Whatever You Say I Am Page 8

  If public enemies weren’t enough, Eminem found worse drama at home, as his family members reached out in bold new ways. The rapper’s father, who lives in San Diego, California, contacted him for the first time since his son was a child. Eminem did not return the favor but answered instead in songs like “Cleaning Out My Closet,” from The Eminem Show, calling his father a “faggot” and wishing him dead for his deadbeat ways. Eminem’s mother, Debbie, took her son’s success personally. During the time we spent together for the Rolling Stone cover story in March 1999, Eminem told me confidentially that his mother had threatened to sue him for his claim on The Slim Shady LP’s “My Name Is” that she does drugs. After my Rolling Stone cover was published, she did, filing suit against her son on September 17, 1999, for slander to the tune of $10 million, claiming that his comments in his lyrics and in a handful of magazine articles caused her emotional distress and sleepless nights. She later filed another million-dollar lawsuit against her son for emotional damages suffered during the proceedings of the first lawsuit. The trials would drag on for two years, after which Eminem’s mother took home, after legal fees, approximately $1,600 of the $25,000 awarded her by the court. As he says in “Marshall Mathers” off the album of the same name, Eminem discovered that he had more relatives than he realized, all of whom wanted a part of his new, televised life. The only upside to success in the private sphere of Eminem’s life was the stability that money brought and the fact that, for the first time in years, he was welcomed by Kim Scott’s family. In the summer of 1999, in a private ceremony among his mother’s relatives in St. Joseph, Missouri, Marshall Mathers and Kim Scott were married.

  It took less than a year for them to go from marital bliss to the parking-lot brawl that could have cost Eminem jail time. The incident set off a downward spiral in their relationship that ended with Kim Scott’s suicide attempt about a month later. While her husband played a show at Joe Louis Arena and her mother watched a video with Hailie downstairs, Scott slashed her wrists in an upstairs bathroom. She was discovered in time by her mother. After Kim recovered, Eminem filed for divorce, and the legal wranglings over the custody of their daughter began.

  Considering the possibilities, Eminem got off easy. In 2002, he settled the lawsuits with his mother and won joint custody of his daughter. A variety of litigation over Eminem’s music was settled favorably or dismissed. The most entertaining suit was filed by Jacques Loussier, a French classical jazz pianist who demanded that all copies of The Marshall Mathers LP be recalled from stores and who requested $10 million as compensation for alleged unauthorized sampling of his piece “Pulsian” in “Kill You.” More important, for his criminal offenses, Eminem was given two years probation. He moved into a home within a gated community that, with his new indoor pool, home studio, and movie theater, eliminated any need he might have to leave.

  Eminem escaped the legal pressures through his work. During this time, he produced D12’s debut, Devil’s Night; toured with Dre and Snoop on the Up in Smoke Tour; toured with Limp Bizkit on the Family Values Tour; filmed 8 Mile; recorded The Eminem Show; and produced beats for Jay-Z, Nas, and most of his own album. It was a relentless schedule that kept him focused and out of trouble. “I’m on probation now,” Eminem said in the spring of 2002, “so I’m a lot more calm because I don’t have a choice. But I probably would have done it anyways. I’m growing up, and I figure there is a certain level of maturity that comes with that.” He then picked his nose to illustrate his point. “Really, though, perhaps all of that was a blessing in disguise. I’m more focused on my job than I’ve ever been.”

  Eminem met fame as a trickster would, by trumping expectations. Slim Shady, the vehicle that announced his arrival in 1999, was sidelined at the height of his fame in 2002, as humor took a backseat to technique. “I do most of my stuff at my home studio,” Eminem says. “I make the beat and, depending on how late it is, I’ll either write the rap there or wait until the next day. I’m taking whole days to write songs now—before I might do them in twenty minutes. Once I lay down the vocals, then I see what the beat can do, where it can drop out, what else can come in—most of that shit I learned from watching Dre. Sometimes, though, I get a couple of lines in my head and find a rhythm for them, then I’ll go downstairs and make the beat to that rhythm. That’s why a lot of my drum patterns are kinda crazy and offbeat, because they were made to follow my rhyme. Now more than ever I try to make my rap go right with the beat. I listen to my older shit, even from just two years ago, from the second record, and I can’t stand it. I think I fell behind the beat too much.” If one song can be a turning point in a musician’s style, for Eminem it was “The Way I Am” on The Marshall Mathers LP. One of the last songs recorded for the album, it was produced by Eminem, a role he has grown into as his career has progressed. But the song marked an evolution toward his surging, anthemic musical style. Eminem’s pugilistic defense of himself in this track is emphasized by a skittering snare drum, ominous bass, and church-bell toll to dramatic effect. Where his voice once ranged high and low in an enticing lilt, on “The Way I Am” it is spit through clenched teeth and tensed vocal cords. “I was out in Detroit to shoot pictures of his house where he grew up and bits and pieces all around town for the inside of The Marshall Mathers album,” Jonathan Mannion says. “Afterward we were hanging out and I had heard just a couple of the songs they had finished for the album and a couple of others that were just vocal tracks and I was already, like, blown away. So he says he’s going to play one more and he puts on ‘The Way I Am.’ And he spit that, word for word, the whole thing, man. I took my friend’s camera right out of his hand and started shooting, like, ‘Sorry, man, give me that.’ Just to hear that song for the first time with him spittin’ it like that. Oh my God, I was floored, the kid was just fucking amazing. He’s out of here, no question.”

  Eminem don’t give a fuck it’s not his birthday.

  Eminem has left the joking aside in search of serious, heartfelt, and technically superior explanations of himself. His zany wit has been replaced by sarcasm and his earlier rhyme styles with more dexterous manipulations of language. He has become a stylistic feat in motion like the footwork of welterweight champion boxer Roy Jones Jr. or a dunk shot by Alan Iverson. Whereas Slim Shady lagged behind the beat, then rushed up to it and around it, lending an added level of humor and mania to Eminem’s delivery, the rapper has become an expert at laying his rap on the beat, sinking into it, making for a more powerful presentation. The Eminem Show is full of brilliant moments that sound like the breaking of linguistic laws for the sake of free association. A few gems are: “verse starts … MC’s heart” (“Till I Collapse”); “closest pal / poster-child” (“White America”); “crayons … chaos” (“Square Dance”); “miracles … syllables” (“Business”); “corrupt … syrup” (“Say What You Say”). This isn’t Slim Shady’s ecstasy trip; it’s a more serious, more skillful ride.

  “I fucking hate ‘My Name Is,’” Eminem said in 2002. “I didn’t hate it when I first made it. When I do a record now, there’s an instinct thing that kicks in when a song could be big. When I listen to a song a few times and it starts to become cheesy to me, that’s when I know it could be a big record. Like ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ that started to get cheesy to me and I said, ‘I think people may like this.’ You know, the shit I really, really put my heart and soul into I don’t get recognized for. My serious shit like ‘The Way I Am’ is where I really dump out my true feelings. There’s a difference between being funny and being real and I feel like I don’t get recognized for the real shit, my best shit.”

  Fame and this sense of not being noticed when he’s serious steered Eminem away from humor, toward earnest looks at his life, leaving the public less chances to miss his point. Songs like “Sing for the Moment” and “Cleanin’ Out My Closet,” from The Eminem Show, as well as “Lose Yourself” from 8 Mile are concise, cinematic stories, in contrast to Slim Shady’s slapstick.

  “I sampled ‘Dr
eam On’ for ‘Sing for the Moment,’ and Aerosmith cleared it,” Eminem says. “That’s really great of them because it’s one of my favorite songs in the world. I was talking to Steven Tyler about it the other day and he said some true shit. He said if I have to make songs that appeal to everybody—like to get people to listen to my realer songs—that’s what I’ll do. Basically, my theory is the same: If I have to make cheesy songs to get people to listen to my harder songs, then that’s what I’ll do. That’s the theory that everyone in the business sticks with but it’s cool to see, especially those guys, they’ve been in the business so long, it’s great to hear that you have the same theories. You gotta play the fucking game, man, you gotta play the game I guess.”

  Eminem is a perfectionist, a rapper who prefers the studio to the club and who has evolved into a producer quickly. “He’s a studio jockey, man,” Dr. Dre says. “He wants to get in there and make records. I admire that kind of energy, it keeps me on my toes.” Eminem’s growing production prowess is in the rolling, bombastic vein of his mentor, but with a rock-and-roll sense of drama.

  “It really bugs me out that Eminem has this conception of himself that he thinks his older music was silly and his real music is this incredibly grimacing method acting shit he does,” says Village Voice critic Frere-Jones. “I thought that early music was a little bit happy and maybe him being a little bit silly, but none of it is exactly happy; it’s a strange hybrid of happy and twisted.”

  Hip-hop in 2003 has become a similarly strange hybrid of itself. Popular rap is at once more thuggish, hardcore, and hedonistic, with an even greater premium placed on a basis in reality—when that reality is thuggish, all the better, it seems. At the same time, the juxtaposition and celebration of the sacred and profane so central to DMX’s oeuvre is the hip-hop rule. What would be considered “conscious,” positive rap must come swathed in thug imagery, and a greater degree of confessional expression is to be found in rap of all stripes. Talib Kweli, Mos Def’s collaborator in Black Star, is the epitome of the thinking tough man on his second solo album, Quality. Nas, in “Made You Look” on God’s Son, advises ladies to look for men who are intelligent thugs, “like a real thoroughbred is.”

  The king of hip-hop in 2003 is a real thug, 50 Cent, a former drug dealer who has been shot nine times and suits up each day in a bullet-proof vest. The Queens rapper has a long enough list of enemies, professional and criminal, that after Columbia Records released him from his record deal, following his shooting, no record label would sign him. Eminem sought him out, and his interest sparked a bidding war, which ended when 50 Cent accepted $1 million—less money than others offered—to sign with Eminem’s Shady Records and Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records. Upon the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin’, 50 Cent broke the sales record for a debut album, selling almost 900,000 copies in just five days. Eminem’s zeal for 50 Cent as well as his verses on the album taunt his newfound audience with threats more real than the parody of “Criminal” from The Marshall Mathers LP. In a verse that begins with Eminem’s saying that he’s got to be what fans see on TV, he says he’s bullied his way into the rap game and he’ll take on any challenger. But 50 Cent is a far cry from Eminem’s benevolent on-screen pals in 8 Mile. So, too, is Shady/Aftermath Records’ continuing beef with Ja Rule’s Murder Inc. family more potentially dangerous than a street fight with the Free World, Eminem’s 8 Mile enemies. This is yet another reinvention for Eminem, from potty-mouth comedian to strung-out delinquent to sobered thinking man; his next incarnation looks to be gangsta mogul.

  “His persona, to me, has changed almost entirely for the worst,” says Sasha Frere-Jones. “But to be sympathetic to him, instead of just looking at the text of all the shit that happened to him in the last two years, with him hitting people you could see him completely mythologizing himself. He got famous really quickly, seized up, thinking everyone’s looking at him and thinking he has to act tough, doing all this stupid shit because he’s in this tornado of people looking at him all the time and asking him for things. That’s also just what happens to people. We should all be glad he’s not dead, because it wouldn’t have been very surprising.”

  “I don’t know if you’re going to see Slim Shady more on the next album,” says Eminem’s publicist Dennis Dennehy. “With the stuff going on around him, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but he’s had a lot less fun. It has nothing to do with his probation, he’s just working his ass off. He’ll hang out with his friends and have a good time, but he doesn’t take a break. He is always working and thinking about music. Everything that happened to him in the past year and a half was a lot more serious than what came before that. The music that’s going to come out of a time like that is definitely going to be more serious. If you look at it as Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers, he hasn’t had a lot of room for Slim Shady in his life lately.”

  chapter 3

  damn! how much damage can you do with a pen? marshall and the media—from pans to fans

  The Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, Michigan, is Midwestern plush, four-star Ethan Allen chic—a layman’s White House. Outside, it is a redbrick modular block with beige stone trim; it’s short enough that the windows open on every floor. Inside is an orgy of gold, indirect lighting, black-and-white marble floors, fireplaces, and deep couches. A wedding party has unfurled on three of the couches, soaking in whiskey, wine, cigar smoke, and the postrehearsal dinner glow. At the bar, a salt-and-pepper-haired man in a merlot-colored turtleneck sweater is talking to me.

  “So you’re here on business?” he says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “Well, you know the one thing to always forget on a business trip, don’t ya?”

  “No, what is it?”

  “Your wife!” he says through a gusty laugh. “But you probably don’t have that problem yet, son!”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, just remember one thing,” he says, looking at me intently, his eyes a little red. “There’s only one difference between your wife and your job after five years. You know what that is?”

  “No,” I say, “but I think someone’s uncle told me once.”

  “Your job still sucks!”

  Upstairs in the Presidential Suite, kicked back in the living room of the three-room spread (dining room with wet bar, bedroom with deluxe bath), Eminem bites into a tuna melt.

  “Damn, they didn’t get me fries with that,” he says. “What the fuck? I’m off that no-carb diet now.” He keeps eating.

  There is a twelve-pack of Mountain Dew on the floor, hip-hop magazines on the coffee table, a big FedEx box on a chair, and an enormous security guard outside in the hallway.

  “So I was thinking,” Eminem says. “About the angle for this here article. And I think it should be all about what school I went to and how I dropped out.”

  “I’m with you,” I say, smirking. “That’s a good place to start. And then I’d like to cover your family life, and I’m kind of wondering if you’ve ever felt, as a rapper, judged for your race?”

  “Well, you know, not really, no,” he says, picking at his food. “And I’ve got a good relationship with my family. I spend most of the day with all of them. We just sing songs and pick flowers. And that’s me, that’s just all the me there is to me. We done?”

  “Yeah, I think that covers it. Well, just one more question, I was wondering, do you get any kind of presidential treatment in this room? Does it come with, like, hotel Secret Service or some Oval Office special massage or something?”

  “Yeah, you get dirty whores,” Eminem says with the half-cocked smile of a kid about to pop a wheelie. “You want to get some? We can get some dirty whores up here. We could get my mom up here.”

  Eminem has done other interviews today, some for television, some for England, and at least one for another magazine, but I don’t think those started like this. Then again, you never know. He’s one-third slaphappy and two-thirds tired, as if he’s coming down from a Mountain Dew rush, even though t
he box is unopened. This is his first meal today, but he’s not complaining. I flash back to how he could barely contain his energy back in 1999. He seesawed between manic and shy in proportion to the size of the crowd. He was living moment to moment then, expecting the roller-coaster ride to end.

  “So I’m thinking,” I say, “that we should forget the music—no one who reads Rolling Stone cares about it anyway—and make up new rumors about you, because everybody knows all the old ones. We could call the article “Eminem, the Born Again.” Or “Eminem, Saved by Scientology.” What do you think? Would the public bite?”

  “The public?” Eminem says. “Oh, I’ve got something for them to bite on. Yes, I do. And I feel like I have a story to tell, man. I’ve got things to say. But I’ve got a better idea. We’ll sit here, crack jokes for two days, and then you can just read The Source interview I just did and then rewrite my bio. Fuck it, we’re done! Let’s go.”

  Eminem looks healthier than he has in the last four years—his skin is clear and he is toned from the workout regime he started for his film debut in 8 Mile. There is a clarity to him I’ve not seen before, a kind of bright-eyed aura coupled with restraint. At first his new mood seems odd to me. In a few days, I’ll realize that this is Eminem calmer than he’s been for the better part of his life. The past year for him was sobering, dotted with lawsuits, his divorce, Kim’s suicide attempt, and his two-year probation sentence. Professionally, his responsibilities were daunting: a film, producing and writing for three albums, touring. The pressure in his personal life has lifted, but his professional trials haven’t even begun. I know why he’s calm. He can handle the entertainment. It’s life that’s scary.