Whatever You Say I Am Page 10
Eminem’s nonmusic press profile has evolved in three stages: from nonexistent to begrudgingly acknowledged, from a problematic titilation to a blight on society, from surprised enlightenment to rabid, irrational, illogical, unprecedented love.
It is strange, but it hasn’t always been that way. “No one will admit to it,” Interscope Records president of publicity Dennis Dennehy said in early 2003, “but when I started doing the press on The Slim Shady album, Eminem had done a few big interviews, and at the tail end of it we tried to get him higher profile press and some TV spots. He’d sold two million records and people didn’t want him on their shows. At that point, people at the big shows and the others were like, ‘Eh, I don’t know.’ I don’t want to name names, but it was a bit of a hard time. It was actually difficult, because he got a lot of press, but there was an attitude like ‘this is a fad,’ and people questioned whether he would even be around for the next album. Of course, all of those people were delightfully proven wrong.”
Major-label publicity folk receive a pile of clippings every morning; faxes of the press their artists have garnered overnight. Dennehy has watched Eminem’s pile grow rapidly in the last year alone; at the height of the hype, it reached two inches daily, then leveled out at around an inch.
“If you look at the press he’s done, in terms of the quantity,” he says, “it’s been fairly static, album to album to album. He always does about the same number of real interviews—it’s the stuff around him that’s grown. It’s gone from press interest to press fervor on the Marshall Mathers LP, when he was public enemy number one, to a long and heated debate that’s still going on, about whether it’s okay to like him or not. When this started, I had friends giving me crap for working with him at all.”
The debate in music and traditional media outlets about whether or not to like Eminem can be tracked to the start of his national career. In the (white) rock music press, even reviews that praised Eminem were tempered with conscience and pause for his more violent rhymes. Many critics also exposed their ignorance of the terrain. More traditional outlets such as USA Today redundantly labeled him a “foul-mouthed shock-rapper,” a category which could potentially include everyone from Sir Mix-a-Lot to Public Enemy. Entertainment Weekly’s review of The Slim Shady LP—a negative one, by David Browne—portrayed Eminem as a backlash against the hip-hop soul positivity championed by Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and the Roots. Browne must not have noticed that 1998, the year of Lauryn, was also the year of ascension for DMX and Master P, two artists who celebrate thug life to the fullest. Browne’s conclusion was a ludicrous assertion that Eminem was a product of “the post-gangsta era of hip-hop,” which hadn’t truly died, and a reaction to the “anti-macho, almost asexual world of alt-rock,” as well as a victory for the “millennial-caveman mentality bumrushing the culture,” via the WWF and men’s magazines such as Maxim. On the last point, Browne was on to something (and mentioning the rising popularity of the frat-rock band Limp Bizkit would have strengthened his argument)—the culture at large was then and has continued to grow even more comfortable with casual sexism and misogyny. Eminem didn’t do that to our culture’s values, nor can it be said that his albums alone increased it, but he certainly wasn’t hurt by the trend. Yet timing alone did not define The Slim Shady LP’s success; America’s love of controversy did. Eminem had it all: He rapped better than most MCs on MTV at the time, he upset the color hierarchy in rap, he lambasted every norm and accepted celebrity in sight, and did it to a melody you couldn’t forget.
What is lacking in Browne’s review and plenty of others is the assumption that Eminem should be judged first and foremost in a hip-hop context, which belies a supposition that he isn’t a real rapper, that he must be a white artist coopting the style, or that since he is white, this must not be real rap. It isn’t natural to see a white MC, and memory of white rappers past only serves to make the image stranger. In fact, a number of Slim Shady LP reviews read like a review of a punk-rock band. Perhaps these writers saw Eminem as an alternative act, a novelty act, or a hybrid of rap and rock, black and white. It was a strange discrimination by those paid to analyze pop culture. The “My Name Is” video made Eminem an MTV darling, while the song’s lyrics lampooned his peers on that medium the way Beck’s “Loser” trumped macho rock with slack beats and surreal sarcasm. But anyone who missed that Eminem is a card-carrying member of the hip-hop nation, from his walk to his product, wasn’t spending enough time on him. This wasn’t a charade by a clown who learned rap from MTV, it was a deft underground MC who had paid his dues.
“There were a few other underground rappers coming up when Eminem did who stood out as innovative lyricists,” says Sway Calloway, MTV News correspondent and longtime cohost of the influential L.A. hip-hop radio show The Wake Up Show. “Eminem found a way to do things better. And Eminem stayed on the grind. He just continued to come by our show and drop freestyles. I got so much stuff that he did. He was doing his footwork. And the thing about him I noticed each time I saw him back then—and it’s still going on—is that he keeps getting better and better. He came to our studio to record ‘Get You Mad’ [on Sway and King Tech’s 1999 album, This or That], and that’s when I first started noticing, damn, this dude keeps getting better. His metaphors are ridiculous. I could just tell he wasn’t going to run out of things to say or how to say them after one album. So many rappers do when they lose touch with the reality that got them there in the first place.”
Regardless, the critics were coming. Eminem’s first high-profile detractor was Timothy White, the deceased Billboard editor in chief. White devoted his page-long column the week The Slim Shady LP came out to a benefit album for Respond, an organization for battered women, as part of his denouncement of the misogyny in Eminem’s music, which he felt perpetuated cycles of violence against women and made “money off the world’s misery.” Eminem made White insult fodder in “Bitch Please II,” from The Marshall Mathers LP, and speculated on the validity of White’s assertions in “Criminal” and other songs.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” Eminem said about White the week the Billboard issue hit newsstands. “Fucker. He took everything I said so fucking literally it disgusts me. He should be able to tell when I’m serious and when I’m not—it’s not fucking rocket science. He didn’t even realize that ‘Guilty Conscience’ was a concept song. It’s about the way people are in the fucking world and how evil always seems to outweigh good, whether it’s in your conscience or in the world and in America especially. In the song, we’re talking about the devil half of you and the angel half of you. Nine times out of ten, the devil’s gonna win.”
In the hip-hop press, Eminem was received cynically until he had proven his abilities. The Source put Eminem in their “Unsigned Hype” column before he was pursued by Dr. Dre, a pedigree Eminem shares with DMX and the Notorious B.I.G.
That column anointed Eminem in 1998 as “an MC in need of some nurturing from a record company … this rapper of the Caucasian persuasion’s got skills.… Point blank, this ain’t your average cat. This Motor City kid is a one-of-a-kind talent and he’s about to blow past the competition, leaving many melted microphones in the dust.”
The hip-hop press dissected the power of Eminem’s rhyme skills as much as they heralded the twisted terrain of his content: The Source called “Just the Two of Us,” the precursor to “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” a “guaranteed rewinder.” The hip-hop press already knew what even many of the (white) men and women who made their living critiquing music overlooked: black rappers have spit rhymes as gory as Eminem’s for years, full of misogyny, homophobia, and street violence, traditions entrenched in the machismo of the gangsta pose, however close it may or may not be to the rapper’s reality. On the microphone in every hip-hop style, exaggeration rules supreme, an extension of the tradition of hyperbole that began on wax in 1979, in the second verse of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” but with roots far older. At the same time, Eminem’s upbringing,
among poor blacks and whites, was closer to the black and minority experience reflected in rap, lending Eminem the added credibility of similarity. Eminem, without a doubt, is the first white rapper with true street cred to cross over. The Beastie Boys, though they did right musically, boasting the backing of Russell Simmons and Def Jam, were the well-educated New York City kids of wealthy upper-middle-class families whose debut album was nothing but bad behavior draped in hip-hop’s gold chains. The rapper Everlast of House of Pain, whose “Jump Around” hit large in 1992, was born on Long Island but grew up in the San Fernando Valley of L.A.—not exactly cushy, but not exactly Compton. He was signed to Warner Brothers on the basis of his association with Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate, a loose group of L.A. rappers. Everlast’s debut, Forever Everlasting, was a flop. It took the funk of Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs’s produced single “Jump Around” to get House of Pain to the top of the charts once—and never again. One-hit wonder Vanilla Ice grew up comfortably in Miami Lakes, Florida, a history he recast when his debut album To the Extreme sold seven million copies and stayed at number one in the nation for sixteen weeks. Eventually, the gangster past he fabricated was exposed for the fraud it was, and by the time Vanilla Ice’s film, Cool as Ice, was released just a year later, he had become such a joke that the film’s soundtrack remained among the Billboard’s Top 200 best-selling albums chart for fewer weeks than To the Extreme remained at number one.
The moment his debut single commanded the airwaves and his bottle-blond visage dominated the small screen, Eminem walked into this novelty legacy. But he was none of what the others had been—he was white trash who had lived poor. He had lived and breathed hip-hop since hearing his first rap song at age nine, and started break-dancing at eleven. If he hadn’t had street cred from the start, he’d have never even made it out of Detroit. As it was, getting out was a feat in itself. “We talked to everybody, every label,” Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, says about landing Eminem a record deal. “I mean, at the point that he did get signed by Dre, we just wanted a deal. Everybody passed on him. To them, it was a risk. Most people don’t officially pass on an act; they sort of string you along because if something happens they don’t want to be sitting there looking like a dickhead. So that’s how they handled it. They didn’t know what they had, but, honestly, neither did we.”
At the start of Eminem’s career, the music press across the board spent most of their words on what set him apart: how he boldly went where no rappers had gone before, turning his anger and spiked tongue on himself. The album includes at least fifteen references to self-mutilation of one kind or another on The Slim Shady LP. Eminem was seen as credible and joyously improper, an heir to the antics of the Beastie Boys circa Licensed to Ill, with a twisted and shocking background story that explained the misbehavior and rendered it harder to swallow.
I don’t care what you say, unless it is about me: Eminem scares his chronic critic Moby at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, August 29, 2002.
There was one negative exception in the hip-hop world: XXL magazine called Eminem a “culture stealer” years before The Source waved that banner in 2002, by which time XXL had rescinded their comments from four years before and made an ally of Shady Records. Initially, though, XXL mirrored the doubt that had met Eminem for years at rap conferences from Miami to L.A. and at more MC competitions than he can count: How can a white MC truly be a part of hip-hop culture? Years later, when The Source copped the same line, running a caricature of Eminem as Elvis and launching a months-long dialogue about the white theft of hip-hop culture, the predicament was more complex. Citing Eminem’s landmark year as a performer, one unparalleled by a rap act in terms of projects, profits, and press, the magazine saw Eminem as a greater evil, a threat to the black identity that is hip-hop. Befitting a complicated topic, The Source’s stance vacillated between insulting Eminem for the advantages his race afforded him in connecting to a wider white audience (insinuating that his dysfunctional family shtick was a greater asset than his rhyme skills) and worrying beyond Eminem, predicting that his success would close opportunities in radio play that would otherwise be afforded to black rappers. Regardless, The Eminem Show still ranked in the magazine’s ten best albums of the year.
There were, of course, the critics who just got Eminem from day one. Robert Christgau, the music critic laureate of the Village Voice who sits alongside legends such as Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, and Dave Marsh (who all popularized music criticism as we know it today), hit it on the head as usual: “Anybody who believes kids are naive enough to take this record literally is right to fear them, because that’s the kind of adult teenagers hate,” he wrote in March 1999. Christgau’s only critique was that toward the end of The Slim Shady LP Eminem “turns provocation into the dull sensationalism fools think is his whole story.”
Yet there were plenty of those “fools.” Chicago writer and devout contrarian Jim DeRogatis has attacked Eminem on all fronts and has never swayed. “He’s a charlatan and a fraud,” DeRogatis says, “who is as bad musically as he is content-wise. There is talent there, but he could be doing so much more with it. I cannot forgive him the rampant misogyny or the homophobia. There is Psycho, which is one of the best films ever made about a serial killer, and then there’s Friday the 13th, Part 8.” Kevin M. Williams, one of DeRogatis’s peers at the Chicago Sun-Times, referred to Eminem in a review of a 1999 concert as a “rap-impaired mediocrity” and proclaimed that his “meager skills … gain greater impetus simply because of his skin color,” naming him a rapper “propelled to dizzying heights by an irresistible song and major label backing.”
“The most dishonest observer of the hip-hop scene I know could not listen to Eminem and say ‘He’s really not shit, musically,’” says rock critic Dave Marsh. “A common assumption among critics is that the people making this music are not quite as bright as they are or at least not as intellectual, analytical, or well informed about what it is that they do. People think the manipulation of an image is an accident. My assumption is that there are no accidents. Anyone who reaches the level of fame of Floetry, let alone Eminem, wants it, they want it bad. Their job is creating a complete package that starts with the performance of the music. You have to be a performer and you have to have desire. People are taught in media theory that the creation of the image is the foundation of the art. I think the creation of the image is the byproduct of others seeing somebody who has set up a foundation for their art.”
The release of The Marshall Mathers LP is certainly the defining moment in the history of Marshall Mathers and his media perception. Eminem’s character-juggling defense of his most graphic lyrics to date stirred listeners into a froth over what he did and didn’t do—and what that did and did not mean. Eminem may have played characters on The Slim Shady LP, but like those of the best comedians—Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Chris Rock—his imitations (nerdy devil, violent burnout, pathologically alienated baby-daddy) were permeable masks demarcated by a lighthearted delivery, interspersed with enough comedic flourishes to reveal the joke. On The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem loosed a slew of obvious yet confusing contradictions, typically within the same song, that America, for the most part, got lost in. The word fag was tossed around generously. There was homophobia, but there were also the lines “if we can hump dead animals and antelopes / then there’s no reason a man and another man can’t elope” (“The Real Slim Shady”), as well as graphic descriptions of gay sex, complete with sound effects, to rival the lyrics of gay punk rockers Pansy Division. For every “Bleed! Bitch bleed!” (“Kim”), there were sweet nothings to Eminem’s daughter, Hailie Jade: “Baby, you’re so precious / Daddy’s so proud of you” (also “Kim”). For “Bitch, you just a girl to me” (“Kill You”), there was “I’m just playin’, ladies” (also “Kill You”). For all the moral fire alarms Eminem pulled, there was the last verse in the hit-single “Stan,” which captures the thoughtful side of Eminem, the man, as he truly is in person more than any other song he has recor
ded. In “Stan,” the rapper apologizes to his obsessed, unbalanced fan Stan for not having written back sooner, sends him a cap for his little brother, reminds him that Eminem doesn’t mean everything he says, and advises Stan to get counseling. “And what’s this shit you said about you like to cut your wrists, too? / I say that shit just clownin’ dawg, c’mon, how fucked up is you?” The album was a masterful manipulation. And the media jumped all over it.
Eminem’s brushes with the law in 2000 gave credence to his haters’ theory that bad words promote bad behavior, but it almost didn’t matter. The press was divided, among themselves and within themselves, over Eminem. He had created an “indefensible and critic-proof” (Entertainment Weekly) “call-your-local-congressperson offensive” (Time) album in The Marshall Mathers LP, “with all the production values and skill money can buy” (Billboard) that “isn’t just a twisted joke; the rapper’s sociopathic facade masks the lingering hurts of his Dickensian childhood” (Newsweek). It was the “first hip-hop album to assume universal attention” (www.salon.com) that “contains the most blatantly offensive, homophobic lyrics the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has seen in many years” (GLAAD alert). It was also “dangerously close to being a classic” (Vibe), a “gruelling assault course of lyrical genius” that “somehow feels completely conversational, the musical backdrop (calypso/Caribbean, Gothic etherea, jiggy disco evolving into P.M. Dawn) is frequently, of all things, beautiful” (Village Voice); it was a “car-crash record: loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling” (Rolling Stone) and an album in which “nothing rises above the level of locker-room insults—nearly every song seems to feature Eminem giving someone the finger” (New York Magazine). It contained “some of the most explicit descriptions of violence ever to make their way into people’s homes” (National Organization for Women, public statement) but it was “funny how much controversy can spring up over an album that is, musically, not all that noteworthy … what could have been a brilliant statement instead elevates Eminem to the rarefied air of true platinum rappers, i.e., those that drop outstanding rhymes over frustratingly mediocre beats” (Spin), a condition that just “isn’t that much fun this time around, no matter how fresh Dre’s beats are” (L.A. Weekly). In the end, “there’s even less point moralizing about this one than there was the last” (Village Voice, Robert Christgau), and “Marshall Mathers is music about what one man doesn’t know, doesn’t even know if he wants to know, and on that road anything can happen” (Interview, Greil Marcus)