Whatever You Say I Am Page 17

  “For white rappers, there’s such a fine line between shit you can and can’t do,” Eminem says. “The main thing is to be yourself. A lot of white rappers—look at Vanilla Ice. Yo, he got exposed. You can only put up a front for so long before people start coming out of the woodwork like, ‘Yo, you didn’t grow up here, you didn’t do this.’ You talk about guns in your rhymes and you never shot a gun! Talkin’ about shit you never lived, you’ve never even seen. If you ain’t got the balls to walk up and sock somebody in the mouth, don’t write it down, because if you say that shit on wax, you’re gonna get tested. If you’re not that type of person, don’t say it! Don’t talk about growing up in hard times in the city if you grew up in the fucking suburbs. White rappers, if they grew up in the suburbs, should play off it, like, ‘Hi! I’m white.’”

  chapter 5

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

  At first it confuses people. It’s like seeing a black guy do country music.

  —Dr. Dre. 1999

  The West Side Highway hums like radio static. The light poles and parking signs lining Forty-sixth Street are plastered with stickers, some still bright but advertising a faded product. The newest ones have posters to match, all red and white, like name tags, with black scrawl in the box: “Hi! My name is Slim Shady!” Fifty yards of dressed-up hip-hop—clean jeans, sneakers, and many skimpy skirts—trails from the door of the Sound Factory. Heels tap and bodies bounce in the midnight March air.

  A white limousine slithers up the block. It waits across the street, in front of the door. Four young men stroll up and look in the window. When nothing happens, they lean on a nearby wall. The door opens ten minutes later and a large black man leads out a pack of white men. The men against the wall are perplexed.

  “Who y’all with?” one asks. No one seems to have heard him.

  “Yo, man, who y’all with?” he asks again, walking over.

  “Eminem,” I tell him.

  “Who?”

  “Eminem. He’s signed to Dr. Dre’s label.”

  “Oh yeah?” he says, skeptical, surveying the pack of whiteys. “He performing?”

  “Yeah, three songs.”

  “I’m gonna have to see that,” he says. “Hey, yo, can I come in wit you?”

  Eminem, buried in an XXXL hooded sweatshirt, emerges from the car and we move to the door. We wait in a cluster, while the eyes on line scan us for a clue as to why we made it to the front so quickly. The answer hangs along the block, but no one shouts out. They look on, Manhattan unimpressed; but it could be disbelief. It is Friday, March 5, 1999, at a large, weekly hip-hop party. A pack of nonfamous white guys and their black security guard just cruised up in a king-size white stretch and entered the building.

  Inside the entrance, three guards much bigger than Eminem’s guard pat people down and trace them with metal detectors. Pockets are emptied, arms are uplifted, and shoes are scrutinized. On a chair sits a few knives, a box cutter, and a pair of brass knuckles.

  “You had any problems in here?” someone behind me asks a guard.

  “Somebody was poppin’ shots outside a couple of weeks ago,” the guard says. “They was driving by and shootin’ in the air like cowboys. We knew who they was and we saw ’em, so we don’t let ’em in no more. They’re not too happy about that, but it’s all good.”

  Downstairs is a lounge, hot and crowded. The patrons are drinking, jostling for room to stand or dance or smoke, to turn away or make headway with a member of the opposite sex. Some people are flossy, sporting jewels and new clothes; others are in sweatshirts and big jackets, holding Heinekens. It is a predominantly mainstream crowd, turned out at the week’s end to hear the hip-hop hits of the moment and the classics that never get old. The DJ and dance floor are upstairs; here, the bumping is muffled. A few underground MCs, record industry people, and journalists sip cocktails in the booths or stand shoulder to shoulder. We in Eminem’s entourage fill a small dressing room too easily, and the guard closes the door. As soon as he does, there’s a knock on it—a sound that won’t stop for the half hour we’re in here. Most will be turned away, but this knock is warranted: It’s Jonathan “Shecky Green” Schecter, cofounder of the The Source magazine and founder of Game Recordings, the hip-hop record label/softcore-porn video production house that celebrates, in image more than in music, the fruits of gangsta fantasy: money, rap, and curvaceous ethnic ladies. Earlier this year Game made themselves known with their second twelve-inch release: Bad Meets Evil/Nuttin’ to Do, by Royce Da 5′ 9″. Featuring Eminem, it was released just as Eminem’s buzz took off. Schecter is armed with the spoils of Game: champagne and a pair of video house talents—sexy, nearly naked black women in leather bikini tops. Crossing this full room is like playing a game of checkers; only diagonal moves to any open space are possible. Schecter and the Game girls map a path to Eminem, Royce passes out Heinekens, and someone fills the room with blunt smoke.

  Eminem sits on the dressing-room counter, leaning against the mirror, a Game girl at each leg. The security guard plays bouncer, quizzing the crowd at the door. He turns away a group of girls who just want to say hello, then a pair of dudes who are not who they claim to be. The door closes. There’s a knock again: MC Serch, one-third of the well-respected, early-nineties white rap group 3rd Bass. The rapper comes in and gives Eminem a hug. Three years from now, Serch will leave his native New York to host a morning radio show in Detroit for WJLB, the station that Eminem mentions in “Rock Bottom” (The Slim Shady LP) to criticize them for their lip-service-only support of local hip-hop. Two knocks later, West Coast rapper Ras Kass slides in; the room is now past full and Ras must leave his boys outside. Well-wishers work their way toward Eminem, who holds court with his two newest fans.

  “Can I get an autograph?” one Game girl asks.

  “Yeah, I can give you an autograph,” he says, pulling a Sharpie marker from his pocket. “You got something you want me to sign?”

  “Yeah,” she says and pulls one breast from her bikini.

  “Yo, you want me to sign you?” he says, smirking.

  “Yeah, right there.”

  The scrawl matches the posters, angular and racy, and stretches across her breast and cleavage: SLIM SHADY. She giggles.

  Insistent knocks go unanswered; Eminem’s security guard just leans against the door now. After a few minutes, he opens it a crack to see who is pounding. Standing there is a guy who says he manages Miilkbone, the white rapper whose anti-Eminem track, “Presenting Miilkbone,” will be released next month on the ill-conceived (produced from his prison cell) Death Row Records compilation Suge Knight Represents: Chronic 2000. On the rap, Miilkbone responds to a line he heard in Eminem’s “Just Don’t Give a Fuck,” from The Slim Shady LP. On his track, Eminem laced together the names of white rappers past, including Everlast and 3rd Bass, not so much on a mission to insult them as to proclaim his mission to defy the white-rap stereotype as a “quest to crush a Miilkbone.” Miilkbone didn’t see it that way. Miilkbone’s manager is denied entrance. Next there is a trio of white girls who squeeze by the manager, attempting to pass Eminem’s security guard while he is talking. They’ve tried three times so far. Patience failed to get them in; flirting, too. This time, they try sympathy.

  The guard is holding the door open, blocking traffic, allowing smoke and heat out of the room and only air in.

  “We just want to say hi. We’ve come all the way from New Jersey,” one of the girls says.

  “Oh, yeah, all the way from New Jersey?” the guard responds.

  “Yeah!” another says, hopeful. “We came all the way just to see him. We love him. We promise we won’t bother anybody. We just want to say hi and we’ll leave.”

  “Can’t do it. Too many bodies in here.”

  “But we came all the way here just to see him,” the first insists, “We’re small, we can fit. You won’t even know we’re in there.”

  “You’re gonna see him ons
tage in a minute. Ladies, you gotta move back.”

  A smallish guy in a baggy leather jacket tries to slip through the door.

  “Hey, who you with?” Eminem’s security guard asks.

  “I was just in there, dog. I’m with all of them, yo.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m K, man. KG.” The guy looks past the guard into the room at one of Royce’s crew facing him. “Yo, dog, what’s up man? How you feelin’?”

  “Aiight.”

  “He wit you?” the guard asks.

  “Nah. I don’t know him.”

  “Who you with?” the guard asks the guy.

  “I was just in there, man. I know the guy at the label.”

  “What label?”

  “Shady’s label, man. Dre’s label,” the guy says. “I’m KG, man.”

  “There’s no one here from the label tonight,” the guard says. “Keep it moving.”

  KG steps back but doesn’t leave. The girls move in for another round. “Sir, I promise, we’ll just say hi and leave,” two say, almost at the same time. “We promise, we just want to say hi.”

  We in the room move toward the door when it opens, breathing in the cooler air as the smoke escapes.

  The guard has had it. “Everybody! Get away from this door right now. Do not block it. Move outside unless you were invited in here. I am closing this door!”

  A line of people wring themselves out of the room, Game girls included, then the door again seals in the bong-water humidity. In the confusion, to the Jersey girls’ dismay, two different teenage white girls have pushed themselves in and now sidle over to Eminem.

  “Hey, Slim Shady,” one of them says, “I like your song.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Eminem says. “Which one?”

  “The one with the video,” she says. “It’s really good.”

  “Yeah, when you dress up like Marilyn Manson,” the other says. “That shit’s really funny.”

  “Thanks a lot.” He looks unimpressed. “Hey, have you met Paul?” he says, looking at his manager. “He’s a fuckin’ fuck. His life is over.”

  “You’re too late,” Paul Rosenberg says, bemused. “I already quit.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well you’re so fired then that you’re rehired, you fuckin’ fuck. You know why? Because you’re fat, bald, and Jewish.”

  The girls smile awkwardly.

  “Can I get a beer?” one asks someone next to the cooler. He doesn’t notice.

  “So you’re from Detroit?” her friend asks Eminem. “What’s it like?”

  I predict, to myself, that this will end her interview.

  “It’s aiight,” Eminem says, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Hey, you two know Dee, right? You’ve met Dee?”

  The girl crinkles her nose. “Dee who?” she says.

  “Deez nuts!” Eminem shouts in her face. The joke is a hip-hop test and it looks like these girls have failed. “Deez Nuts” is a classic gangsta rap track featuring Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Warren G, and Daz from Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992); it starts with a phone call skit much like the joke Eminem just played. “Deez nuts” is big in Eminem’s crew right now; anyone answering a “who” or “what” often gets “deez nuts” as the response. “Deez Nuts” are tough to avoid even if you know the joke; as the newest hanger-on, I myself am served plenty of “deez nuts,” the loudest set coming in the middle of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. I didn’t stand a chance, anyway; interviewing is a minefield of “who” and “what” questions. Before I was finished, though, I doled out “deez nuts” myself. Once. I’m not sure, but I think it signaled the end of that joke’s run in Eminem’s crew.

  Everyone in the room is laughing, including the two young women, but it’s clear they don’t quite know why. Eminem stares at them with a toothy, he-crazy grin.

  One of them pokes him. “You’re funny!” she says.

  “Am I funny? Paul, am I funny?” Eminem asks.

  An authoritative knock at the door reveals a man in a headset. “You’re good to go,” he says. “They’re all ready up there.”

  The crowd in the lounge has grown and is now pressing up against the dressing-room door. Eminem’s security guard and the club staffer back us all up, and we file out in a line, Eminem in the middle. I hear drive-by comments from the VIP peanut gallery:

  “Who’s that?”

  “Yo, that’s him?”

  “He’s a little guy.”

  “He is so cute. He doesn’t look that good on TV.”

  “Oh my God, I have to meet him.”

  “Yo, Shady, mushrooms, dawg!”

  “Why he rollin’ like dat?”

  “Dre got a white Snoop, yo.”

  The dance floor is full of grinding bodies, so is the balcony overlooking it. The DJ fades the music and announces Aftermath/Interscope-recording-artist Eminem’s performance as we enter the room. DJ Stretch Armstrong waits on a platform in front of us. He drops the needle onto the groove of “Scary Movies,” juggling and winding it back and forth between the turntables. Heads peer from the balcony. I sidle onto the platform, between two people on the back edge. Eminem and Royce hop onto the platform and pick up their mikes.

  Royce strides from side to side, loosing his verse, while Eminem, loose from his dinner of more substances than sustenance, paces stage right, pointing and punctuating Royce’s lines with shouted whats. The two are raw, tight hip-hop; the song, two long serrated battle raps bound by the chorus “Y’all want drama? Wanna make a scary movie?”

  This isn’t the kind of jiggy anthem that was rocking the room minutes ago. The audience stands still; the expressions are hard to read, but I place them between intrigued and unsure—and stuck at “What the fuck?” The three white Jersey girls whom I recognize from the doorway of the dressing room are in front of the stage, bobbing with enthusiasm, though they don’t seem to know the song. Eminem stands, eyes closed, his beat hand—the right—keeping time with definitive gestures, as it does when he scribbles rhymes on a pad. The song ends fast on his last word.

  “OK,” he says, gathering his pants, which are baggy and prone to falling down. “I’m gonna take it back for a minute.” Eminem joins Royce center stage as Armstrong rolls out Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.” Royce throws his hands in the air. “C’mon!” he shouts. “Put ’em up, yo! Sing that shit!!”

  Bodies start to sway and arms are raised in allegiance. All eyes are on Eminem. He will prove himself now or lose them forever; by the end of this song, he’ll be either an MC with skill or a Caucasian karaoke casualty.

  Eminem commences his performance, his delivery laid back, a mix of his wacky modulated monotone and Snoop Dogg’s silky drawl. The room awakens again as the crowd begins to move; the energy is tangible, spreading, and palpably warm.

  “Ain’t nuthin’ but a G thang …,” Eminem sings. Armstrong cuts the music.

  “Baaby!” the crowd shouts.

  “Two loc’d-out Gs goin’ …,” Eminem raps, avoiding, as he always does, the word niggaz.

  “Craaazay!” they shout.

  Eminem scampers herky-jerky across the stage, bobbing his head and with one hand holding his pants. The crowd is won. They’re dancing while watching the action; people hang over the balcony railing to see. Royce and Eminem meet at the front of the stage, chanting the song’s chorus. On the last beat, Armstrong cuts from mentor to apprentice, splicing “‘G’ Thang” into “My Name Is.”

  Anyone who didn’t know, knows now. Of the four times I see Eminem perform “My Name Is” tonight, this one will be the best. Earlier, on Staten Island, he faced teeny-bopper reality. Later, he will do his thing for the beautiful people. But this crowd is home to him: skeptics, haters, new fans, devotees, and indifferents. He loses himself in the song, running out ahead of the beat, then falling back into it. His eyes are closed and he nearly falls from the stage, throwing himself back from the edge just in time. A formidable black woman in front has been watching his performance with a wri
nkled brow. She gives it up finally, cracking a huge grin at the line “My English teacher wanted to flunk me in junior high. / Thanks a lot, next semester I’ll be thirty-five.” She dances in place and raises her hands at the chorus, singing the loopy hook like the white teen girls next to her.

  Armstrong cuts the music during the last chorus to initiate an audience call-and-response, which grows to a loud crescendo, then the music stops.

  “Good night,” Eminem says. The mike thuds when he drops it, unlike his pants when he drops them, flashing bright geometric-print boxer shorts. The audience cheers. Eminem jumps off the back of the stage, dragging a human wake behind him. There is a mad rush to the dressing room and the knocking begins anew, more insistent than ever. The air in the room is dank. Eminem sits, sweaty, lit with adrenaline and slaps from his crew. A new line of well-wishers trail from the door.

  I leave the room to catch a breath. A white girl who is jockeying for door position tells her friend, “I love him and you know I don’t love hip-hop.”

  “I know,” the friend answers. “He’s, like, so original! And he’s so cute. He’s perfect. I want to marry him.”

  Her friend nods.

  “And I will, too,” the other continues. “I know when he sees me, we’ll be together forever. He’s perfect for me.”

  When I return to the room, I squeeze into my place by the door. Eminem is surrounded by friends and strangers, drinking water, and not really smiling. He doesn’t look mad or glad, or under siege. I critique his game face, and though I’ve only been with the camp for eight hours and he hasn’t directly said a word to me yet, in that moment I see everything. He is raw star quality, fuming with the entitlement of deep, broad, untapped talent. He’s not the extrovert I thought he was, but he can play the part. I watch him scan the room, his vision attuned to the details, yet focused far, far beyond here.

  Before our flight to Detroit, we sit in a booth at the food court in Terminal B of Newark Liberty International Airport. Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas, Philly cheese steak sandwiches, orange curly fries, withered salads in domed plastic cups, and oily cookies are lined up. We’ve missed three flights already after last night’s shows, which actually ended this morning. My headache is finally gone, faded by medication.