Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  Blue-collar balladeers: Eminem and his fan Bruce Springsteen backstage at the 45th annual Grammy Awards on February 23, 2003.

  The Eminem Show received accolades across the board for Eminem’s production work, his more confessional lyrical content, and his improved rhyme skills this time around. The great Eminem question here was mapping his personalities—the bait dangled in the title. “On earlier albums,” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker, “he turned his life into a cartoon, starring ‘regular guy’ Marshall Mathers and his ‘crazy’ alter ego, Slim Shady.… Now he seems to be trying to turn the cartoon into a life.”

  “For all the raw hip-hop confessionals that line his body of work, this is perhaps the most emotionally naked he’s allowed himself to appear in public,” wrote Brian McCollum in the Detroit Free Press, referring to “Hailie’s Song,” the ode to his daughter that appears on this record. “One of the many aspects differentiating Eminem from other best-selling, vulgar pop stars is that there is so much pathos and honesty in his lyrics, especially on ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet.’” wrote Neil Strauss in the New York Times. It’s “a third album that avoids all the pitfalls of third albums: introspective without being self-pitying, expansive in scope without being pompous, exploring new directions without disappearing up it’s own arse,” according to England’s New Musical Express. Q, another British magazine, lamented Shady’s early sabbatical: “As Eminem outgrows his old alter-id, so the obligatory pantomime villainy, skits, and crass cameos by Shady Records signings become a hindrance.” “On The Eminem Show,” wrote Entertainment Weekly, “he’s still raging against the machine, while admitting that he’s a deeply flawed part of that machine himself.”

  “His profile now is that he’s obviously here to stay, he’s obviously an artist with something to say,” Interscope Records head of publicity Dennis Dennehy says. “There’s no longer a debate about whether he is viable, or appropriate. The cultural argument, in this new world, is whether there’s any point in getting wound up about this stuff anymore—obviously America’s got more serious problems. Then it was the movie and more people talking about him. I wouldn’t say he’s a media darling, though. People, of course, want to talk to him, because who wouldn’t tune in to see it. Even the people who hate him all want him on the show. The people who spend hours deriding him in the media? They all want him on the show.”

  Despite across-the-board praise, there are still two critics of stature in America who have not altered their stance against Eminem. Music critic Jim DeRogatis doesn’t see the voice of a generation in Eminem; he sees a packaged product—a rebel yell manipulated by Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, and Interscope Records, as he said in an interview for this book.

  “We’re talking about Generation Y, the second largest generation of teenagers in American history. There are seventy-two million kids in Generation Y, after seventy-six million of their parents, who are the Baby Boom generation. There’s a mere seventeen million of us Generation Xers sandwiched in between them. This is a consumerist generation so far, and the vast majority of Generation Y has yet to wake out of its consumerist slumber. I think of the pod people in The Matrix, everybody plugged into the machine. It’s a video game, television society, and everything can be solved with a quick trip down to Abercrombie and Fitch—and Eminem plays into that. He is product on exactly the same level that Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and everybody else that he’s made fun of in his lyrics is. There is no difference, except that his tactic is cheap sensationalism and shock, as opposed to showing your fake boobs like Britney. Pop music is inherently disposable trash, and I’m not saying there can’t be great pop along those lines. But rarely has there been great pop that gives you that quick sugar fix, that had so much hatred intertwined, whether it’s hatred for specific people or hatred for groups of people. If you have a serious problem with a woman, to fantasize about killing her and slicing her and dicing her—there’s better ways to address your problem. Especially when you have vocal skills like he does.”

  DeRogatis cites a “critical overcompensation” toward Eminem to explain his widespread praise by an older generation of music writers. “There is a problem with forty-year-old white guy critics, and now most of them are fifty,” says the thirty-eight-year-old DeRogatis. “They desperately want not to seem out of step with young tastes, so they go overboard in praising something popular with young people. I don’t have that problem. I know what my emotional reaction to Eminem is. I know what my critical reaction to Eminem is. I have no problem standing up and saying it’s shit.” DeRogatis sees wasted talent in Eminem—and no one is calling him on it. “He gets covered in two ways: by people who don’t know hip-hop, who see him strictly as a sensationalistic scourge—and I don’t think he’s a plague on society, fuck that crap—or he gets covered with glowing hyperbole. There’s very little in between. If Bob Dylan had released an album in the sixties praising Richard Nixon as a great force in American society, his wrong-headedness would have been attacked and assaulted by his generation. I think that’s what the critical response should have been to Eminem. There’s this thing of thirteen million record buyers can’t be wrong, to which I say, where is Hootie and the Blowfish today? America voted for Ronald Reagan—twice. Tell me again that the American masses can’t be wrong. The tragedy is to have Eminem’s talent and to do so little with it.”

  Richard Goldstein, editor in chief of the Village Voice also came out against Eminem just as the national opinion rose to unprecedented pro-Em levels. Goldstein sees the rapper as part of a tradition of celebrity bigotry and aligned him more with conservative Republicans, such as George Bush, than free-speech liberals. “Eminem is a paranoid personality,” Goldstein said in an interview for this book. “A paranoid male personality with an intense sense of aggrievement that is out of proportion to reality. That is projected through his music so that millions of people sign on to the paranoia. This is a dangerous phenomenon. What’s happening now with 9/11 is that this came together with politics and is now a true orthodoxy, sublimated into militarism.”

  Still other critics were just bummed that Eminem had gone serious on us. “He’s moved into something that seems like a Michael Mann movie,” says critic Sasha Frere-Jones. “When he deals with the serious things in his life, he plugs in some very cheesy templates in his head. Now, I don’t think he doesn’t feel them, or it’s not real to him or meaningful, I think it totally is. It just means it’s harder for me with my Communist, pinko background and overeducated brain—I don’t find it as effective as when he’s doing acid and killing himself.”

  The release of 8 Mile opened the Eminem door to one and all. The film, like The Eminem Show, put him in a straightforward context that everyone could embrace—and they did. He became a common meeting ground for conversation, like a member of the celebrity machine that he lampooned on his first album. The tone of the mainstream press was reverential—the kind reserved for music figures such as Madonna. Rumors of Oscar nominations began to fly, and as the cast and crew of 8 Mile talked about Eminem’s dedication to the film, his public image turned from bad boy to hardworking single father. To look at the coverage, Eminem’s music career became secondary in the eyes of a public that was eager to fill out his celebrity profile with gossip of who he was dating and the life story they would have already known had they listened to any of his albums. Baby Boomer critics began to herald him as the icon of a generation, just a year after they’d declared him a blight on American values. “Unravel Eminem’s pop DNA and you’ll detect strands of Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Bob Dylan. Heresy? Maybe, but so were initial appraisals of Madonna, another forebear to consider as Eminem’s stock and stature rise” (Edna Gunderson, USA Today).

  The Boomer comparisons to the rock idols of yore is a game played whenever an artist captures the ear of the country. Eminem is not the new Bob Dylan, the new Beatles, or the new Elvis Presley—these are unrealistic comparisons. The effect those artists had on pop music and culture is incalculable becau
se of the times in which they lived. Elvis threw open the doors on American values and ushered into the national consciousness the age of the teenager as a cultural force in America—an age now fully institutionalized. Bob Dylan rewrote folk and rock into literature. And the Beatles in seven years took the history of pop music and turned it upside down and inside out. It is hard to measure anyone against artists who lived and innovated at such a fertile time of what we know as contemporary culture. If Eminem is like any Boomer pop icons, it is David Bowie or John Lennon. Bowie was an adept thespian who changed with his times, but in every incarnation used a well-integrated facade, mystery, and shock to communicate the depths of his message. John Lennon as a solo artist was raw, honest, macho, and vulnerable, and made beautiful confessional art of his personal life.

  When Frank Rich weighed in on Eminem in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, the end of the media conversation had been reached. The feature, like many others about Eminem in 2002, was uninformative outside of a writer’s discovery of something he’d missed in the broader culture. Though the underlying feeling was that of a critic jumping aboard the Eminem train, it duly reflected the national Eminem meter. Later in that same month, November, Eminem was rumored to be in the running for Barbara Walters’s “Person of the Year” accolade. It was an unprecedented degree of attention for someone with such a dirty mouth. All the Detroit newspapers ran stories featuring interviews of Eminem’s neighbors in the plush gated community that he now calls home. They told reporters about Eminem’s contribution to the neighborhood—sleigh rides for the children at Christmas. They chronicled his trick-or-treating with Hailie, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and hockey mask as Jason from the Friday the 13th films, the same mask Eminem wore each night at the start of his show on the Anger Management Tour. “Marshall is a very good father and a very nice person—very down-to-earth,” his forty-five-year-old neighbor Cathy Roberts told the Detroit News. The same paper interviewed another neighbor, fifty-seven-year-old Dave Crorey, who met Mariah Carey when Eminem brought her over to meet the Croreys during the pair’s brief romance. “He seems a little timid,” Crorey said of Eminem. “He’s nothing like he’s portrayed—a wild kid and all that. Seems a little on the shy side.” There were Eminem cover stories gleaned from what seemed like twenty-minute interviews and endless articles about the concentric circles of his life, necessitated since at the time the man himself was not doing press. At the height of it all, three different houses in Detroit that were reported to have once housed Eminem went up for sale on eBay. The bidding price of the home pictured on the back cover of The Marshall Mathers LP, which had been appraised at $120,000, headed north of $10 million. It wasn’t exactly a slow year for celebrity culture, but the excitement, curiosity, and embrace of Eminem outshone everything. America, for better or worse, must have seen itself reflected in Marshall Mathers, and rushed to join the fan club.

  “Everyone seems to love Eminem,” says Frere-Jones. “I think short of killing his own daughter, it doesn’t seem like he could do anything that would repel people. You open the paper and Jimmy Carter is saying, ‘Oh, I like Eminem’—they’re clambering on top of one another to be offended less and less. I’m not trying to sell my cure or anything, but Eminem, what is this idea that people hate you? As far as I can tell, nobody hates you, other than Richard Goldstein—God bless him for being out there on his own.”

  “The challenge now is,” says publicist Dennis Dennehy, “to keep from willfully overexposing him. I don’t think he’s overexposed, but he’s everywhere. When you really get down to it, in the last year, he’s done maybe seven interviews in this country. It’s going to be a challenge with the next record, or the next whatever he does—but we’ve got to maintain the press he gets without giving him away. We could go out tomorrow and do an interview with almost any outlet in America—no one would say no to an interview with Eminem. But there’s nothing to be gained by it. He’s got a lot to say, he explains himself really well. But it’s better to maintain some mystery. I think for anyone who really cares about artists, your favorite bands are always the most mysterious. You didn’t read about them everywhere—so when you did, it was a big deal.”

  The truth is that Eminem doesn’t like to do interviews; he prefers to save his sound bites for song. That’s not to say he’ll make the experience unpleasant. He is civil, charming in a subdued way, passionate, and if he’s not too swamped or tired, a lot of fun to be around. He’s learned to do interviews well over the years—probably to make them go faster, since he thinks they’re pointless at their worst and redundant at their best. As for the storied past and personal life he chronicles in verse, he prefers to keep the intimate details private. “If you listen to the songs and don’t take the words out of context,” he says, “it’ll tell you why I’m saying this or why I’m saying that. I might say it in the song later on, but you’ll hear it. If you don’t listen to the whole song, it’s like watching the middle of a movie and turning it off and then talking about it. Just listen to the fucking songs. If you listen to them, they will tell you. The album’s like a fucking instruction manual—and sometimes interviews are like somebody trying to put something together but they don’t know how. Read the instructions! Why are you making me sit here and tell you?”

  But Eminem being Eminem/Shady/Marshall/him/them, it can’t be that simple. There are subtexts, metaphors beneath the metaphors—right? “Somebody asked me today in another interview,” he said in 2002, “‘When you said you feel like your father, you just hate to be bothered—what did you mean by that?’ And I sat there for a minute and I was like, fuck! What did I mean by that? They almost had me thinking that there was a deeper meaning to it. No, dummy, it’s a metaphor! My father didn’t wanna be bothered with me. And I hate to be bothered by everything. Man, when people start to overanalyze, I tend to start overexplaining myself and in my head, I’m questioning it instead of taking it the way I meant it. It’s like, ‘I like to wear my raincoat in the rain’—what did I mean by that? I couldn’t have meant, like, that I like to wear my raincoat in the rain! Could I? Do I? Do I like when it rains, so I can wear my raincoat?”

  The four years of media angles on Eminem can be summed up with four questions: (1999) Is he a novelty?; (2000) Does he matter?; (2001) Should he be stopped?; (2002) How great is he? The year 2003 and beyond is interesting: What comes next? Since Eminem has been deposed from moral monsterhood by everyone but the most extreme right and left wings, he will be an MC with one less battle. And since he may have done some healing with his own “issues” over his past three albums, maybe he’ll look around a little bit. America is a dark, complex, contradictory country—it shaped Eminem—and maybe Marshall will start a new dialogue about what he sees. He has the credibility, brains, and skill to catch everyone’s ear on any topic, and by all accounts he’s already got our attention

  “The truth is, at the end of the day,” Eminem says, “I really don’t care what people say about me because it’s people like me who give half of these people their jobs. They keep their jobs if they have something to write about, and if they write about something good all the time they’re not gonna sell papers, they’re not gonna sell magazines, and they won’t make a name for themselves. All of them dream of being a famous writer and whatever it takes and whatever they gotta do to slap a fucking headline in the fucking papers that says ‘Teen Murders Himself Because of Eminem’s Lyrics,’ they’ll do. That’s what’s gonna sell papers and magazines, so that’s why they do it. At end of the day, it doesn’t really matter to me. Ya know, it’s just kinda funny. I didn’t blow me up half as much as the press did. I couldn’t have sold myself half to these kids the way the press did. If they write that the Eminem album is gonna cause kids to go and murder and shit, they’re gonna go fucking buy the album and see what it’s about. And you know, it ain’t nothing but music.”

  chapter 4

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

  T
he headlights eat the dark between the traffic lights along four lanes sprawled each side of a wide divide. Electrical transmission towers form a spine up the median, carrying 200,000 volts through the city. Strip malls advertise sex and cars, mattresses and meals, glowing in the gray landscape. To one side of the road, the city’s residents are 82 percent black. To the other, the suburban county’s residents are 83 percent white. The white van slows to turn into a grid of streets. Each house we pass has a square patch of grass and a driveway wide enough for one car; some have fences, some have shingles, some are brick-faced. All are modest.

  “Stop here,” Eminem says, sitting behind the driver of the van, on the bench in front of me. “That was our house.” The steep brown roof is broken by a deep-set window. The short porch is covered in snow, as is the car in the driveway. A light is on in the front room. The street is still. The house is sixty-two years old; as of this year, 1999, it’s been in Eminem’s family for nearly fifty years. Two years from now, Eminem will re-create the house’s facade for a concert tour spanning America and Europe. He will begin each show standing before it in overalls and a hockey mask, wielding a chainsaw. Three years from now, his uncle, Todd Nelson, will sell this house for $45,000. Four years from now, the new owners, a lawyer and a real estate developer, will watch eBay bidding on the house reach $12 million, then yield nothing.

  “My room was upstairs,” Eminem says, his breath fogging the window. “I was at my grandmother’s a lot, but this is the house I grew up in. This neighborhood is all low-income black families. Across 8 Mile back over there is Warren, which is the low-income white families. We lived over there in a park; people think they’re all trailers, but some of ’em are just low-income housing parks.” He points past me at another house. “Some redneck lived over there,” he says. “They were the only other white people.”