Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  Eminem was the last member of D12 to create his alter ego, because the summer of 1997 was a rough one for Marshall Mathers. He worked a lot when he had a job, he drank a lot, he fought a lot, and one ordinary morning, found himself on the path to his dream. Slim Shady became his D12 character and Eminem immediately created a list of words to rhyme with it. Slim Shady became his avenging angel, a figure he pictured as a mummy with its wrists slit; a fiend without feeling and beyond life, death, or caring; a monster freak who only knew how to say and do what no one was supposed to.

  “I was taking a shit, swear to God,” Eminem says about the morning he thought up Slim Shady. “I was sitting on the toilet and boom, the name hit me. I started thinking of all of these words I could rhyme with it. So I wiped my ass and got off the pot and went and called everybody I knew. I was like, ‘Bada-boom, badabing, wanna go with it, or no?’ Once I came up with the Shady concept, I wrote the Slim Shady EP in two weeks.” He had found himself and he was serious about it: Eminem showed up to record what became the Slim Shady EP with the Bass Brothers with a $50 “Slim Shady” tattoo on his left arm, complementing the “Eminem” on his right.

  The Slim Shady EP laid the groundwork for The Slim Shady LP, executive-produced by Dr. Dre and released February 23, 1999. That included seven songs, three of which made it onto Eminem’s full-length major-label debut: “I Just Don’t Give a Fuck,” “If I Had,” and “Just the Two of Us,” Eminem’s first murder ballad to his baby’s mother, Kim. The EP has all the Slim Shady essentials: flippant nihilism, self-loathing, destruction, acute battle raps, fucked-up family pathology, and comedy, both subtle and slapstick.

  Although the EP is seven songs long, two are shortened, radioedit versions of other songs on the album. So in just five main songs are the roots of the blueprint of Eminem’s success. Slim Shady is his avenger, anointed for bad behavior, but the album also hints at the three-character harmony that would soon develop in Eminem’s music: Slim Shady, Marshall Mathers, and Eminem.

  In 1997, Eminem and Kim Scott made their way through a few houses in drug-infested neighborhoods further into the city limits than either had ever lived. After stray bullets hit their house and chronic burglaries cleaned them out, Kim and Hailie moved in with her mother in the white suburb of Warren, while Eminem couchsurfed, eventually renting a room with a few friends in a house on 7 Mile Road. “We were paying this guy rent because his name was on the lease,” Eminem recalls, “but he was keeping all the money.” Everyone got evicted. “The night before I went to the Rap Olympics in L.A., I had to break into that fucking house and sleep on the floor because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No heat, no electric, everything was shut off. I woke up the next day and went to L.A. I was so fucking pissed then. I had gotten fired from Gilbert’s for the second time, we got evicted, and that guy ran off—we still haven’t found that motherfucker.”

  Paul Rosenberg, recently signed on as his manager, had been raising awareness of Eminem in New York, and met up with Wendy Day, CEO of the Rap Coalition, an influential artists’ advocacy group that co-sponsored a competition for up-and-coming MCs, dubbed the Rap Olympics. When Paul met Wendy, she already knew Eminem from one of the many rap conventions he attended in the midnineties. “Wendy had met him at some music seminar in Detroit,” Rosenberg recalls with a sly grin. “He used to walk around with, like, a stack of vinyl after he ran out of his tapes. He’d pressed his whole Infinite album onto one piece of vinyl. You’re not even supposed to press vinyl when you’re putting out an independent album on your own, but he did. He had this whole album on vinyl, that’s how he used to shop himself around. So he gave her one when he met her.” The Rap Olympics featured team competition and categories for the rappers to compete as individuals. Day wanted Eminem for her Rap Coalition team for the same reason Eminem had become a fixture in the Detroit freestyle pecking order: No one had ever seen anything quite like him before. “When he came to New York, he freestyled at one of Wendy’s workshops and she added him to the team,” Rosenberg says. “Our thing was great. He was going to do the team battle, but our focus was the individual battle. That battle ended up taking so long that he didn’t get to compete in the team battle. Actually, the individual battle took so long that they didn’t really get to finish the Rap Olympics.”

  By the time he reached the Olympics, Eminem was at the end of his rope, financially and spiritually. He was hungry for a break. “Right before the battle in L.A., I took him to a bar,” Rosenberg says. “I said, ‘I know you want to win, but if you don’t, it’s okay. Do your best.’ My god, he was unbelievable. I was sitting in there next to this big black guy and after the first round he shouted, ‘Just give it to the white boy, it’s over. Just give it to the white boy.’”

  “I went in there just shitting on everyone, man,” Eminem says of the competition. “I had nothing to lose. I took second place and I was very unused to that. Everyone said I looked like I was ready to cry. And I was so mad. Steaming, dog. I had nowhere to live back home. The winner of Rap Olympics got, like, five hundred dollars. I could have used that, man. Second place got nothing.”

  By most reports, Eminem was defeated twice at national MC competitions in 1997 by the same man, J.U.I.C.E., a talented freestyle MC from Chicago, who took first prize away from Eminem at the Rap Olympics as well as Scribble Jam in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many who witnessed both called it a victory for Eminem or a tie that Eminem lost to his competitor’s loyal fanbase or a color bias. Many others don’t even remember who won, just who was good. For his part, Paul Rosenberg remembers otherwise.

  “This guy named Other-Wize beat him [at the 1997 Rap Olympics],” Rosenberg says. “I’d have to see a tape of it to see how he actually won. I think Eminem won. But it doesn’t matter. He really wanted to win, he could have used the money. But I knew that even though he didn’t, it was great for us—it was exposure we could turn into something.” Rosenberg was right; Eminem didn’t win that battle, but he did win the war. Two Interscope assistants, Dean Geistlinger and Evan Bogart, son of deceased disco kingpin and Casablanca Records founder Neil, approached Rosenberg and Eminem after the Rap Olympics. They felt strongly about Eminem but were careful about pushing his music across the boss’s desk. “We stayed in touch with them,” Rosenberg says. At the time he still worked as a personal-injury lawyer and stayed after hours at his firm to call labels on the West Coast on Eminem’s behalf. “At some point I called the guys we knew at Interscope and was like, ‘OK, we’re coming to town; I’m bringing Em out and I want to set up a meeting because he’s starting to get really discouraged.’ There were a whole slew of labels flirting with it, but nobody was biting because he was white. Aside from the moderate success of 3rd Bass, there really hadn’t been a successful, credible white rapper. They thought he was talented, but they were scared of it.” This time Rosenberg’s push worked: The tape made it to Jimmy Iovine, the Interscope Records president, then to Dr. Dre.

  There have been many versions told of how Dr. Dre came to hear Eminem. In one Dre heard him rap on the nationally syndicated Friday night hip-hop showcase The Wake Up Show, with King Tech and DJ-rapper-turned-MTV News correspondent Sway Calloway, and phoned the studio. Other variations of the story of Eminem’s discovery state that either Dr. Dre, Iovine, or both approached the rapper at the end of the ’97 Olympics. A third says that Dr. Dre happened upon a tape of Eminem’s Slim Shady EP on the floor of Iovine’s gym. The truth is that the night after taking second place in the Rap Olympics, Eminem freestyled on The Wake Up Show along with a group of rappers who had also competed. Dr. Dre did, in fact, hear him, and remembered Eminem’s voice when Iovine handed him a tape sometime afterward.

  “I was at Jimmy’s house and he played the tape for me,” Dre says about hearing the Slim Shady EP for the first time. “He asked me what I thought of it and I said, ‘Find him. Now.’ I thought the tape was incredible, know what I’m sayin’? In my entire career in the music industry, I’ve never found anything from a demo tape. Usually
somebody knew somebody or someone was brought up to the studio. When I heard it, I didn’t even know he was white. The content turned me on more than anything, and the way he was flipping it. Dark comedy is what I call it. It was incredible, I had to meet him right away.”

  The Bass Brothers and Paul Rosenberg pooled some money to fund their trip to L.A. to meet Dr. Dre; the accommodations were as luxurious as Eminem’s back home. “We were in some shitty-ass motel with a hard-ass cement floor,” the rapper says. “When Paul told me that Dre called I was like, ‘Get the fuck out of here, man.’ I thought he was lying. We had gotten jerked around by so many labels by that point.”

  Soon after, the contracts were signed. It wasn’t long before Dr. Dre introduced Eminem to the world as he’d done with Snoop Dogg about half a decade earlier (Snoop’s 1993 debut, Doggystyle, became the first debut album to enter the national charts at number one.) Though FBT would work on Eminem’s debut, furnishing their services to Interscope Records, Dr. Dre would be the influential face man and public mentor, bestowing upon Eminem a flawless hip-hop credibility to silence naysayers from the start. After they broke the ice, Dr. Dre was eager to begin recording with his new apprentice. “When I met Dre I was nervous, man,” Eminem says. “I was just like, ‘what’s up,’ and looked away. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t want to be starstruck or kiss his ass too much. I told him later that I’ve been a fan of his since I was little, since N.W.A. He was like, ‘I didn’t even think you liked my shit.’ I was like, ‘Dog, you’re motherfuckin’ Dr. Dre!’ I’m just a little white boy from Detroit. I had never seen stars, let alone Dr. Dre. That shit was bananas.”

  “Em just couldn’t believe he was sitting there and that Dre liked his music,” Rosenberg says. “What else can you say? The guy’s sitting in a room with Dre and Dre is like, ‘I want to fuck with you.’”

  The first day they worked together, Dr. Dre and Eminem recorded four songs in six hours. Two of them, “My Name Is” and “Role Model,” made the album and distinctly defined the Slim Shady persona. They are an invitation and a warning, an arrival with a disclaimer of all that will follow. Like Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?,” “My Name Is” is a hummable anthem that trademarked Eminem in just one song. “My Name Is” is nursery-rhyme catchy, a showcase of Eminem’s humor over a bouncy beat built around the funky piano hook of the eclectic, openly gay, African vocalist Labi Siffree’s “I Got the …”—ironic, considering the accusations in Eminem’s near future.

  “My Name Is” did more than introduce Eminem to the world, it established a tradition: the caliber and tone of the singles that would announce each of his following albums (“The Real Slim Shady” for 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP and “Without Me” for 2002’s The Eminem Show). “My Name Is” set the precedent of prediction that now flows through all of Eminem’s lyrics: It is a debut single from the point of view of the already-famous. It is a dictated message to a huge, preexisting fan base by an artist who had barely been heard outside of his hometown.

  When The Slim Shady LP was released on February 23, 1999, the pop-culture landscape wasn’t ready. Due to the heavy rotation “My Name Is” had gotten on radio and on MTV for nearly a month, the LP debuted at number two, selling more than 300,000 copies in a week.

  “When ‘My Name Is’ was released on MTV, his underground buzz was as big as an underground buzz could get back then,” says Paul Rosenberg. “The underground has changed, but at the time you had a scene that was really anti-MTV and all of the Puff Daddy jiggy videos. The underground wanted some real rap. These kids bought vinyl and really searched for something different than mainstream hip-hop. Eminem did a show at Tramps in New York that was completely sold out and he didn’t even have an album out. And that is a pretty big deal. It was a great show. That crowd was all fans, some who had seen him perform before, some who had bought tickets just to see him. From the beginning he was an MTV staple, so that puts him automatically with the kids. It depends on where he is playing or what tour he was on, but Eminem played to a lot of different crowds.”

  The album holding on to number one the week The Slim Shady LP was released was TLC’s Fanmail, anchored there by its mooching men caveat, “No Scrubs.” The number three spot was held by The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The spotlight for the past year had belonged to women: Celine Dion, the chest-beating diva whose chart-topping ballad “My Heart Will Go On,” from the film Titanic, went on and on; Lauryn Hill’s string of hits, “Ex-Factor,” “Doo Wop (That Thing),” and “Everything Is Everything,” blazed across the charts; Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” rallied for girls’ nights out; and Madonna returned with “Ray of Light.” The Backstreet Boys and the Spice Girls rode atop the first wave of teen pop, the Spice Girls enjoying a pair of albums on the charts simultaneously, and both groups logging well over one hundred weeks on the Top 200 Albums list, while newcomers such as Britney Spears and *NSYNC nipped at their heels. In rap, Will Smith’s Big Willie Style, Mase’s Harlem World, and Puff Daddy’s No Way Out led a celebration of all things fly and material with, in the case of Puffy and Mase, a side salad of gangsta posturing. Jay-Z and DMX represented the hip-hop streets in quality while multimillion-dollar record cartels, such as Master P’s No Limit Records and Cash Money Records, did in quantity, selling mountains of CDs yet remaining virtually unnoticed by the mainstream media. Will Smith, for his part, made a point of succeeding in rap without cursing or killing in his records—a fact Eminem would point out in “The Real Slim Shady” before asserting that he couldn’t do the same and wouldn’t. The rock world of the day was drowning in Pearl Jam’s legacy: the insipid, introspective warblings of anonymous bands such as Matchbox 20, Creed, and Third Eye Blind. They would soon be pummeled by the sound of testosterone: the amped frat-boy rock of Limp Bizkit, the aggressive weirdness of Korn, and all those who followed.

  You do want a piece of me: Eminem performs at the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts, April 14, 1999.

  The forty-first annual Grammy Awards celebrated the music of 1998 and were held in February 1999, weeks before the release of “My Name Is.” The ceremony might well have been a wake: the acts commanding the public eye suggested a mood about to change drastically, a take-over of sensitive diversity so complete that it could only give way to the extremes of teen pop, hardcore rap, and rap-rock. The year of the woman, with females dominating nearly every major award, would be the last for some time. The Grammy for Album of the Year (among others) went to Lauryn Hill for The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; Record of the Year and Pop Female Vocal was “My Heart Will Go On,” by Celine Dion; Madonna won her first Grammy after sixteen years in the business for Ray of Light, the year’s Best Pop Album; while Sheryl Crow won Rock Album of the Year for The Globe Sessions and Alanis Morissette’s “Uninvited” took home Best Rock Song and Rock Female Vocal. The Beastie Boys’ Hello Nasty took home Best Alternative Music Performance while in the rap categories, Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” and Jay-Z’s Volume 2—Hard Knock Life took home Best Solo and Best Album, respectively. The top grossing films of 1998 were Saving Private Ryan and Armageddon, while the Best Picture Oscar went to Shakespeare in Love. In 1998, the only hint of the coming of Slim Shady consciousness on the big screen was the politically incorrect gross-out opus There’s Something About Mary. Just a year later, tastes sure had changed. Along with the shoe-in box-office monster of the year, Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace, Americans flocked to all-things Shady: slapstick, violence, horror, and the pathology of the American family. The top grossing films of 1999 were the creepy ghost story The Sixth Sense, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, The Matrix, and the gritty scarefest The Blair Witch Project. The Oscar for Best Picture that year went to the brilliant, dark, dysfunctional family drama American Beauty. The world was not only ready for Slim Shady, we were looking for him.

  In the few previous years, the music world had seen too many heroes die, and with them the idealism inspired by what see
med like transformative revolutions in rock and rap. Kurt Cobain’s death stopped the progress far too early, while hip-hop’s reigning rappers, Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G. and a.k.a. Biggie Smalls), were gunned down in their prime, just as their music could no longer be ignored by the mainstream. Tupac and Biggie Smalls did get covered of course, like so many rappers before them, for the violence that surrounded their lives, deaths, and music. In the face of such real tragedy, record companies’ and consumers’ tastes turned to the positivity of the earthy, female variety as well as the low-calorie sweetener of teen pop. By 2000, the year Eminem released The Marshall Mathers LP and *NSYNC released No Strings Attatched—the album that, at 2.5 million, still holds the record for the most albums sold in one week—these two were each other’s foil, the equally popular camps polarizing teen music consciousness: on one side, the coy sexuality and synchronized dance of Britney Spears and company; on the other, the bird-flipping angst of Eminem.