Whatever You Say I Am Read online

  I watch Eminem pick through the rest of his food, and I listen to him talk about the calm he enjoys in Detroit. His speech has changed, too. The stretched vowels of his hip-hop patois are now a clean Midwestern dialect for the most part. He is still quick to respond when he’s passionate about a topic, but now he takes his time to structure the answer. When my tape recorder is rolling, Eminem is forthcoming, but the situation is more of an interview than it has ever been.

  This makes my job easier, but it makes me want to finish quickly, too. We break up the questions with the kind of banter that editors cut and only musicians and fans care about, discussing in nontechnical terms (i.e., “I like old keyboards because you can get those, like, music-box kind of sounds.”) the science of mixing and mastering, the uncelebrated genius of the Pharcyde’s first album, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, and the side effects of overanalyzation (paralysis, paranoia) brought on by too many interviews or too much psychotherapy, which are more or less one and the same. We skip tangentially over the past two years of his life and the album and film that capture and encapsulate it, and I feel like he’s practicing, testing out subjects and answers for future meetings with writers he doesn’t know. In the months to follow, I see some of those same answers in print in other magazines, said better than today, with the afterthoughts born of repetition.

  Eminem sits hip-hop style in a lounger: leaned way back, legs akimbo, one arm hanging over the armrest, a pose at once stately and disheveled. We’re talking about the pains he’s taken to be clear in his lyrics on The Eminem Show, about how he’s tired of being misinterpreted, about how the controversy in the past few years took attention away from the music. We’re talking about the mainstream press, the mainstream listener, the casual MTV viewer tuning in to Eminem for the first or second time and whether they’ll see “Without Me,” the first single from The Eminem Show, for its high-speed irony. I ask him if he thinks fans and critics who have followed him from the beginning will appreciate a thematically heavier Eminem. His eyes widen and he stares straight ahead at the horizon, along the top of his right Nike Air Max where it rests on the coffee table. He’s seized by a thought. I’ve seen him this way before. We were on a plane and Eminem was talking about his mother, he was telling me a story about food poisoning and hot dogs and about being arrested on his birthday. He froze like he did now in the retelling, picked up a pad covered with his small, crooked scrawl, and proceeded to scribble rhymes with his left hand, keeping time with his right. He doesn’t do that now; this Eminem has probably already made a lyric of this feeling.

  “I have to tell it like it is,” Eminem says, not looking up from his shoe. “What I sit around and talk about, you know, I have to go say to the world, otherwise what would I be? If I’ve got any balls at all, I’ll come out and say it, which is what I do. That latest Source article—I’m just not happy about it. I felt like there could have been more said and it could have been said in a different way. Whatever.”

  When Eminem is angry, he’ll say he’s not and then dissect the object of his irritation until it lies in pieces. The May 2002 issue of The Source featured an Eminem cover story for The Eminem Show. The self-proclaimed “Bible of Hip-Hop” had covered the rapper before, starting with a piece in their “Unsigned Hype” column in March 1998, but their latest installment reflected a disintegrating relationship between two mutual admirers. The Source cofounder Jonathan Schecter, who sold his interest in the magazine in 2000, had released Eminem and Royce’s twelve-inch “Scary Movies,” and the rapper’s coverage in the magazine’s pages had been regular. The Source had the chance to be the first national magazine to feature an Eminem cover story and had taken steps toward it, but balked like so many of the record-label executives who had heard Eminem before Dr. Dre. A year later, in July 2000, Eminem was the first white face to appear on the magazine’s cover since its inception in 1988. The Rolling Stone cover story I wrote was the first in-depth feature in a national magazine about Eminem and proved to be far more thorough and revealing than The Source’s article. Since then, the magazine’s coverage of Eminem had been a game of catch-up. The May 2002 issue focused on the rapper’s family history by talking to peripheral players, at a time when Eminem’s past had been regurgitated ad infinitum. In addition, the rapper’s albums never ranked among the magazine’s “Five Mic” Hall of Fame, where even a cursory glance at the roster highlights the omission: the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill is the only album by white artists, and two albums (one from 2002) by Scarface, a skilled but not sublime rapper, are honored. Eminem had lived by The Source’s word in his youth and now, justifiably, felt disrespected. In the magazine’s “Quotables” column, copy devoted to the best rhyme of the month, Eminem felt his best rhymes never made it to their pages.

  “It’s funny, it’s like that, though,” Eminem says. “Every rapper, especially me, always dreams of getting a Quotable in The Source. When that magazine first started, it was the bible of hip-hop to me. The first thing me and my friends would do is open it to see whose verse got the Quotable—whoever it was was God for that month. I’ve gotten them now, but the shit I’ve gotten Quotables for is, to me, not my best shit. I can’t believe I got a Quotable for my verse in ‘Forgot About Dre.’ To me, that’s nothing compared to my third verse in ‘Criminal.’ In all my songs, I try to start the song off real slow, then in the second verse I amp it up a little bit, and the climax is the third. I think that last verse in ‘Criminal’ is one of my best. Or my verse in ‘Fight Music’ on the D12 record. The things of mine that I like most get slept on, and the shit that’s routine for me ends up becoming Quotables. It’s weird.”

  This was only the beginning. The Source and Eminem would become outright enemies a few months later. That day in the Townsend Hotel, Eminem kept coming back to the topic, angry that the magazine he’d been loyal to gave him superficial tabloid treatment. All evening and the next day, he said it didn’t matter, and yet he made statements about The Source ripe for bold print. I knew he wanted to slap the magazine in my article, to air his gripes in the same pages that had scooped The Source in 1999. I also knew that no matter how much of his venom I included, it would be cut by my editor. The bits I did include were cut—they were regarded both as free publicity and taboo; media featuring media-bashing was deemed akin to cannibalism.

  The Source, to Eminem, was a betrayal after years of history, a mentor turning its back, then attacking. As the year 2002 drew to a close, Source cofounder and rapper Ray “Benzino” Scott called Eminem “Vanilla Ice 2003,” and he recorded a handful of tracks that lambasted Eminem as “the rap Hitler,” “the rap David Duke,” and the leader of a white coopting of hip-hop. Eminem responded with two blistering tracks—“The Sauce” and “Nail in the Coffin”—that buried Benzino lyrically and closed the door of The Source to Eminem and, unfortunately, other artists on his Shady Records, such as D12 and newcomer Obie Trice. Case in point: In the magazine’s “Top Thirty in Hip-Hop,” a list of the most powerful players and biggest sellers in 2002, Eminem, Shady Records, and his manager, Paul Rosenberg, were not cited, despite selling 7.5 million copies of The Eminem Show, the year’s top-selling album in any genre. They had also sold 3.5 million copies of the 8 Mile soundtrack, a film that took in more than 100 million at the box office. Eminem’s yearly gross in 2002 was about $300 million, while Shady Records’ 50 Cent debuted with Get Rich or Die Tryin’, which sold more than 800,000 copies in less than a week and three million in about a month. In the same issue, 50 Cent was listed as one of the acts to watch in the coming year. Yet in the “Power 30,” Eminem and Shady Records were passed over in preference to Réné McLean, CEO of McLean Entertainment Group, a marketing consultant firm who worked on 8 Mile, and Flavor Unit, Queen Latifah’s management firm and record label whose cofounder, Shakim, admitted that first-week record sales of five thousand copies was good enough for Flavor Unit’s artists.

  Believe it or not, his lyrics say that if he weren’t rapping, he’d be raping in a Jason mask:
Eminem flips off Sydney, Australia, on July 27, 2001.

  The hate between Eminem and The Source grew, blurring the border between journalism, cultural community, favoritism, and racial prejudice for the worse. MP3s of co-owner Benzino’s anti-Eminem tracks were posted on the magazine’s website as he churned them out, and they were sent to journalists from a Source editor’s e-mail address. At the same time, Kim Osorio, the magazine’s executive editor issued an official statement in defense of Benzino against Eminem online, on TV, and on the radio, proclaiming that the magazine’s involvement with Benzino was separate from their objective role as critics of hip-hop.

  This drama was months away from our Townsend Hotel interview, but The Source was already under Eminem’s skin when we met. He had idolized the magazine and felt that if any media outlet would represent him properly, The Source would. It was, in fact, an old gripe all over again. On the song “If I Had,” from The Slim Shady LP, Eminem derided Detroit hip-hop station WJLB, an operation with the motto “where hip-hop lives” that only played 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. and never local artists, especially Eminem.

  “I know that plenty of artists, not just rappers, who sell a lot of records are looked up to and sometimes it’s deserving and sometimes not,” Eminem says. “A lot of people could be saying that I don’t deserve it. You know, failure has always been the scariest and biggest motivation for me, just the fear of losing and somebody getting the last laugh on me. In the back of my mind my worst fear is that I wake up tomorrow and I won’t be able to write nothing. That’s why this is good. If people stop writing about me tomorrow I might not have shit to write about. If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, and all that shit, my songs would be really wack. They’d just be boring.”

  IN 1996, WHEN EMINEM’S FIRST ALBUM, Infinite, was released, it was one of many independent rap releases. Zero newspapers, even in Detroit, reviewed it. In 2002, Eminem and The Eminem Show were discussed in one column or another of the New York Times alone 153 times, up from 20 in 1999, 78 in 2,000 and 96 in 2001. In 2002, Eminem was the New York Times’s mirror, angled to reflect aging critics who donned ill-fitting zeal (Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich), a critic who saw commercialistic shtick defeat innovation in Eminem’s new music (Jon Pareles), another critic’s love-hate-love relationship with him (Neil Strauss), and an infamously unmerciful editor’s summary of post-9/11 art (Michiko Kakutani).

  In November 2002, as the 8 Mile buzz inebriated the nation, newspapers that had printed uninformed, anti-Eminem articles at the height of anti-Eminemism circa February 2001, featured columns by nearsighted fuddy-duddyies who, somewhere between then and now, had come to terms with Eminem’s misogyny, gotten over his corrosive influence on the youth of America, and decided that fag was an acceptable term (probably because he wasn’t saying it as much). Either they’d been seduced by the magic of the big screen, where they were won over by the familiar Hollywood outsider-makes-good template, or maybe seeing Eminem act convincingly on the screen convinced them that he acted on his records, too, that all of his statement-antistatement somersaults really were the fun of it. Andrew Sarris, in an article in the New York Observer titled “Guess Who Thinks Eminem Is a Genius? Middle-aged Me,” stated that Marshall Mathers is today’s James Dean. Paul Slansky, a Los Angeles writer, theorized in the same paper that middle-aged suburbanites identified with Eminem’s anger and frustration, brought on not by hard times but the pressures of child rearing. The New York Times’s celebrated theater-critic-turned-cultural-analyst Frank Rich covered Eminem in a Sunday magazine cover story, comparing him to Elvis (a tag Eminem predicted in “Without Me” from The Eminem Show) and equating the violence in his lyrics to nothing more threatening than that of Hollywood fare.

  “Chiming in on Eminem gives older critics a sense of vitality,” says Village Voice executive editor Richard Goldstein, a political and cultural critic since the sixties. “Discussing Eminem makes them feel connected with their young. It’s kind of a testosterone producer, which is a big issue for middle-aged people.”

  The pick of that litter was New York Times political reporter Maureen Dowd’s piece, “The Boomer’s Crooner,” a Sunday editorial in late November of 2002, brimming with tales of her middle-aged friends dropping the kids off at school, then rolling down their SUVs’ windows, childproof locks be damned, and rapping along with Eminem as he lyrically rapes his mother. Dowd reported that a friend’s eleven-year-old daughter called her mother “psychotic and weird” because parents should not like people who talk about “drugs and sex and hard lives.” Dowd collected the juiciest bits of her fellow fogies’ Eminem praise and expressed disdain for her peers, who, “frantic to be hip, eager to be young,” she asserted, were doing no more than “trying to rob their children of their toys.” The thesis that seemed to emerge from her stream-of-consciousness piece was that her crowd’s “suffocating yuppie love” rendered Eminem as cuddly as Beaver Cleaver. Like long-standing anti-Eminem critics such as Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago-Sun Times, Dowd claimed that acceptance among the demographic he loved to annoy signaled the end of Eminem. Like her friends who only “got” Eminem when the parody was removed, Dowd still missed the point. Her piece’s punch line claimed that Eminem’s jacket and tie on the cover of his latest album, a trade-off for his “do-rag and baggy Nikes” (baggy Nikes?), were a surefire sign of a sellout and that if Eminem weren’t very smart and wicked, he’d soon hear his music in elevators. If Dowd had taken the time to leaf through the CD booklet, she might have followed the story told in the photos. Laid out as simply as an AOL news report, the inner sleeve of The Eminem Show is a photo essay of Eminem being stalked by paparazzi bent on making his life a show, while, in reality, the rapper is seated in a control room, reading a newspaper in a suit and tie, watching the action on monitors, collecting footage for a show of his own. If Dowd thinks the positive praise being currently heaped on Eminem won’t annoy him more, she obviously hasn’t been listening.

  Of course, if Eminem’s new “older” fans were wondering why they had missed the joke before, they should have asked their children. The Kids, the group Eminem shouts out most often in his records, seem to have known the difference from the beginning. It also seems that only after older eyes realized that Eminem wasn’t going away, he was examined, a process made easier with the printed lyrics provided, as they were for the first time with The Eminem Show. The music is equally large-type: Though thematically as disturbed as the other two, Eminem relied less on bizarre imagery than precise explanation to make his point, allowing for literal-minded access. Maybe the older newcomers found that in a post-9/11 world, Eminem’s immoral anger wasn’t threatening in the face of impending war, or that the sing-along rage forum he provided exorcised their fear, anxiety, and Osama hate. Maybe they were impressed that Eminem worried about the same things as they did, juxtaposing the claim that he was a destructive force to American youth with the very real threat of war and the draft in the first song on The Eminem Show, “White America.”

  In 2002, there were other op-ed columns about Eminem in regional and national papers such as USA Today—that great barometer of the middle—by middle-aged writers. Most of these scribes, the type who usually devote their columns to musings on the raking of leaves or that crazy Christmas shopping season, suddenly waxed on about family bonding after seeing 8 Mile: how they related to America’s bad boy and then happily head-bobbed to Eminem with their kids. It was a reaction that record-company marketing and sales execs dream of but couldn’t plan for; a reaction more overtly subversive than Eminem would ever have predicted. At the time, I wondered if these new fans weren’t offended by the words bitch and ho, or Eminem’s critique of the Bush administration in “White America,” or his comparison of his pain to that of a little girl inside one of the planes heading for the World Trade Center on “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” the same song that features the voice of his then seven-year-old daughter, Hailie, and simulated sounds of Eminem doing cocaine. It was just weird; it felt like a PM
RC conspiracy to declaw Eminem by manipulating his acceptance; sterilizing him with an injection of parental approval.

  Image reconfiguration, phase one: Elton John and Eminem flip the script at the 43rd annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on February 21, 2001.

  The widespread embrace by the Boomer generation was a prediction Eminem didn’t make, and one that freaked him out. Looking back on 2002 in December, he told the Detroit Free Press that he may be getting too big for his own good and that he never really asked for that, just a chance to make a living in rap. Shortly after, Eminem retreated from the public eye. He dove into production work for artists on his label, and passed on award shows, while his publicist turned away never-ending interview requests and his booker started planning a limited summer tour that included just two American appearances: consecutive nights in Detroit. With The Eminem Show, the rapper had released his most self-absorbed, least funny, most detailed vision of himself. The album is Eminem for Dummies, for those who can’t take a joke or differentiate fiction from reality. The content isn’t much softer, as some reviews of it suggested. The homophobia—and its converse, graphic descriptions of gay sex—are lessened but intact, and though there aren’t as many uses of the word fag, they are there, referenced as censor bait, and labeled as such, for example in these lines from “My Dad’s Gone Crazy”: “If y’all leave me alone, this wouldn’t be my M.O. / I wouldn’t have to go ’eenee meenee meini mo, catch a homo by his toe.” There are no murder ballads about his wife, but the album still gives Kim and all women plenty of jabs. Yet, strangely, no one has criticized The Eminem Show on moral grounds, not even the factions who attacked him just one album ago. As his list of fans grows, his list of obvious “muses” for his next album grows smaller.