Whatever You Say I Am Page 13

  No cars, animals, or people of any color stir the dusk. Eminem’s eyes run over the house, scanning details. He has shared troubled memories of this place with me, but his eyes aren’t melancholy, they’re proud. “I want you to see the walk I did every day to junior high,” he says.

  Along the way, the van rolls past Osbourne High School, Eminem’s rap alma mater. He attended Lincoln High School in Warren but snuck into this predominantly black school with Proof to battle-rap in the cafeteria, in the bathroom—anywhere a crowd might gather. We pass the junior high where D’Angelo Bailey, the bully he meets in “Brain Damage,” beat up Eminem regularly. A week from now, I will call every “D. Bailey” in the Detroit Yellow Pages and find D’Angelo. When I do, I’ll listen to him recount the beatings warmly, his memory either blurred by time or quasifame, denial or ignorance. Bailey once slammed Mathers onto frozen asphalt at recess, sending him to the hospital with a concussion, but Bailey will remember it as good fun. Before he will say goodbye, Bailey will ask me for Eminem’s phone number so that they can catch up on old times. When I don’t offer it, he will ask me for tickets to an Eminem show that is a few months off. Three years from now, Bailey will file a million-dollar lawsuit against Eminem for invading his privacy, defaming his character, and hindering the sanitation worker’s efforts to launch a rap career.

  We trace Eminem’s old walk to junior high school. It is more than a mile from Eminem’s house, farther from his grandmother’s house in Warren, across 8 Mile Road. The van heads in that direction, on 8 Mile and slows down at the entrance to the Bel-Air Shopping Center. There is a long stretch of grass, wider than a few cars, running along the parking lot. At one end is a wall, beyond it a few hundred feet of empty land.

  “I got jumped by a whole crew right here,” Eminem says, looking over his shoulder at me. “I was sixteen, I was skinny as fuck, and I couldn’t fight as a teenager. I was walking home from my boy Howard’s house through the Bel-Air and I stopped at Toys “R” Us on the way to warm up ’cause it was winter. I came out of there and all these black dudes rode by in a car, flippin’ me off. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ and I flipped ’em off back. They kept driving and I didn’t think anything of it. I’m walking down this long patch of grass right here to the wall at the end right there. Two dudes come from around one end of the wall and it’s them. One dude walks past me. The second dude stops and asks me what time it is. I’m like, ‘I ain’t got a watch.’ Dude who walked past came back and said, ‘What you say to my boy?’ And hit me in the face. I fell into all this mud.”

  Once on the ground, Eminem realized that he was surrounded. “I got up and was afraid to swing,” he says. “I was like, ‘What did you do that for?’ And the dude’s like, ‘For the same reason I’m gonna do this.’ And he pulls out a gun. I turn around and ran, right out of my shoes. That’s what I thought they wanted. I had them new LL Cool J Troops and shit. I ran right out of them and didn’t even mean to.” Eminem had run past the wall in front of us, into the empty field on the other side, toward his grandmother’s house.

  “The other dudes from the car started chasing me, and one caught up to me and threw me down in the mud,” he says. “I jump up and this dude is tall as fuck and I swing and hit him in the face and he just laughs. He hits me in the ribs and I fall down again. I’m in my socks, in the mud. I get up, start running again, and they don’t chase me, and I’m thinking they’re getting the car again. Then one of them shoots at me. Just one shot. As soon as I heard it, I thought I was shot but I couldn’t feel it yet. I just start screaming and don’t stop.”

  A car had pulled up next to Eminem, on the shoulder of 8 Mile Road. “This guy throws open his door and I don’t even stop or look back—I thought it was one of the dudes chasing me. But this guy had seen what had happened and pulled a gun on them and scattered them. He drove to catch up with me, and I’m running on these train tracks over there past the field, cutting my feet up on ’em. This guy, he was a white guy, finally starts yelling at me, ‘It’s all good, it’s all good, get in.’ He drove me the rest of the way home, which by then, I had run so fast, I was almost there. I asked the guy to wait and tell my mom what had happened, but he took off. I was fucked up—face all swollen, feet bleeding and muddy. I slammed the door and screamed at my mom ‘Why the fuck do we live here! I’m getting fucked with every day!’ It was totally racial. I know it because the next day I went back and my shoes and hat were right where they came off. At least they could have jumped me for my shoes. The only reason they could have done it is because I’m white.”

  Four years after our drive in his old neighborhood, I walk behind Eminem, up a flight of stairs in a Detroit club to a floor reserved for his party. Mirrors line one wall. Red velvet booths, with curtains, line another. The DJ mixes into “The Real Slim Shady” when he sees Eminem. Women in high-slit dresses proffer free shots of red and green liquor in test tubes. Eminem scans the room and takes a seat deep in a booth, behind the curtains. The half-circle of couch is visible from only one side.

  Select guests arrive, more women than men. They line the walls of the room, and park on the dance floor. A few stare at the curtain that hides Eminem, but none approach. In the booth, he praises rappers past and present and describes new beats he’s made. He tells me he thinks each new OutKast album is a breath of fresh air to hip-hop. His friends leave their seats to meet some women. Some return, some don’t. Eminem remains, talking to me and whoever else sits down.

  Two robust ladies appear at one side of the curtain.

  “Hi, are you Marshall?”

  “Yeah, how you doin’?” Eminem says.

  “Why are you sitting in there hiding from us? Isn’t this your party?” one of the ladies asks.

  “Yeah, it’s my party,” he says. “I’m just chillin’, you know.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, come out here! Talk to us.”

  “Yeah, okay, in a minute,” he says. One of his crew is happy to occupy these two in the meantime.

  “This shit is funny, man,” Eminem says. “Probation and all that sobered me up. It’s a blessing in disguise.” He watches the room, greeting the eyes that meet his when he shows himself. “Yeah, I’ll be back,” he says.

  The dance floor is full now, but no one is dancing. These VIPs pose, striking a stiff posture of nonchalance while shifting to glimpse the party’s honoree walk across the room. Eminem has seen enough of these events to expect that he’s still onstage at private parties, that everyone here is either desperate or too proud to talk to him. Others are nightlife fixtures, the people who frequent VIP rooms, often sporting attitudes haughtier than the poutiest star. Eminem walks through the room, and I think of the awkward social machinations of an elementary-school dance. He moves slowly, looking at people, talking to no one. Guests approach him cautiously. A few women flirt with him. His friends circle around and joke with him.

  He returns to the booth soon.

  “See anything interesting?” I ask him.

  “Nah, man,” he says. “These things are all the same, you know. It’s weird to meet people like this. It’s funny, I mean, most of them want something from you. They might just want you to tell them stories and shit and entertain them. Some people are cool, but some don’t realize when I go out like this with my friends, I just want to have a good time. I don’t really take too many days off, so why do I want to entertain like that when I’m out with my friends? That’s what I do on stage.”

  “You can’t really let loose when everyone here is here to meet you, I guess.”

  “I can’t really let loose at all right now, I’m on probation,” he says, and laughs. “But yeah, I wouldn’t want to anyway; you never know what people want from you or what they’d do. I’ve had so many fucking lawsuits, man, it just isn’t worth it to me. I just hang out when I’m in Detroit. Just hang out with my friends, that’s it.” Eminem looks past me at a girl waving to him from across the room.

  “I thought I knew her for a second,” he says. “You
know all this shit really isn’t important to me. All I care about is making music, man. If I could live my life in the studio, except to be with my daughter, that’s what I would do.”

  The next day I drive a tan rental car in the middle lane of a three-lane road, following a silver-blue Mercedes. Behind the tinted windows, Eminem is in the passenger seat and Paul Rosenberg drives. At the photo shoot we’ve just left, I heard Eminem quip about fixing the photos “in post,” short for postproduction. “I can’t believe I even know what that means,” Eminem told me, chuckling at himself. “In the studio, I’m turning knobs that I never even knew existed. It’s good, man, I feel more clearheaded, more focused now. I used to just come in the studio and drop my verse; now I’m there all day. There’s so much more to the process to me now.”

  It is sunny and brisk, and the road is busy. The snowbanks lining the road gleam under the blue winter sky. A rusted-out red Toyota sputters next to me; I hear the tattered muffler above the noise of the road and the stereo. Two black men in the car talk intently and nod. They lag behind, then cross from the left lane to the right. They drive beside me, then ahead. A red light stops the traffic, and the Toyota stops next to the Mercedes. The driver leans out of his window and talks to the one-way glass. Eminem rolls his window down and nods slowly as he talks. He is handed a tape. The traffic light changes and the cars drive off.

  “Those guys shopping for a record deal?” I ask him later.

  “Yeah. They had a tape they wanted to give me,” Eminem says. “That’s cool. I did that shit, too. Everywhere that I might meet someone, I’d show up with a tape. I never gave them to rappers, but everybody else that I could. That’s what you gotta do, man. You gotta stay hungry, you gotta get your shit out there, you gotta show up places. You gotta just live for rappin’, man. After my uncle Ronnie got me into it, that was it for me. As fucked up as shit got for me, I just lived for rap. It’s the only thing that got me through the day.”

  FROM DAY ZERO, hip-hop was built on alienation and freedom. The freedom of expression in the face of oppression, the freedom to chronicle an unseen history. It was and remains the voice of the minority majority living in cities, born in a mecca wasteland called the South Bronx. Today it also speaks to citizens from Kalamazoo to Cambodia. In its earliest incarnation, hip-hop reflected the mores and traditions of a fragment of society within a greater one, and like other grassroots influences that altered the majority culture, from the blues to outsider art, it was created in isolation. Today hip-hop is an attitude, a lifestyle, a stance against the mainstream, and a voice of anger, frustration, alienation, sex, and rebellion for youth of all ages and backgrounds.

  “To me, hip-hop is modern, mainstream, young, urban American culture,” Russell Simmons, hip-hop godfather and Def Jam CEO, wrote in his autobiography, Life and Def. “I know there’s a lot of ideas there, but hip-hop’s impact is as broad as that description suggests.… The beauty of hip-hop, and a key to its longevity, is that within the culture there is a lot of flexibility. So Run-D.M.C. and A Tribe Called Quest and N.W.A and Mary J. Blige and Luther Campbell and the Beastie Boys can all wear different clothes, use different slang, and have a different kind of cultural significance. Yet all are recognizable as being part of hip-hop.”

  You can’t knock the hustle: Jay-Z in 2000.

  Hip-hop, in comparison to other African-American musical traditions—blues, jazz, and rock and roll—has remained closest to its roots for the thirty years it has existed. It is possibly the most potent, least altered African-American cultural expression in history. Hip-hop has evolved technically, but its basic theme has remained: self-improvement with style. The earliest rap records, like those released a week ago, were about getting money, living better, having a party, having sex, defying mainstream society, and looking really good while you do it. In the beginning, hip-hop culture and rap music unified young black and Hispanic men and women, the original b-boys and -girls, at DIY parties in parks throughout New York City’s five boroughs. It was celebratory, an alternative form of dance music to the synthetic disco and formulaic R&B of the time. It grew into sonic reportage with a scope that embraced the world the same way it did the end of the block. Rap broadcast inner-city realities and established a rebel stance—that no hardship would keep the minorities who pioneered hip-hop from living, to the fullest, on their own terms.

  In the past thirty years, rock and roll has slowly faded away as the sound of teenage rebellion in America. Integrated into the system of mainstream culture by the aging Baby Boomers that drove its innovative 1960s phase, rock and roll has lost its outlaw edge; only rare talents such as Kurt Cobain or Radiohead stand out today. Cobain was someone as brilliant and broken as his music, while Radiohead channels anxieties into otherworldly rock opera. The majority of rock bands and rappers today, from Good Charlotte and P.O.D. to Ludacris and 50 Cent, act like rebels of society. From their dress to their lyrics, they stand apart from the norm. The only difference is that in hip-hop the stakes are typically higher, increasing the appeal to a voyeuristic audience. Where the average “misfit” rock band defies the jocks and cheerleaders and strives for a lifestyle apart from the nine-to-five world, a rapper defies the police, the government, and anyone else who stands in the way. Rap rebellion, even when a pose, is closer to reality, as many rappers are or once were outlaws. Many more rack up arrests once in the public eye, simultaneously fulfilling a stereotype and bolstering their bad reputation. Their rebellion is more believable, more celebrated, and to fans, more worthy of iconography. Many have prison records, gang affiliations, a history of drug dealing or connections to all of the above. Most rappers redefined the reality of their upbringing and succeeded when statistics show that they shouldn’t have. Rappers are the new icons of teenage disenfranchisement, and whether those teens are alienated by the suburbs or by selling drugs in the inner city, they all hear and feel the reality in the music.

  Hip-hop is and always will be a culture of the African-American minority. But it has become an international language, a style that connects and defines the self-image of countless teenagers and that has been used to profit immense corporations. Chuck D once called rap “the black CNN.” Today, it’s more like a premium cable package, complete with QVC, five kinds of HBO, the Biography Network, NBA Season Pass, the Boxing Channel, and “Back-in-the Day” Television. It is closer to a cable corporation (plenty would say one owned by “the [white] Man”) with internships and jobs and platinum perks for its employees, but no guaranteed retirement plan. In the rap game, street graduates with the highest rhyme point average and style extracurriculars can land a corner office or prime cubicle. If they’ve got golden letters of recommendation and perform in the field, there’s a chance they might make partner. Like the legal profession, though, there are more rappers in (and out of) school than there are job openings available in the charts—those chart spots require a specific profile.

  In thirty years, hip-hop has proven itself the most expansive, mutable music of the twentieth century. The style and rhythms of hip-hop have altered everything from rock to techno as easily as they have integrated styles as diverse as calypso and East Indian music. It’s as unsurprising that hip-hop’s elastic subversion has taken its place in the fabric of American culture as it is that the innovative self-improvement capitalism at its root has been converted into a moneymaker for American corporate capitalism.

  The lower classes in America have spent the last ten years (1990 to 2000) in the worst economic straits since the Great Depression and are characterized by high divorce rates and/or nonexistent nuclear families. Hip-hop speaks to and for these classes, particularly kids, like the church, reflecting and explaining reality, offering a code by which to live and a sense of community within a community. At the same time, in the middle-class suburbs, teenagers of all races meet on hip-hop common ground to relieve the stress of growing up in a downsized American dream, rife with divorce, academic and peer pressure, and the teenage angst that blooms as surely as zi
ts. People of all types suffer ills that are voiced in hip-hop, a music that articulates community and alienation in the same breath.

  The history of hip-hop can be set in contexts as flexible as the culture’s boundaries. Books such as Nelson George’s Hip-Hop America; Ishmael Reed’s poetry anthology, From Totems to Hip-Hop; The Hip-Hop Generation by Bakari Kitwana; When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost by Joan Morgan; and Vibe History of Hip-Hop all dissect the culture from within and without with clearheaded intellect. Others, such as the Ego Trip’s Book of Rap Lists and Ego Trip’s Big Book of Racism, make their point with fierce, bitter humor as freewheeling and embracive as hip-hop itself. Nineties academics such as Professors Herb Boyd, Cornel West, Tricia Rose, and Michael Eric Dyson bring the after-party to the ivory tower to dissect the breadth of hip-hop’s implications, particularly now, when the culture has attained a global scope.

  The following cursory overview skips over the three decades of hip-hop and the socioeconomic factors that shaped the hip-hop revolution. The purpose here is to trace hip-hop’s path to national exposure via mainstream avenues such as MTV, to understand how the culture has spread and been perceived by generations so far. In doing so, I hope to shed light on the effect that Eminem has had on hip-hop at the turn of the century and how, when, and why hip-hop shaped him. Hip-hop is such an elastic-rich culture that tracing its artistic roots is a question of how deep to dig.

  A musicologist bent on true beginnings would begin in Africa, tracing the slave ships and slave songs to the Caribbean and, ultimately, to America. In Africa, tribes used a variety of rhythm instruments to communicate over distance, including, as their instrument-building skills advanced, talking drums. Among the Ashanti of West Africa, the drums were the town criers and first newspapers. Flexing lengths of animal hide stretched along the sides of the drum, the drummer could achieve a variety of tones, bending them to mimic the octave changes that were employed in African languages to change the meaning of words. The intricate rhythms traditionally retold the tribe’s past glories in celebratory ceremonies but were also used in war and mourning, as well as for sending messages to neighboring villages more quickly than a swift runner could.