Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  “Ohhh, shit!” he says, pulling free and falling back on his ass. “I’m going to jail tonight!”

  As promised, after the last song, “My Name Is,” we’re immediately escorted into an alley where the limousines await. Some of the fans break through the security and chase us out the door where those who didn’t get into the oversold show are already waiting. We pile into the car, flushed with the adrenaline rush of our exit. As we wait for the police to clear a drivable path, a sexy young girl who looks no more than fifteen taps on the window, inches from Eminem.

  “I want to fuck you,” we see her say. She pulls down the front of her halter top, exposing all of her cleavage. She flicks her pierced tongue at the window.

  “I want to fuck you, too,” Eminem says. “But I won’t.” He looks at her a moment longer and then sits back, his head deep in the corner of the seat, his eyes darting about, taking us in.

  “Hey, you fuckin’ fucks! Why is everybody so quiet, you fuckin’ fat skinny fucks! Fuck you, you fuckin’ fucks! You’re so quiet, you’re tired, you’re so boring you’re snoring, you’re so garbage, your life is over!”

  WHETHER WE ADMIT IT OR NOT, Slim Shady is this millennium’s jester, the pop-culture punk come to piss us all off, the underachieving class clown bent on disturbing the peace. He’d be a bright student if he applied himself, but Slim Shady spends his mind on jokes. Slim Shady is a cracked-out crack-up who boasts in “Role Model” that he gets so high because he hits the trees (i.e., pot buds) harder than Sonny Bono. But Slim Shady claimed victory in defeat. He is Eminem with exhausted options, a victorious last stand, gleeful and amoralistic, a demidemon with nothing to lose but his bad mood.

  Slim Shady transformed Eminem’s life and troubles into popculture iconography. The character’s nihilism defied all that was superficial and polite in popular entertainment with a smile as fake and unsettling as the testimonials on late-night infomercials. Slim Shady embodies the angry young white misanthrope who feels marginalized by society and feminized by feminism and who rejoices in the freedom of his uselessness. The sheer bitterness at the heart of Slim Shady’s extremity is presented in a cartoonish excess that waltzed into the mainstream like a Trojan horse, subverting societal norms rather than defying them as Eminem’s labelmate, the Goth shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, had done. Manson manipulated perceptions of gender and organized government and religion to upset convention in the midnineties, but his image as an androgynous space alien is too easy to relegate to the freakish outskirts of popular culture, rendering his message, as it were, easy to ignore. Manson became a two-dimensional effigy for disaffection and was burned as such in the wake of Columbine: Marilyn Manson was the perfect scapegoat god for teens so disenfranchised that they would shoot up their school.

  Eminem’s lyrical instigation left less room for misinterpretation than Marilyn Manson’s artier facade. The rapper’s neatly cropped blond hair, blue eyes, cute earrings, and boy-band good looks were too normal to ignore. On the strength of his outsider alter ego with nothing to lose, Eminem’s wit and dark humor entertained or repulsed casual observers, sometimes achieving both at once. He used Slim Shady to voice the deepest evil in his mind and make an example of bad behavior, then hid behind Slim when critics asked him to explain. Slim Shady did the deeds and thought the thoughts, not Eminem. This stance both criticized the importance of entertainment and acted as a convenient, infallible alibi, but the nuances of Eminem’s creation were, of course, lost on the mainstream. Among teenagers, Eminem was the Ferris Bueller of popular music, the shadowy legend who got away with everything, while Slim Shady, his rebel soldier, brought home Eminem’s dreams. Slim Shady landed him a record deal and won him hip-hop respect, MC battles, and starhood on par with legend—in four short years.

  In a hip-hop edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which rappers or their personas were the players, Puck, the comedy’s fairy instigator, could be no one but Slim Shady. The comparison is valid when you closely examine Eminem’s use of Slim Shady as a humorous device. Slim Shady is like Shakespeare’s Fool: the character who darts across the plot to tip the audience to truths unseen by the other characters. The Fool is sly, smarter than he lets on, and concealed by his comedy. He may annoy or illuminate, but he won’t be ignored. Like any mischief-makers worth their weight, be they political, like Abbie Hoffman, or mythological, like the Greek god Pan, Slim Shady is a savior in a nuisance suit—a needed, uninvited messenger. Slim Shady is also compulsive, neurotic, and in possession of both the knack for getting into trouble and the cunning to extricate himself from it.

  The reeling rhyme animal in action at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, September 10, 1999.

  “I’m bringing cutting edge humor to hip-hop.” Eminem said a few months before The Slim Shady LP debuted. “It’s been missing that for a while.” In 1999, mainstream hip-hop was serious and seriously materialistic, fuelled as much by industry standards as consumer taste: Jay-Z’s Volume 2—Hard Knock Life and Volume 3—The Life and Times of S. Carter, Puff Daddy’s Forever, Missy Elliot’s Da Real World, as well as the Notorious B.I.G.’s first and 2Pac’s third posthumous albums were the dominant barometers of the time. Humor, sarcasm, and the exploration of anything other than the spoils of the hip-hop life were in short supply. Volume 2—Hard Knock Life is one of Jay-Z’s most somber offerings, fueled by the single “Hard Knock Life,” which featured a sample from the Annie soundtrack. It was the most crossover-minded collection of his career. His follow-up, Volume 3—The Life and Times of S. Carter, was a favorite buoyed by the boasting single “Big Pimpin’.” Puff Daddy’s Forever depicted the high life as a full-time job, complete with Cristal memories and forty-karat dreams. Missy Elliot’s sober second album relied more heavily on hip-hop cliché than she had ever and would ever again. In 1999, Cash Money Records and Master P’s No Limit Records, two Southern labels whose image epitomized ghetto excess, made their mark. Both labels had been raking in tens of millions of dollars since 1995 with minimal mainstream exposure and no major-label distribution; but deals with Universal Records and Priority Records, respectively brought their sound to the masses. Rapper B.G. of the Cash Money family put a term to the material age with the anthem “Bling Bling,” from the 1999 album Chopper City in the Ghetto. The phrase was slang for all things shiny and pricey, from having enough ice (diamonds) to skate on, to Lorinser rims and Yokohama tires on every (note the “every”) ride in the garage, a combination that can average $2,000 per wheel. The bling-bling philosophy was really more eighties than nineties: it was conspicuous consumption, the belief that you were only living when you were blinging.

  Flaunting possessions and referring to brand names in rap lyrics are as old as hip-hop itself, but in the late nineties the trend grew elitist. Where goods were once a piece of the picture, they took center stage and were upgraded exponentially, making hungry bystanders of much of the hip-hop nation. Where Run-D.M.C. once rapped about their Adidas, Puffy now rapped about Prada; where rap gear once meant a Troop tracksuit and boombox, it had become diamonds, designer clothes, and cars. Hip-hop’s material lust complemented the pseudo-Mafioso imagery that dominated the East Coast groups of the day, and suggested a new pecking order, in which skills were honored but a stylish package was an equal priority. Hip-hop’s mainstream image in the bling era, to paraphrase the theme song to The Jeffersons, moved on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky. Sports jerseys were replaced by suits, and thuggish aliases gave way to pinkie-ring personas. Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy Records disseminated the style widely, transforming its artists from gangst-a to gangst-er. Puffy protégé Mase, formerly Mase Murder, became a white-suited Harlem mobster. Biggie Smalls’s cohorts, the Junior M.A.F.I.A., which launched Lil’ Kim and Lil’ Cease, towed the same line. Even Nas was caught up in the moment, mixing his literate street honesty with tales of gangster high life, and his street garb with fancier attire on two albums, I Am … The Autobiography and Nastradamus, both released in 1999. Many fans believed
Nas’s classic first album, Illmatic (1994) to be a fluke until the rapper returned to his roots with Stillmatic in 2001.

  At the same time, socially conscious hip-hop was left for dead. Acts such as Arrested Development and Digable Planets had charted hits in the early nineties, but aside from superstars like the Fugees, worthwhile “alternative” rappers like Black Sheep and Pharcyde received little record company promotion for their sophomore albums in the age of gangsta rap. Even the legacy of KRS-One—socially aware songs by rappers with a thug image—fell out of style, not to achieve any kind of mainstream chart success until Nas’s “I Can” in 2002.

  Premillennial mainstream hip-hop was thug life lite: an allegiance to the fruits of rap success and violent imagery without a celebration of the violence and death-obsession that surrounded the Tupac-Biggie Smalls years. At the same time, hip-hop artists and fans were obsessed with “keeping it real”: not putting on airs, telling lies, or forgetting your roots, even as the scene moved inextricably further from those roots. From late 1997 through 1999, following the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, it was as if hip-hop went on spring break and sent MTV footage of the good times: pool parties, speedboats, and more squadrons of Hummer SUVs than the marines had in Operation Desert Storm. The climate was even sunny and friendly enough for the G-rated rap of Will Smith, who scored with “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” and “Miami” from 1997’s Big Willie Style, although by 1999’s Willennium he had become a punch line for that nice-guy image. The rare artist, such as Jay-Z, could be street and bling, while eccentrics like Busta Rhymes stood out from the pack with hits such as “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See.”

  The dominant face of hip-hop in the late nineties reflected mainstream culture, whereas in the previous decades it had reflected a culture apart. Hip-hop’s material extravagance paralleled the technology-boom economy that turned lucky stockholders into lottery winners, while the benefits of a fatter economy were celebrated by all. Both the limitless Internet goldmine and the bling-bling universe broadcast on MTV portrayed a state of indelible rich bliss, but the high wore off and depression followed: The economy dipped, the dot-coms closed down or sold out, and hip-hop fans hungered for change.

  Well-heeled rap imagery was soon mocked by fans and dropped by artists. Mase, Puffy and Bad Boy Records’ shining star, saw diminishing sales, as the label affiliation that once worked to his advantage became a hindrance. He was so disillusioned by his days in rap that after a multiplatinum debut, he retired and became a minister, just as his second album, Double Up, was released. The LOX, the Bad Boy Records act who wrote, among other hits, Puffy’s bling-bling anthem “It’s All About the Benjamins,” deserted Bad Boy publicly for a rap coalition closer to their thug-image roots, DMX’s Ruff Ryders. The LOX blamed Puff Daddy for their momentarily cleaned-up, well-suited image, and songs like “If You Think I’m Jiggy” (a reinterpretation of Rod Stewart’s “If You Think I’m Sexy”) and “Get This” on their debut, Money, Power & Respect.

  It was fitting that the LOX, arguably some of the game’s most underrated rappers, fell in with DMX, the New York lyricist who took the throné of hardcore rap after the fall of 2Pac and Biggie Smalls. DMX and his Ruff Ryders were the most popular and contrary rap acts to thrive in the face of bling-bling hip-hop. His ascent was ten years in the making, by which time DMX had mastered his craft, combining street credibility and commercially appealing songwriting so well that he remains the first artist to have his first four albums debut at number one, beginning with It’s Dark and Hell is Hot in 1998. DMX tapped into what Eminem would a year later: Rap and music fans didn’t want to hear artists keeping it real, they wanted to feel artists keeping it real. DMX brought an intense, confessional, no-frills individualism to rap, unearthing his life’s uneasy contradictions and conveying them in gritty detail. DMX was the new style, a composite rap persona, a thug without excess; tough enough to kill, but brave enough to cry. He and Eminem, in stylistically different forms, embodied a new rap paradigm that connected deeply with fans: real skills, real stories, complex emotional terrain, and no undue ceremony. DMX and Eminem made honest revelation respectable, paving the way for even Jay-Z to dive deeper on his 2001 stunner, The Blueprint, with tracks like the heartfelt “Song Cry.” DMX and Eminem proved that the pop music-consuming public would not subsist on fantastical tales alone. They wanted to hear tales like theirs—lives they might have lived, not those they’d never know.

  In the ramp-up years to the millennium, while popular hip-hop checked its reflection in its diamonds, the synchronized dance of teen pop dominated popular music with a manufactured sunnyday reality. Members of *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, competing acts managed by talent agent Lou Pearlman, had cut their teeth on the Orlando, Florida, theme-park circuit and turned Disney cheer and adolescent longing into multimillion-selling albums mostly produced in Sweden, the pop mecca that birthed ABBA. Videos of rain-swept Backstreet Boys, some then close to thirty, dominated MTV. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, former costars on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club, similarly competed for fans as they once competed for solos. In the late nineties, marketing to teens became big money. Business studies identified teens and their disposable allowances as an untapped resource and refocused their products and marketing accordingly. Corporate America churned out teen-oriented films; launched magazines such as Teen People, Cosmo Girl, and Elle Girl in a sliding publishing market; and conducted frequent teen focus groups to track trends.

  On MTV, sandwiched between the boy bands, Britney Spears’s sassy schoolgirl act, and microdiva Christina Aguilera’s active acrobatics, Eminem played a humorous hip-hop stereotype: the crazy white boy. In the “My Name Is” video, which begins with a television broadcasting “The Slim Shady Show,” starring Marshall Mathers, the rapper imitates Bill Clinton, a flasher, a puppet, a science-show host, and Marilyn Manson, and he plays himself as a patient on Dr. Dre’s analysis couch. The video’s irony is Eminem at his best. Playing a wacked-out nerd, he satisfies and mocks the expectations of a white rapper: that he must be insane for even trying, because white rappers, in a genre founded on street wisdom and style, are as smooth as a geek in plaid pants. As his life story became public, Eminem became less parody than reality. Compared to the pop songs of the day, “My Name Is” was dynamic, harnessing brattiness and self-destructive frivolity to a chipper point of view detached from the implications of it all. The emotional scope of Eminem’s music was as irregular as life itself, while in teen pop the pieces fit just right.

  Eminem stuck out, as he says in “Role Model,” from The Slim Shady LP, like a green hat with an orange bill. In his first interviews with MTV, one of which caught the eye of Brian Grazer, the producer who developed 8 Mile around him, Eminem shape-shifted from sarcastic to serious and goofy to gangsta in the space of an answer. He lit up his MTV performance debut on the Music Video Awards in 1999 with a medley of “My Name Is,” “Guilty Conscience,” and “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang,” performed with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, which highlighted his hip-hop pedigree and a theatrical, high-energy stage presence. At the MTV Awards and the Grammys that year, Eminem looked like he might actually laugh during his acceptance speeches, as if he couldn’t believe he was being rewarded by those he mocked. A year later, in 2000, as his negative media image loomed and his personal life began to unravel, Eminem played to his reputation. Accepting one of a handful of MTV Awards for The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem pulled a speech from his pocket, allowing a pile of “pills” to fall on the stage, and he summed up the event as “The one night where you can fit all these people I don’t like into one room.”

  In his first appearance on MTV’s TRL, the same week The Slim Shady LP was released, the rapper was subtly hilarious. The show’s co-guest of the day was pop-rapper-turned-underwear-model-turned-actor Mark Wahlberg, there to promote his current film, Three Kings, to the channel’s teen audience. The contrast between Eminem and Wahlberg’s Jazzercised take on hip-hop less than a decade earlier coul
dn’t be missed by the viewers old enough to remember when he called himself Marky. Wahlberg represented two pillars in Eminem’s hate files: crappy white rappers and teen pop. The screaming youths in the studio audience probably were not aware of Wahlberg’s rap career, coincidentally as an Interscope Records artist, too, fronting the pop rap outfit Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The Bunch sold a million records in 1991, thanks to the high-energy hit “Good Vibrations,” but failed to connect on their second and final album, You Gotta Believe. Their brief notoriety did, however, pave the way for 1993’s Form … Focus … Fitness, the Marky Mark Workout, a stepping-stone to Wahlberg’s film career.

  “Marky Mark, fucking asshole. Bastard prick,” Eminem told me about that day on TRL. “I don’t know what the fuck his problem was. He walked up in there like fuckin’ ‘What, is there supposed to be some fucking tension in here?’ He’s a fucking little faggot. I’m standing with Carson Daly and we’re off air. And some dude who works for MTV tells us Mark Wahlberg is coming in, says he’d appreciate it if we don’t call him Marky Mark. I thought that was kinda funny. I wasn’t planning on doing that shit anyways. Little fucking homo. Then he comes up and he’s standing on the side when we was off air and he’s like, ‘What, is there supposed to be some fucking tension in here or something?’ I pretended like I don’t hear him and shit. Then we’re on air and Carson calls him on set and I’m like, ‘What up, Mark?’ He shakes my hand but he don’t even look at me. He goes, ‘Where do you want me to stand?’ Carson’s like, you can just stand there. I’m like, ‘We’ll just stand around here like one big fun bunch!’ So I threw a stab at him. He didn’t want me to say Mark-y. Probably didn’t want me to say funk-y neither.” Eminem punctuated the “fun” moment with a bug-eyed look at the camera. Wahlberg looked as if he had forgotten his next line in a scene.