Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  After The Marshall Mathers LP became the fastest-selling rap album of all time, racking up 1.3 million copies sold in one week, his dissenters, just like Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) in Jaws, were in need of a bigger boat.

  “The controversy didn’t surprise me,” Eminem says. “I knew there was something coming. I didn’t know exactly what it was yet, but Dre told me I’d better get ready for some shit. He was like, ‘You’re gonna go through it. Believe me, I went through it with N.W.A.’ But I had no idea all of that was gonna happen. You know, selling all the records I sold off The Marshall Mathers LP out the gate was strange to me. Not that I feel undeserving or anything like that, but I was just like, ‘Holy fuck, this is me doin’ this.’ That’s the biggest weirdest thing to live with. I had no choice but to get used to it. But it’s still strange.”

  By September 2000, the “Eminem question” reached the floor of the Senate, where the vice president’s wife spoke out against Eminem.

  “So here’s a name,” said Lynne Cheney, former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, “Marshall Mathers. It is truly astonishing to me that a man whose work is so filled with hate would be so honored by his peers.” The week before, Eminem had won three MTV Video Music Awards, in addition to the two Grammys and one MTV Video Music Award he’d won the year before. “This isn’t the first time,” Cheney said, “but Eminem is certainly, I think, the most extreme example of rock lyrics used to demean women, advocate violence against women and violence against gay people.” All the while, an unlikely rainbow coalition of gay, Christian, and women’s groups were doing their best to boycott Eminem and his album through letter, e-mail, and phone campaigns to his management office, record label, and the Grammy Association, who nominated The Marshall Mathers LP for four Grammys. They also protested outside his concerts on both coasts and in Europe.

  Shady consequences: Eminem and his attorney during his sentencing hearing on weapons charges at Oakland County Circuit Court in Pontiac, Michigan, on June 28, 2001.

  “Somebody called me during that time, around The Marshall Mathers LP, who is a homosexual,” recalls publicist Dennis Dennehy. “He’s with a website and he supports art that’s labeled obscene—Robert Mapplethorpe and other artists that Middle America find obscene. He called me to say that of all the controversial art he does support, he could not support Eminem. Yeah, you know, because it pissed him off. It’s fine to promote art that doesn’t piss you off, that pisses someone else off. But once it strikes a nerve, it’s a different story. You’ll defend something until it actually affects your world.”

  To hip-hop fans, Eminem was different, but the harsh themes and violence in his music weren’t too terribly new. But the attention afforded him indicated a subtle racial prejudice. Eminem’s opponents, by singling him out, suggested that the same themes, as chronicled by black rappers, were somehow more acceptable. “I think it was about the messenger,” Sia Michel, Spin magazine’s editor in chief, says of the controversy surrounding The Marshall Mathers LP. “It was sort of this kind of weird racism, where it was like, ‘Oh, well, you know how those gangsta rappers are, they say lots of crazy shit.’ As if we don’t expect anything more from them. And then a couple of years later, the white guy comes out saying similar things and it’s like, totally shocking. This white, blond man is saying these things, we’re going to take umbrage at this. It is kind of racist, just assuming that Eminem should be any less violent or use any less offensive language than anybody else, simply because of his race. It was harder for people to stomach.”

  “With Eminem’s Grammy nominations viewed as a seal of approval, many more people have stepped forward to voice their outrage,” read a call to arms released by the National Organization for Women (NOW) in early February 2001. “Young women, parents, people of all political persuasions are writing to NOW, asking what they can do. While Eminem continues to make lots of money for lots of people, he will most likely be everywhere. But we can certainly shame those who profit from and promote him and his music.” They did their best, outside of the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 21, the day Eminem won three more Grammys and performed his most ambitious single, “Stan,” with Elton John singing the hook sampled from Dido’s ballad “Thank You.”

  “While Eminem certainly has the freedom of speech to rap whatever he wants,” read a GLAAD public statement, “it is irresponsible for Universal/Interscope Records as a company to produce and promote such defamatory material that encourages violence and hatred. This is especially negligent when considering the market for this music has been seen to be adolescent males, the very group that statistically commits the most hate crimes.”

  NOW must have been dismayed by Madonna’s open letter to the Los Angeles Times in defense of Eminem: “Since when is offensive language a reason for being unpopular? I find the language of George W. [Bush] much more offensive. I like the fact that Eminem is brash and angry and politically incorrect. At least he has an opinion. He’s stirring things up, he’s making people’s blood boil, he’s reflecting on what’s going on in society right now. This is what art’s supposed to do. And after all, he’s just a boy.”

  Elton John’s jump from outspoken gay activist to Eminem supporter disparaged Mrs. Cheney and GLAAD. “Elton John has been good in the past about speaking out on issues of equality for gay people,” Cheney said in a press release just after the Grammys, “on issues of being against violent language against gay people. I am quite amazed and dismayed that he would choose to perform with Eminem.” Elton John, in my opinion, understood what the moral gatekeepers didn’t: If Eminem was smart enough to push the buttons he had, he was smart enough not to hate homosexuals and to know that anyone who took his songs as a mission statement were the extremists one really needed to be worried about. In post-Columbine America, having been honored by the Grammys and hounded by the PC watchdogs, Eminem found himself the world’s new pop monster.

  “Eminem wasn’t even as extreme as some stuff that had existed in hardcore rap before him,” says Sia Michel. “But he said it and wrote about it in such a crazily, amazingly cinematic way that it made it seem even more graphic. He said it over these friendly kind of singsong riffs, too, so you really heard the lyrics in a different way. But part of the controversy was the fact that for a while there, hip-hop was the mainstream but it wasn’t treated as the mainstream in the media. R. Kelly was one of the biggest stars around but you weren’t reading about him in the Star or the white mainstream press at all. When Dr. Dre came out with The Chronic, it was huge, but it wasn’t on the mainstream radar. It passed by the kind of people who would pick it up and make complaints. Then Eminem came out and here is this really photogenic white guy plastered all over MTV. He’s just massive, as soon as his first single came out, and I think those same people took notice. And they saw him singing these singsong, fun songs and he’s saying these things that are really going to get to the young kids, now. But they didn’t know that those young kids were already listening to Dr. Dre and Snoop before Eminem.”

  When the mainstream tuned in to extreme rock music, they came up with a scapegoat. Now it was time to change the beat. “The Greeks and Romans used to put their monsters on stage for everyone to see and fear—they are what the society needs to see of itself but can’t face,” David Bowie said about Marilyn Manson in 1997. “Marilyn is exactly that. He’s our most compelling monster right at the moment.” He certainly was. Manson had been shoveling sludge Goth since the early nineties and finally hit his career apex in the same year of the Oklahoma City bombing, Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, the death of Princess Di, and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Manson held the indecency throne in PC America.

  After the tragedy at Columbine High School, Manson became a household effigy. The two teen murderers who allegedly liked his music reopened the discussion on the detrimental effects of “devil’s music” on youth deemed too unsophisticated to distinguish performance from reality, a discourse that began with rock and roll in the fifti
es and was blown open by Elvis’s gyrating hips. Manson’s guff was closer to the flack Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne received thirty-something years earlier when two teenagers, in separate incidents, took their own lives. Those parents blamed Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and the allegedly embedded backward messages (“do it, do it”) in Judas Priest’s “Stained Class.”

  Manson, and Eminem after him, raised issues of the limits of free speech and the effects of music over other forms of entertainment on youth. Both performers challenge the ideals of the traditional American family held dear by so many, Manson by parodying gender and notions of beauty and organized religion, Eminem by parodying mass media and celebrity culture and white family dysfunction. Both harp on drugs. These artists and record label-mates sparked controversies different from other free-speech debates, however. The reaction to Manson and Eminem was a moral uproar; much different than the warning letter sent by the FBI to Priority Records after N.W.A’s gun-blazing Straight Outta Compton went gold without radio support, or the campaign led by the NRA and police-support groups against the Ice-T-led Body Count’s “Cop Killer” in 1992. Those artists were treated as rebel leaders encouraging inner-city chaos and racial revolution. Manson and Eminem were viewed as deviants who would lead God-fearing children into mass moral decline. Manson had shocked and titillated with self-immolation, gory imagery, and substance worship. Slim Shady farted his way onto the pop charts in 1999 and stole the show with jokes and whip-smart, wiseassed rhymes that taught the kids all the wrong (very wrong) nursery rhymes. Manson, for all the evildoing his denigrators believed he enacted upon the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, was still easy to marginalize. With his praying mantis frame, Roswellian complexion, and buttless PVC wardrobe, Manson was the freakiest guy ever to be named Brian, an alien on the outskirts. Eminem was more subversive and ultimately more influential. With his bottle-blond hair and twin hoop earrings, he looks like a member of the pop system—the devil’s Backstreet Boy. He’s not from some Gothic underworld, he’s from your neighborhood. A pill-popping metal monster like Marilyn Manson who lives in a drug-addled rock hell is just a guy with a bad case of Halloween. Eminem, the former dishwasher from the local grill who pops his mom’s pills, dreams of killing his wife, and encourages robbery, date rape, and double homicide, is scarier. He looks like an average American young man and counts millions of them among his biggest fans.

  The truth of the matter is that no crimes have come to light that were allegedly incited by Eminem’s music. Perhaps because he’s easier to hear and has more than a few controversial songs, Eminem was also not afforded the same artistic license as the great pop icons Nirvana, whose “Polly” from Nevermind recounted an actual kidnapping and rape from the rapist’s detached perspective. On their next album, In Utero, “Rape Me” was written from the perspective of the angry victim in “Polly,” whose recourse is to urge her attacker on. Though women’s groups voiced opposition to “Rape Me,” there were no picket lines outside of Nirvana concerts. “I’ve gone back and forth between regretting it and trying to defend myself,” Kurt Cobain told Rolling Stone about the song in 1994. “Basically I was trying to write a song that supported women and dealt with the issue of rape. Over the last few years, people have had such a hard time understanding what our message is, what we’re trying to convey, that I just decided to be as bold as possible.… I’m a big believer in karma and that that motherfucker [who rapes] is going to get what he deserves, eventually.”

  The first time I met Eminem, I asked him about the effect of his music on kids who may be too young to tell when he’s joking and when he’s not. He answered me then as he has everyone who has asked since. “My music is not for younger kids to hear,” he said. “That’s why there’s an advisory sticker on it. You must be eighteen to get it. That doesn’t mean that kids won’t. I got 2 Live Crew tapes when I was twelve. I’m not responsible for every child out there. I’m not a role model and I don’t claim to be. It’s what the song ‘Role Model’ says. I say that I do everything in the song, but it’s all fucking sarcasm. How can people not get it? … That’s fucking ridiculous. It’s obviously saying, ‘You wanna grow up to be just like me? Fuck no, you don’t!’ The message is: Whatever I say, do the opposite. You do that, you’ll be good, because my whole life is the opposite of good.”

  As soon as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) announced that The Marshall Mathers LP was nominated for the Record of the Year Grammy for 2000 (as well as four Eminem nominations in the hip-hop categories), a letter-writing campaign was organized by the Family Violence Prevention Fund, while NOW, GLAAD, and a handful of other organizations organized the Rally Against Hate outside the ceremony. As the controversy heated up, NARAS president Michael Greene was forced to issue a defense of the album, claiming it was “the voice of rebellion.”

  No more fightin’ with Dad: Kimberly Anne Scott outside the 37th District Court in Warren, Michigan, after her hearing on charges of disturbing the peace, October 2, 2001.

  In his defense of free speech in music, Greene didn’t mention anything about the album that would win the Grammy for Best Album of the Year, Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature. “Cousin Dupree,” the Steely Dan song that would take Best Pop Performance of the year, is about an aimless lech coming on to his younger cousin. Another song on the same album, “Janie Runaway,” is about an older man finding a muse in his teenage runaway lover and enticing her into a ménage a trois with one of her friends in return for a birthday trip to Spain. Though Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are both in their fifties, no one treated their album as a mission statement or suggested their homes be searched for child pornography. It was considered a work of venerable song-craft by veteran musicians. Steely Dan wasn’t protested by children’s rights groups, nor was any suggestion made that the Grammy accolades toward such songs would incite Steely Dan’s demographic—middle-aged Baby Boomers—or their children into sexual indentured servitude. Not to make light of hate crimes or domestic violence, but to think that a record alone will tip the scales in the mind of the monsters who commit such acts is to dangerously simplify both reality and the pathology of these criminals. Whatever music they might choose as a backdrop to their alienation doesn’t create their sickness. If anything, visual arts are a stronger catalyst, film a more powerful influence over our culture. 8 Mile proved this when it redefined Eminem, snuggle-sizing him to fit into the nation’s outstretched arms. The film won over the Baby Boomers in particular, who took Eminem as their entrée into hip-hop, the first youth movement with as large a cultural impact as the hippies. At the 2000 Grammys, however, the academy, whose core voters are predominately Boomers, voted for subtlety over hyperbole, Steely Dan’s stylized taboo over Eminem’s screamed “fuck you.”

  Eminem did take home three Grammys that year, one for Best Rap Solo Performance (“The Real Slim Shady”), one for Best Rap Duo (“Forgot About Dre”), and one for Best Rap Album (The Marshall Mathers LP), to place in his living-room trophy case alongside the two he won in 1999 for Best Rap Solo Performance (“My Name Is”) and, again, Best Rap Album (The Slim Shady LP). Eminem’s duet with Elton John at the ceremony was calculated to soften his tag as a homophobe. But Eminem couldn’t resist stirring the waters again shortly after the event, claiming in an interview that he wasn’t aware that Elton John was gay. The truth of the matter was seen backstage at the Brit Awards, the U.K. equivalent of the Grammy Awards, later in the year, when a writer from London’s Daily Express observed Eminem, standing in the backstage bar, having a drink with his crew and being watched but left alone by the cream of the Brit pop-music scene, when he was greeted by John with a huge bear hug and a “Come here, darlin’!” If anyone still wondered about his views at that point, Eminem the homophobe didn’t flinch or shy away from John, he just grinned.

  “It amazes me that people can’t see that what he is doing is a performance,” John told the reporter that night. “He plays a part onstage and he pushes
buttons. I think he’s incredible as a performer and a person. The music industry needs people who can be subversive. As a nonsubversive songwriter, I particularly appreciate and admire his lyrics. I spent three days with him in America and I can tell you, he’s very calm, very modest, very sweet, and very shy.”

  When Eminem returned with The Eminem Show, an album released early to discourage rampant Internet piracy, it was a whole new world and a whole new Eminem. The cover art that intrigued Maureen Dowd featured Eminem seen through a stage curtain, taking a moment before stepping up to a microphone bathed in a spotlight. Unlike his other album covers—the shot of him in the gutter in a trenchcoat with an empty bottle of booze and pills, coupled with a shot of his childhood home on the back (The Marshall Mathers LP); the surreal night scene of him and Hailie on a dock, with a pair of legs sticking out of the trunk of their car (The Slim Shady LP)—this album art left no questions. The album was also the first to include his lyrics; another sign that nothing was to be misinterpreted.