Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  praise for whatever you say I am

  The Life and Times of Eminem

  “Bozza avoids a gushy, insider’s love-fest. Instead, he takes advantage of his unique perspective to paint an informative portrait of a conflicted figure whose influence on American culture goes far beyond his own popularity.”

  —USA Today

  “It is time for a thoughtful look at what Eminem’s appeal really signifies, and Bozza does a creditable job.”

  —New York Times

  “A provocative portrait of a young man as reviled as he’s revered … with telling observations concerning what it says about the rest of us when such a divisive figure becomes a pop culture phenomenon.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Bozza details what is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Eminem story: the rapper’s determination to keep a grip on the world as the world got ungripped around him.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Bozza deserves props for sticking to the critical high road. More that anything else, he makes a compelling case that Eminem is the perfect voice of the post-Sept. 11 generation: jaded but vulnerable, damaged and complicated, desperate to be understood.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Bozza makes the case that Eminem is worth thinking—and writing—about.”

  —Boston Herald

  “An engaging book about a new and highly buzzing cultural manifestation.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “Bozza’s unprecedented access to Mathers then and now has given rise to one of the only fully honest accounts of the now brilliant star.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Brilliantly, Bozza tells the tale of an elusive genius in Whatever You Say I Am, and every white-hot truth is here. This is more that the definitive portrait of Eminem’s emergence and meaning; it’s a manual for loving music and understanding how passion is born.”

  —Cameron Crowe, writer-director

  “While most scribes, with eyes closed, have long been pushing pens in hot pursuit of international rap phenom Eminem, Anthony Bozza has wisely devoted his time to exploring the trials and tribulations of Detroit native Marshall Mathers III. And he who understands Mathers understands the fabric of American society—beautiful stitches, stains, rips, and all.”

  —Sacha Jenkins, former Vibe magazine music editor, writer-at-large for Spin magazine, and coauthor of Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism! and Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists

  “Anthony Bozza was granted an access to Eminem that no journalist is likely to see again soon—and so Whatever You Say I Am offers the most intimate glimpses yet of the most towering, complicated figure of our culture.”

  —Alan Light, former editor-in-chief of Vibe and Spin magazines, and editor of The Vibe History of Hip-Hop.

  To Marshall Bruce Mathers III.

  For his life as he’s lived it and as he’s told it,

  and everything that he’s changed on the way.

  contents

  acknowledgments

  introduction

  i’d like to welcome y’all to the eminem show

  1

  this looks like a job for me the evolution of eminem

  2

  i only cuss to make your mom upset a lot of truth is said in jest

  3

  damn! how much damage can you do with a pen? marshall and the media—from pans to fans

  4

  this rap game from kool herc to kool keith—a brief history of hip–hop

  5

  became a commodity because i’m w-h-i-t-e caucasian persuasion—flipping the race rap

  6

  we call it amityville that’s the mentality here, that’s the reality here—to live and thrive in detroit

  7

  if I’m a criminal, how can i raise a little girl? moms, marriage, and the morals of marshall mathers

  conclusion

  watch me, ’cause you thinkin’ you got me in the hot seat from a sinner to a saint

  bibliography

  acknowledgments

  Without the aid, encouragement, conversation, work, and inspiration of these people, this book would not be. Thanks to my editor, Carrie Thornton, for the Jedi mind tricks she employed to understand me and to keep me on track and as on time as she could. To Trisha Howell and Patty Bozza (no relation) for their calm and patience with me. Jim Fitzgerald for his sage edit adages and everyone at the Carol Mann Agency for their assistance and representation. My circle of friends, peers and sounding boards, were essential to my process, particularly Joseph Patel, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jon Caramanica, and Matt Diehl—thank you many times for your insight and empathy. I thank Lindsay Goldenberg for her tireless support, research assistance, observations, patience, love, and for believing in me. To my mother and stepfather for the pep talks and advice, respectively, and for collectively keeping me in touch with the tastes of “the aged.” Unbeknownst to my editor, my father and stepmother provided several necessary work breaks; I thank you, she doesn’t. Thanks to the J. Baker family, nuclear and extended, of Minneapolis, for their prayers and votes of confidence. They are an invaluable asset to that fine city. I would like to thank Eli 5Stone for transforming my stream-of-consciousness ramblings on the polarity of good and evil, shadow and light, and Eminem and Marshall Mathers into the arresting (no pun intended) illustration on the opposite page. I also thank André from OutKast for music as intelligent as his opinions, Dave Marsh for being as cool as I’d hoped he’d be, and everyone interviewed in these pages, artist, critic, or other. I am indebted to Eminem for sharing his passion, conviction, and vision and to he and Paul Rosenberg for the preference they’ve shown me over the years, a proximity without which this book would not be possible. Thank you, too, to Jann Wenner for founding Rolling Stone and to former managing editor Bob Love for promoting me—two undeniable stepping-stones in the creation of this work.

  Introduction

  i’d like to welcome y’all to the eminem show

  I saw 8 Mile the day it came out on November 11, 2002, among a crowd of my fellow New Yorkers, all of us dropping our ten bucks into a pot that by Monday added up to nearly $55 million, the second biggest opening weekend for an R-rated film in history (the title-holder in that category, for now, remains Hannibal, a film that played in more theaters than 8 mile). The audience that evening was a true cross section of New York City: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, young, and middle-aged. Some were heavy into hip-hop; some were hooked on pop and MTV; some were drawn by the media buzz; and others—two Goths, a group of metal heads, and a gray-haired couple with a whiff of academia to them—just looked curious. There was a tangible anticipation in the air. I felt as if I were not on line to see a Hollywood feature, but among the cultish generation-spanning devotees of Kiss, Neil Diamond, Tom Jones, or James Brown, waiting at a convention or outside of a record store, hoping to get an autograph.

  I like to show up early for a film, but even arriving an hour ahead of schedule I was far back in the line. Whether it was to get a jump on Monday’s water-cooler talk, to decide if the controversial rapper deserved the Oscar nod the press had speculated, to see what hipsters called the best hip-hop movie since Wild Style, or to find the key that would decipher fact from fiction in the canon of Marshall Mathers, we had all lined up to see what we’d see. I had my own ideas, too. I saw the film as an evolution, not so much for Eminem as it was for the cult of celebrity. To me, the film wasn’t an indication that he was trying to launch a J. Lo–like “all-media” career (music, film, plain old fame), contrary to a claim I’d hear from people who really hadn’t looked that closely, and I was sure that, no matter how great Eminem was in 8 Mile and how many scripts were stuffed in his mailbox at the
moment, this might be his only acting credit. What occupied my mind that day was whether or not he knew how he had turned America on its ass, whether he realized how he had our culture—the parts he liked and the parts he didn’t—by the balls, and whether he let himself, when he was alone, with no one to see, be happy about it. I wondered if it scared him that everything he rapped about came true.

  I took my place behind three girls who looked like they’d take home the prize in any Sex in the City trivia contest. I wasn’t surprised that they’d see 8 Mile, but I was surprised that they’d brave the hubbub of opening night. I listened to them debate about Marshall’s sexiness and how his celebrated acting ability affected that coefficient. “I used to hate Eminem,” one said. “I just thought he was disgusting.” I wondered if she’d heard any of his songs before she had decided that she hated him or had heard any of them now that she had changed her mind. One of the other girls voiced my thoughts: “Do you guys have any of his CDs?” They all replied in the negative, though they planned to stop at Virgin Records for the 8 Mile soundtrack after the show. “I love that ‘Lose Yourself’ song,” one said. “It’s like hearing the Rocky theme or something—you just want to kick ass!”

  Behind me a group of teenage boys bustled in place and hooted when the line started moving into the theater. They discussed where on the Internet to best get a free MP3 copy of the 8 Mile soundtrack and where they had downloaded “Lose Yourself.” They debated whether Brittany Murphy was hot or not and whether her character was a caricature of Eminem’s on-again, off-again love, Kim. “Nah,” one of them said, “she’s supposed to be Christina Aguilera.” I had to laugh with them, as they evoked one of Eminem’s enemies.

  I was as eager as anyone there to see how closely the real life of the rapper wove its way into the script and how a persona swathed in rumor and controversy was defined against a Hollywood recreation. Everyone around me knew that Eminem’s story occupied the center of the film—just like he inhabited the core of our collective American thought at that moment. Like them, I’d come to see how much of his life he bled onto the celluloid. Unlike them, I had an unfair advantage.

  I had been in a trailer with Eminem, not on-set in Detroit or at a video shoot in L.A., but in a suburban trailer park forty minutes outside of his hometown back in 1999. It was at the end of a long day shadowed by the looming gray clouds that roam Midwestern skies from September through May. We had spent the afternoon and evening on a driving tour of Detroit, Eminem acting as tour guide, showing me the places that formed and malformed him: his high school, the home where he grew up—the one that two years later was reproduced for the The Marshall Mathers LP stage show. We passed the stretch of 8 Mile Road in front of the Bel-Air Shopping Center where he was chased by a carload of black guys he’d flipped off. He was beaten right out of his clothes. He had thought it was for his LL-Cool-J-Troop sneakers which, at the time, were one of the most expensive models on the market. His mother told me later how he was dropped off, bruised and bleeding, in his underwear by a trucker who had intervened. We ate at Gilbert’s Lodge, the restaurant where he’d worked as a dishwasher and cook for five years. Rolling through the byways of his past, Eminem was the calmest I’d seen him in the days we’d spent together. He told me the stories of the scenery around us—tales more sad than happy—in heartfelt, heartbroken, matter-of-fact tones. He relived his life for my benefit as a tourist in his own past, as engaged in the telling as I was in the learning.

  I was there with him to write my first cover story for Rolling Stone. It became the first national glossy coverage on Eminem and remains the most thorough chronicle of his upbringing, until (and if) Eminem decides to tell us all the secrets he’s kept to himself. That first Rolling Stone cover, which was meant to feature a naked Eminem holding a lit stick of dynamite over his manhood, made history for us both: It increased my profile as a writer and helped Eminem reach a new dimension of success—whether he was ready for it or not. Our journey in 1999 ended in a snowy trailer park, but it began in New York in the bathroom at his manager’s office, where I met Eminem by accident just after he’d finished throwing up a fifth of Bacardi and a slice of pizza. It was all he’d eaten that day but was only an appetizer for what was to follow: three club appearances spiced with four ecstasy caps, chased with ginger ale.

  Cruising from Staten Island back to Manhattan that night, Eminem was a different kind of tour guide. Riding a high that would floor most people, he was a lyrical Tasmanian devil, spitting couplets at all of us—his manager (Paul Rosenberg), DJ Stretch Armstrong, collaborator Royce Da 5′9″, and a few others—that caused combustive laughter, jaw-gaping awe, or, often, red-faced embarrassment for the subject of his well-aimed darts. He was a living, breathing, drinking, falling, and reeling Slim Shady that night. His energy was almost tangible, as if you could see his synapses firing. The bits of stimuli before him flooded into his dilated pupils, coursed over his brain, and were spit back out at us, redefined in rhymes, jibes, and insults impossible to rebut. He commanded the room, the limo, the afterparty, wherever we were, not because we, his entourage, were a doting audience—in fact, there were many wits in the bunch—it was because no one could touch him.

  At that time, “My Name Is” got more airtime on MTV than Carson Daly, but Eminem was still fairly strapped for cash. His New York appearances had been booked months before, when the rapper was still a broke, underground phenom—the White Shadow of the vinyl and mixtape world. That’s where I’d first heard him on “Five Star Generals” the B-Side to Shabaam Sahdeeq’s twelve-inch “Sound Clash,” and I was far more impressed than I’d been when I heard his debut LP, 1996’s Infinite. He was an able rhymer in ’96, but he wasn’t angry, fed up, or at wit’s end. He was just trying to fit in; just rhyming intricate words because he could. The recordings of his freestyles on Sway and Tech’s Wake Up Show (where he was named freestyler of the year in 1997), as well as the first version of “Just Don’t Give a Fuck,” made their way around—so far around as to reach me at Rolling Stone—and were something else. Eminem sounded like a drug-fiending Clive Barker–creation covering the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill.

  That night in New York, Eminem played an all-ages show on Staten Island, won over a black hip-hop crowd in Manhattan, and at four in the morning entertained a club of models, wannabe models, and all those they attract. Eminem was as fucked up as anyone I’ve seen with a microphone outside of a wedding, and he killed ’em across the board.

  That New York trip was scenes from a life not quite his; it was still like a life on TV, the life Eminem was about to own. He’d soon be under the scrutiny of the music industry, America, and the world; but back home in Detroit, it was business as usual, which meant that Eminem didn’t even have a home. He’d been staying with his friends, or his mother, until she moved away temporarily. When he signed his record deal, he’d bought his mother’s trailer from her, out in what he called “hickville bumfuck,” because his daughter, Hailie Jade, liked it. His mother left Detroit for her native St. Joseph, Missouri, because of some trouble with the state of Michigan. Apparently she’d allowed Eminem’s half brother, Nathan, then about ten years old, to skip too many days of school (the legal limit in Michigan is one hundred). She’d lost custody of him but, after months of appeals and fighting through red tape, had won him back and promptly left town.

  After the night of shows and after we’d missed a few planes, I spent the flight talking to Eminem while everyone around us slept. We broke down his broken home, his mother, his grandmother, and the family history that is now the stuff of lyrics. He was very different during that quiet time, as he was on the driving tour of his hometown and as he always is one-on-one. He expressed himself thoughtfully, without boasts or poses. He’s nothing if not kinetic, but it’s a quick, often subtle switch from Shady to Eminem, from Eminem to Marshall, and back again. It seems to happen as soon as you (or he, maybe), think he’s settled into one of them too long. The real Marshall Mathers, the one I met before the f
ame and have seen less of since, is the most interesting side of him—he’s angry and sensitive, shy and curious. The real Marshall is who America is really consumed with. He’s a whole new paradigm of the white male: talented, humble, proud, mad, frustrated, hateful, and capable of compassion. At his best and worst, Eminem embraces the contradictions at the heart of our society.

  It might have been his hangover, or it might have been my empathy and enthusiasm, but Eminem was relieved that he could relate to me, and he told me as much as he’d told any journalist, at first, to the healthy dismay of his eavesdropping manager. I can only guess, but I think it was somewhere in the air between New York and Detroit that Eminem decided to let me be the one journalist he’d arrange to have interview his mother. It was a coup, the Holy Grail found before the search began. The honor did not come without responsibility. For several months after the story was published, Eminem’s mom, then called Debbie Mathers-Briggs, would phone me. Those talks were long, strange, and upsetting, some of the saddest speeches I’ve heard from anyone. We’d chat about Marshall as a child, and from my vantage point on the outside, her recollections sounded like tales of a family making do with what they had and finding happiness in their shared struggle. She would ask me why Marshall hated her now and why he was doing what he was doing to her. She stopped calling after she filed her legendary lawsuit against her son and, I assume, heard that the tape of my initial interview with her would be filed by the defense as evidence, should the case come to trial.

  By the time we had wrapped that first session together in Detroit, it was late and Eminem, Hailie Jade, Kim, Paul, Larry Solters (Eminem’s first publicist), and I were in a van humming along the frozen highway to hickville bumfuck. Well past the townships of Warren and St. Claire Shores, where Marshall spent plenty of time earning the minimum wage and miming Tupac and the Beastie Boys in his bedroom mirror, everyone began to nod off, Hailie first, Paul second. I was tired, too, and the low din of the engine and road, which drowned out the third or fourth go-round of The Slim Shady LP, did little to help me stay conscious. I had been a sponge all day, absorbing the experience out of an interest well past professional obligation. Eminem sat on the bench seat in front of me. He had barely slept for three days. He sat erect, staring at the passing road, blinking, thinking, and flicking his hand to the beat. He seemed very far away. Looking back, I see that moment and that night as the final calm before the storm to come for him. As I’ve followed his career since 1999, spent time with him personally, and interviewed him again and again, I’ve seen the effect that that storm has had on him.