact, conversant in Shakespeare. His passion is music—he’s a great tenor. The great
sadness of his life was that he didn’t learn the piano. Oddly enough, kid’s not really encouraged to have big ideas, musically or otherwise. To dream was to be disappointed. Which, of course, explains my megalomania.

  I was a bright kid, all right, early on. Then, in my teenage years, I went through a sort of awkward phase of thinking I was stupid. My schoolwork goes to shit; I can’t concentrate. I started to believe the world outside. Music was my revenge on that.