Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  Moon over Barcelona: Eminem accepting one of his three MTV Europe Awards in Barcelona, Spain, on November 14, 2002.

  “Marky looked away and shit when I said that,” Eminem said, “with a look that was like ‘fuckin’ dick.’ So Carson congratulates me on my sales for the week and Marky Mark is like, ‘Oh, you got an album out?’ Fucking dick! Nah, you fucking bitch. You already heard it everywhere, you fat fuck. You probably got six copies, you fucking little queer. After I leave, Carson and Mark are talking about Korn on the air and Marky Mark says, ‘I like Korn. Ice Cube turned me on to them. I usually don’t like white people who do music, though.’ Trying to throw another stab at me I guess. What the fuck is he? Because he don’t do music now, he don’t like white people who do music? How’d he do albums? I’ve never even mentioned his fucking name anywhere!”

  As with every other pop star who comments about or otherwise irks Eminem, Wahlberg showed up in a lyric soon afterward (in “Drug Ballad” on The Marshall Mathers LP). The reference to Wahlberg was minor because his slight wasn’t too serious. Christina Aguilera, on the other hand, revealed Eminem’s marriage to Kim Scott on MTV before the couple made it public knowledge. The comment landed her in “The Real Slim Shady” from The Marshall Mathers LP, complete with accusations that she gave Eminem a venereal disease and oral sex to both Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst and MTV’s Carson Daly. Moby’s later intellectual dissection of Eminem at the 2000 Grammys and MTV Video Music Awards landed him a mention on “Without Me” from The Eminem Show, and a simulated beating in the video and live show. Former House of Pain rapper-turned-would-be-bluesman Everlast’s attack on Eminem in the song “Ear Drums Pop” by Dilated Peoples warranted “Quitter,” an entire unreleased song complete with a death threat. Eminem’s response to Wahlberg was minor, merely reminding the public that the now-serious actor was once a cheesy rapper. But it started what is now a tradition in Eminem’s music of skewering, for the benefit of his audience, anyone who insults him—a fitting outlet for a sarcastic and entertaining battle MC.

  At a time in American history when the president was on televised trial for intern-management worthy of Larry Flynt, Eminem voiced the lunacy of the day and the pent-up male psychology beneath it. “Eminem’s style is incredible,” Dr. Dre said a few months after finishing up The Slim Shady LP. “He has his own thing and he sounds like nothing else out there. He’s saying some shit your average MC isn’t even going to think about. He has this one line on ‘Role Model’ that sticks out for me, it’s kind of grotesque: ‘Me and Marcus Allen were buttfucking Nicole, when we heard a knock at the door, must have been Ron Gold [sic].’ You know what I mean? It’s dope, it’s entertaining, it’s just bad taste.”

  While Puffy and company sipped champagne and documented hip-hop’s Great Gatsby era, Slim Shady got high on model-airplane glue, his mom’s pills, and other people’s hallucinogens. His lyrics were often such exercises in uselessness, carelessness, failed suicide, and self-immolation that the crew of MTV’s show Jackass wouldn’t even try, like hanging from a tree by your penis. Slim Shady got off ripping Pamela Lee’s tits off. He soothed Hillary Clinton with sherbet after ripping her tonsils out, and killed a fat girl who taunted him in gym class by having sex with her, using his mortally expandable go-go-gadget dick. The character inverted Eminem’s handicaps as a man and a rapper, from his color, to his mother, his temper, and his taste for drugs, into his greatest advantage; his frustration turned to fuel. Slim Shady is inappropriately funny, like a Ritalin kid off his meds or a scatological joke at a funeral, inspiring irrepressible laughter. Eminem fused the crazy white boy and angry young man stereotypes, playing both to their fullest with ironic, unmerciful insight into white, dysfunctional family values, all the more real for the self-loathing present throughout. “Nobody is excluded from my poking at,” Eminem says. “Nobody. I don’t discriminate, I don’t exclude nobody. If you do something fucked up, you’re bound to be made fun of. If I do something fucked up, I’ll make fun of myself—I’m not excluded from this.”

  Eminem was hesitant to flaunt his natural sense of humor earlier in his career for fear of seeming more ham than hardcore—a crazy white boy without a clue. On his independently released album Infinite, his wit was buried in wordplay, expressed in the rapper’s ability to wield complex mouthfuls: lamination, intimidator, telekenesis, unconditionally, cumbersome, and Christianity. But the jokes were there, and every bit as deft: “Cause you can be quick, jump the candlestick, burn your back / And fuck Jill on a hill but you still ain’t Jack,” from “313,” a standout on Infinite. Even on the album’s title track, among serious musings about a superstar career and being able to feed his daughter, Eminem revealed the reason for his lack of success: He’s currently serving a sentence in hell for murdering musical instruments but still compulsively tries to rap his way to repentance every time he hears a new beat. Witty, sure, but nowhere near the lunatic limits to come. “I was always a comedian, since I was a kid,” Eminem says. “That’s why Infinite wasn’t a good album, it was way different.”

  Eminem laughs both with and at himself, as well as at popular media and anyone else who doesn’t get the joke. His humor is part of an arsenal that allows him to subvert popular culture while being a card-carrying member of the mainstream, a stance that stands out in rap and pop music as much as his consistently singsong melodies and unique, pent-up delivery does on the radio. Eminem thrives amid opposition, uniting hummable hooks and blunt lyrics, enticing his now very diverse fan base into off-color sing-alongs. Take the misogynistic bridge of The Eminem Show’s “Superman” (“I do know one thing though / Bitches they come, they go”) or his update of Sex Pistols creator Malcom McClaren’s hit, “Buffalow Gals,” echoed in the introduction to The Eminem Show’s “Without Me” (“Two trailer park girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside”); such phrases are wed to refrains as G-rated as a Barney song and as tough to purge once heard. Eminem’s knowing smirk shines through his harshest moments, which include their own disavowals. The antiwomen assertions of “Kill You” (The Marshall Mathers LP) and the anti-American society rant of “White America” (The Eminem Show) contain spoken “just kidding” conclusions. “Kim” and “97 Bonnie and Clyde,” Eminem’s murder ballads to his wife, Kim, contain no clear indication of parody, but for their contrast to reality: Despite years of fighting, a marriage, a divorce, a suicide attempt, a custody battle, and the birth of another man’s daughter, Eminem and Kim are still connected beyond the bond of their own daughter, Hailie.

  If there is one song that makes Eminem’s point once and for all, it is the final song on The Marshall Mathers LP, “Criminal.” Over a grooving chorus, Eminem says that every time he says what’s on his mind, each rhyme of his is seen as a criminal act. The verses of that song lay out Eminem’s key to success in hilarious lines, telling his mother, preachers, and teachers that they can’t reach him because he learns everything he needs to know from cable television. Imitating a televangelist (in the voice of Mr. Mackey, the South Park elementary-school teacher) who asks the Lord for a prostitute, new car, and the healing of Eminem’s soul, Eminem raps that he won’t be ignored because his blond hair, blue eyes, and pointy nose can’t be missed. To reinforce the point, the song begins with a spoken introduction in which Eminem warns listeners who believe he is as dangerous as his lyrics that they should be very, very afraid, because that means they believe that Eminem really is going to kill them. He inverts the expectations that rappers and musicians must live by the word of their art, turning the critique back on the audience that expects this to happen, while feeding their interest by his pointed mixture of fact and fiction, seriousness and sensation.

  Without the ironic twists, Eminem’s music would have no message. It would be the rap equivalent of the one-dimensionally macho comedy of late ’80s goombah Andrew Dice Clay, whose misogynistic brags grew nothing but tiresome. Unlike Eminem, Andrew Dice Clay was banned for life from MTV for foul language during a presentatio
n at 1992’s Video Music Awards. Maybe Clay is the true rebel, playing his image against the world without compromise, even to his disadvantage. Maybe Eminem is just a huckster, changing costumes to suit the occasion, donning his joke side to hit big on pop radio and his hardcore stance to maintain his credibility, playing the two sides off of each other to keep from copping to the extreme themes of his art. The world is still listening to Eminem because his art can be what you make of it; there is evidence to suit every point of view.

  Rock and rap stars have long stirred controversy and the best of them have done so with an inherent sense of the improperly funny. But most do not or cannot integrate it as well as Eminem does. From Marilyn Manson to N.W.A to Ozzy Osbourne to fellow Detroit native Alice Cooper (whose slapstick gore was as hilarious onstage as his booze-soaked behavior was problematic offstage), musicians dubbed “controversial” never turn sinner to saint, as Eminem has, in the space of just one album. Marilyn Manson, America’s most hated musician before the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, was targeted by morality watchdog groups such as the PMRC and blamed by a number of mainstream media outlets for coloring the lives of Columbine killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Unlike Eminem, Manson’s art did not contain any kind of explanation or image disclaimer to tip-off the literally-minded that he is not a cult leader, despite his stage surname. As happened to Eminem in Daytona, Florida, in 2001, Manson has been banned from performing in several U.S. cities and boycotted by activists for the point of view expressed in his music. In spite of an eloquent defense of free speech in interviews as well as his 1999 autobiography, The Long, Hard Road Out of Hell, Manson has never been entirely accepted in the mainstream, with or without his stage makeup and prosthetic breasts. It has taken Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper twenty-odd years and their middle-aged bloat to become cuddly elder statesmen of rock in the eyes of America. Both have grown up and, as a key point in the metamorphosis, generally sobered up into respectable, average citizens, the kind of guy who loves his dogs (like Osbourne) or loves golf (like Cooper). In comparison, Eminem circumvented one-dimensional shock-rapper status with cunning, by issuing his defense with his offense and serving them up with a wise-assed grin. This was the only way that Eminem’s views of society, himself, and everything in between could have made it into so many homes, both as an intruder and welcomed guest.

  Fans in Times Square await their hero on MTV’s Total Request Live, November 8, 2002.

  A good deal of Eminem’s zaniness relies on his gift for mimicry, lending him comedic possibilities that other rappers do not have. He can halt his most self-important swagger, as he does on “Criminal” from The Marshall Mathers LP, with a wacky voice introduced flawlessly into a verse. He has pulled off manic imitations of his mother (“My Dad’s Gone Crazy” on The Eminem Show); rappers Snoop Dogg (“Bitch Please II” on The Marshall Mathers LP), Method Man (“Get You Mad,” from King Tech and Sway’s This or That), and Slick Rick (“Quitter,” unreleased on album); as well as South Park characters, including Eric Cartman, the obese, careless, short-tempered kid (“Marshall Mathers” and “The Kids” on The Marshall Mathers LP, clean version). All of the voices and backup vocals on his albums, unless otherwise noted, are by Eminem, including the high-harmony parts sung in “Hailie’s Song,” from The Eminem Show. But even when imitating others, Eminem is one of the easiest rappers to understand, with enunciation that remains crystal clear regardless of the slang, mispronunciations, or truncations he employs to force dissimilar syllables to his rhyme patterns. “The way he raps is one of the main things that sets him apart,” says Village Voice critic Sasha Frere-Jones: “People shouldn’t discount for a second how important that is to him being popular. The first time I heard “My Name Is,’ I was walking into the Virgin Megastore, and it was so loud and crowded, but I heard his voice and knew it was him, over everything. He has the kind of voice you can recognize from one thousand feet away.”

  In his early freestyle days, Eminem also had a visual rap style that was as impossible to miss as the color of his skin. “I remember the first time I saw Eminem rap,” says Sway Calloway, MTV News correspondent and host of the influential L.A. radio show, The Wake Up Show. “I noticed how he really assumed this identity when he started to rap. He looked kind of weird in the face, kind of crazy, and that was his thing. He was this little white guy, who when he rapped, looked kind of like a jerking mannequin. Every punch line he would jerk and bob his head really hard and he was saying the craziest shit, just the most extreme, outlandish, and really humorous metaphors. Before he showed up at our show the first time and I saw him do his thing, I remember we had a copy of his tape, I think it was just the Slim Shady EP on cassette. We were the first people in L.A., on commercial radio at least, to play ‘Just Don’t Give a Fuck.’ At the time, that was very extreme; nobody would dare to touch that lyrical content. But we banged it right off the cassette because this guy was just so extreme and crazy as shit, sayin’ ‘Fuck the world, like Tupac,’ and telling you ‘put my tape back on the rack.’ That’s funny shit.”

  When Eminem debuted, many hip-hop heads had spent the past two years cheering on the all too real Slim Shady: Ol’ Dirty Bastard of New York’s Wu-Tang Clang. This rapper spent 1999 celebrating the success of his second album, Nigga Please, with a string of bizarre arrests ranging from failing to pay a year’s worth of child support (about $35,000) for three of his thirteen children, to making “terrorist threats” (i.e., threatening to shoot up the House of Blues nightclub in L.A. after he was kicked out for drunken behavior during a concert by R&B singer Des’ree). He was also arrested—and this list is by no means complete—for lounging in the nude on the balcony of a Berlin hotel, driving repeatedly without a license, and shoplifting a pair of $50 sneakers that he wore out of a store in Virginia Beach. Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s antics made as much sense as his often incoherent, hilarious lyrics and frequently unrhymed, off-the-beat ramblings that put the scat in scatological. While other rappers flashed their cash, Ol’ Dirty Bastard demanded—via a dance groove—his girl’s money after accusing her of lying about being pregnant with his child. Though his free-associative leaps and cracked warbling are disturbingly entertaining, hip-hop heads didn’t come to Ol’ Dirty Bastard for lyrics, they came for the show, to hear the only lunatic in the mainstream. But with a character who was this erratic, the fun couldn’t last. Whether it was the crack and alcohol abuse that landed Ol’ Dirty Bastard in a court-ordered rehab program (which he violated) for six months, or genuine mental instability, the same behavior that made Ol’ Dirty Bastard hip-hop’s beloved loco also earned him a two- to four-year jail sentence that began in April 2001. ODB was a mere mortal version of the God of Mischief: He could get himself into trouble, but he couldn’t get out. Slim Shady, the crazy out-of-place white boy, fed the same desire for a freakish hip-hop joker. In “Cum on Everybody,” a deliberate “dance song” caricature of the jiggy hip-hop singles of the late nineties, Eminem gets down getting down on himself. He claims that his best chance with the ladies in East Detroit is pretending to be a Beastie Boy, admits that he’s one tablet short of a full medicine cabinet, and says he wants to murder every rich rapper who makes him jealous.

  The attention that heavy MTV rotation brought Eminem soon changed him. “When you don’t watch MTV much and the few times you do turn it on, you see yourself there somewhere, it’s weird,” Eminem told me in the middle of 1999. “Whenever I see it now, I’m talking or it’s a video, or MTV News or something. If I’m up there and I mention something, anything that I might do, it might be an MTV News thing later on.” Eminem was plucked from the hypothetical visions of success in his underground freestyles and, after years of rejections from record labels, given the opportunity to live up to it. In a four-year span, he’s created three albums, one film, one soundtrack; he has toured worldwide; and he’s produced albums and tracks for other artists. But in the words of Biggie Smalls in 1997, Eminem’s success brought mo’ money, mo’ problems. When his royalty checks s
tarted rolling in, Eminem, Kim Scott, and Hailie Jade moved from Kim’s mother’s house, where they had been living since they moved out of their trailer, and into a large home in Sterling Heights, a middle-class suburb, complete with a pool, a few bedrooms, and a beautiful piece of land that, in an irony worthy of Eminem, was situated across the road from a trailer park. “Literally the entrance to the whole development was across the street from his driveway,” says Jonathan Mannion, the celebrated hip-hop photographer who shot the artwork for The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show. “It was about twenty feet away—you step out of his front door and you’re looking directly into the main entrance of this trailer park. His house was beautiful, too. It was a phat crib, it had a lot of land in the back, a pool, whatever. It had everything, and then you look out the front and, what is this?”

  The township did not allow Eminem to build a fence around his property, which left his home and its inhabitants exposed to passing fans, some of these helping themselves to a dip in his pool or his entire mailbox as a souvenir. Despite his performance persona, Eminem is shy around strangers yet quick to anger if he feels violated, so it’s no surprise that he handled fan invasiveness with more than an alarm system. The rapper bought a few guns, kept one on him, and boasted to Spin magazine just days before his arrest in 2000 for alleged assault and weapons possession that anyone who came to his house unwanted would be met by a barrel in the mouth.

  Eminem’s critics believed his music’s celebration of violence would spawn copycat activities, just as WWF wrestling inspired young men in makeshift rings to pummel each other in their backyards. Children have always imitated art, from staging light-saber fights with flashlights after watching Star Wars to acting out their own kung-fu choreography based on that of Jackie Chan. The MTV series Jackass, despite the onscreen warnings, inspired a flood of moronic, injurious pranks to be caught on tape and sent to the station’s offices—so many, in fact, that the show’s disclaimer was changed to inform viewers that these tapes land in the trash, unseen. Faced with the platinum-selling popularity of Slim Shady, parent watchdog groups foresaw a teen apocalypse of drugs, lewd behavior, and violence, and spoke out against Eminem in 2000.