The Dark Story of Eminem (11 page)

More grinding offences followed. “The neighbourhoods we lived in fucking sucked,” Kim told
Rolling Stone
. “I went through four CDs and five VCRs in two years.” One taunting crack addict was to blame. After his first break-in, he came back a few nights later to make a sandwich, and mark his territory. “He left the peanut butter, jelly, all the shit out and didn’t steal nothing,” Marshall spat to
Rolling Stone
. “Ain’t this about a motherfucking bitch. But then he came back again, and took everything but the couches and beds. The pillows, clothes, silverware – everything. We were fuckin’ fucked.”

The festering racial tension that had scarred his attempts at a rap career followed him to that house too. “Little kids used to walk down the street going, ‘Look at the white baby!’” he remembered to
Spin
. “Everything was, ‘white this, white that’. We’d be sitting on our porch, and if you were real quiet, you’d hear, ‘Mumble, mumble, white, mumble, mumble, white.’ Then I caught this dude breaking into my house for, like, the fifth time, and I was like, ‘Yo, fuck this! It’s not worth it, I’m outta here!’ That day, I wanted to quit rap and get a house in the fucking suburbs. I was arguing with my girl, like, ‘Can’t you see they don’t want us here?’ I went through so many changes. I actually stopped writing for about five or six months, and I was about to give everything up. I just couldn’t, though. I’d keep going to the clubs and taking the abuse. But I’d come home and put a fist through the wall. If you listen to a Slim Shady record, you’re going to hear all that frustration coming out.”

It was the thinnest his skin became to his minority status, and the nearest he came to admitting it had an element of choice. He could have snapped under the abuse, gone “back to where he came from”, like many a black racial pioneer in his city before him; accepted the white suburban life he’d been half-raised for, and would at least find camouflage in. No wonder he stopped rapping at this moment of crisis. If he retreated from black America, how could he make its music?

But in the end, he carried on. He and his young family moved back with his mother for a while, with the usual crises and screaming. He would later live with friends, while Kim and Hailie stayed behind – an indication, perhaps, of who now riled each other most. And from this tumult, in the summer of 1997, Slim Shady was born to save them all. His genesis was typically unwholesome.

“I was on the pot when I thought of Slim Shady,” Marshall happily told
FHM
. “I was taking a shit and it popped in my head. It was because in the Dirty Dozen you have to have an alias. I’m Eminem, but in the Dirty Dozen I’m Slim Shady. I was taking a shit, thought of it, got off the pot, forgot to wipe my ass and went off to tell everybody.” “Boom, the name hit me, and right away, I thought of all these words to rhyme with it,” was the slightly alternative origin in
Rolling Stone
. “So” – more hygienically – “I wiped my ass, and, ah, called everybody I knew.” “I thought of the name and then wrote,
‘Slim Shady/ Brain-dead like Jim Brady’
,” he recalled in
Angry Blonde
, “and that’s when I went with the name.”

His Eminem alias was the sort of thing every rapper needed, but never changed who he was, on record or off. This new name was different. Coming when all the simmering problems in his life were reaching boiling point, Slim Shady – plucked perhaps from Shady Lane, near Gilbert’s Lodge – set something rolling loose in his head. “The more I started writing and the more I slipped into this Slim Shady character, the more it just started becoming me,” he wrote in
Angry Blonde
. “My true feelings were coming out, and I just needed an outlet to dump them in. I needed some type of persona. I needed an excuse to let go of all this rage, this dark humour, the pain, and the happiness.” It was as if he had named his subconscious, or the rush of uncensored emotions which crash through, for better or worse, on Es (which he’d soon start to hungrily gobble). The way he told it, he had been possessed by himself. In a period of despair, in the crude process of taking a shit, Slim Shady had appeared to set him free.

There would be encouraging hands on his shoulder, when this new Marshall made himself known. To hear Marky Bass tell it to the
Sydney Sun-Herald
, the Bass Brothers had moulded Slim, a product not of a private apparition, but old-fashioned showbiz Svengalis. “His lyrics were a lot tamer when he started out,” Marky confided. “He always had his characters and an edge, but it wasn’t so much about his life story – and now pretty much everything he is writing about is what goes on in his life. We came up with the idea of shock rap. Things were going a little berserk in Marshall’s life, we were getting turned away by labels who didn’t want a white rapper, and some of the anger started coming out of him. We said, ‘You’ve got to let this out and ride with it.’ His early stuff was accepted within the rap genre and by the critics, he was always clean with his lyrics and his delivery, but the market didn’t take to it until it got a little foul-mouthed, a little potty-mouthed. Now, they’ll take anything from the kid.”

Talking to the
Mail On Sunday
, Mathers-Briggs seemed to confirm the story. “No one should take anything he says seriously,” she explained. “He doesn’t mean it. He is making money out of negative issues, because he could not make it any other way. When he first started to write filthy lyrics, I asked him why. His answer was the more foul he was, the more people loved him. He didn’t make money out of nice things. If he wrote a song about how much he loved his mother and little brother, he’d be laughed at.”

Once he became famous as Eminem, Marshall would never be averse to doing what it took to sell records, and the advice of the Basses, still effectively his paymasters, must have carried weight with him. But, as even Marky indicated, the emotions that congealed into Marshall’s new persona were genuine; Slim was his own creation. “All kinds of shit – not being able to provide for my daughter, my living situation, etc., just started building up so much that I had just had it,” he recalled in
Angry Blonde
.

The contrast between Slim and his previous character was shown by the shocked reactions even of his foul-mouthed soulmates in D12, when he rapped Slim’s first song for them. It was two freestyle, crazed verses he didn’t even bother to name –
“Stole your mother’s Acura/ wrecked it and sold it back to her,”
was one rhyme he remembered. At its end, Bizarre intoned, “You have now witnessed a white boy on drugs.” Proof was still more appalled, warning, “You need to quit talkin’ that drug shit.” But Slim’s malign influence went deeper than Marshall’s rap style. His life changed to suit his alias. As he described it in
Angry Blonde
, the decline of his daily existence and the rise of Slim went hand in hand. “[That first song] seemed like it was from out of left field compared to what I usually rapped about,” he wrote. “I soon found myself doing things that I normally didn’t do. Like getting into drugs and drinkin’. I was reeeaaally fucked up. I was sick of everything. Kim and I had Hailie, my producers FBT [the Basses’ pro name] were just about to give up on me, we weren’t paying rent to my mom’s, and just a whole bunch of other horrible shit was going on.”

But now, at last, he had a weapon with which to retaliate. Over the summer of 1997, as his circumstances simply got worse, he wrote three songs which would become the centrepiece not only of the next year’s
The Slim Shady EP
, but key tracks on
The Slim Shady LP
, the album which would introduce him to the world. His “first real song”, ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, was the one which bottled the essence of his fearlessly, funnily dark new identity best. It was written while he was still living back at his mother’s with Kim and Hailie. On record, its introduction by D12 associate Frogger shows the nervous uncertainty everyone around Marshall seemed to feel at his transformation.
“A get your hands in the air, and get to clappin’ ‘em and like, back and forth because aah, this is … what you thought it wasn’t,”
he announces, washing his hands of what follows even as he applauds. There’s a hacking cough in the background, before Slim Shady roars onto vinyl.

‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ is a battle rhyme in essence, but of a ruthless, rude confidence Eminem never managed on
Infinite
. He bundles most other white rappers into touch – Vanilla Ice, Everlast, even the admired 3rd Bass – as well as his Detroit rivals, before admitting
“I’m ill enough to just straight up dis you for no reason.”
But the rap’s point is to let Slim off the leash, and define him at the start, while burying
Infinite
‘s failed Eminem:
“Slim Shady, Eminem was the old initials (Bye-Bye!)/ Extortion, snortin’, supportin’ abortion/ Pathological liar, blowin’ shit out of proportion/ … Impulsive thinker, compulsive drinker, addict/ Half animal, half man/ Dumpin’ your dead body inside of a trash can.”
By the final verse, Slim’s outrageous thoughts are blending into true moments from Marshall’s life, a wrong-footing technique which would become a trademark; cursing his dishwashing chores at Gilbert’s, remembering his quietness at school, he then imagines he had a Junior High drug habit, and at 13 raped the women’s swim team. What really makes this the “first”, fully realised song by Eminem/Slim, though, is its sneered chorus:
“Screamin’ ‘Fuck the world’ like Tupac/ I just don’t give a FUUUUUCK!”
The rallying cry was irresistible. In the real world, holding down a job to support a baby and girlfriend, Marshall cared too much. But the
“Fuuuuuck!”
he didn’t give on record temporarily trampled all that. It was his first, relished raised finger to everyone.

‘If I Had’, by contrast, dropped all bravado, and sank into the troubles which spawned Slim. A cousin of
Infinite
‘s ‘It’s OK’, it jettisoned that track’s artistic distance, for one of hip-hop’s most nakedly depressed, weary songs. Marshall had left his mother’s to live with a friend and his roommates by now. He was still struggling. “I wrote that shit the same week my car broke down,” he remembered in
Angry Blonde
. “My fuckin’ engine blew out and a bunch of fucked up shit was happening, all at the same time.”

“Life … by Marshall Mathers,”
it begins, like a school report, or a teenager’s secret diary. It’s rapped flatly, almost whined, in Marshall’s normal speaking voice, to a barely varying, downbeat drum track by its EP producer, DJ Head. For the LP, the Basses would spruce it up into a version that included a descending, looped organ, and a soft female voice. Either way, it was circular music with no exit, expressing Marshall’s true feelings with no adornment; Slim’s existence now letting him be honest as himself, as well as from behind that dark mask.

What he thought was bleak. Life was a
“big obstacle”
, friends were
“really your enemies”
, money was, as on ‘It’s OK’, still
“the root of all evil”
; everything was geared to trick and backstab him.
“What is life?”
he wondered.
“I’m tired of life.”
And, 38 more times, he said
“tired”
, listing the dissatisfactions that drained him. Skinny crackhead friends, drive-by shootings, minimum wage jobs and petty bosses, DJs playing bad rappers and never him, his own weakness with drink,
“using plastic silverware … not being a millionaire,”
it all
“tired”
him. He was
“tired of being white trash, broke and always poor … tired of being stared at”
(something which, ironically, would worsen with success). Slim butted in with a chorus of vengeful fantasy:
“If I had one wish/ I would ask for a big enough ass for the whole world to kiss.”
But the overall mood was of rare resignation:
“Just fed up/ That’s my word.”
It wasn’t a song by someone expecting success, or who cared any longer about hip-hop’s requirements. It just said poverty had left its writer hopeless and depressed. Bordering self-pity and paranoia, as such feelings do, its shameless self-exposure was one reason he would soon be plucked by Interscope into a new, vastly wealthy life.

‘Just The Two Of Us’, the
EP
track renamed ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ on the
LP
, was something else again. It was written still later in the summer of 1997, when Marshall and Kim had temporarily split up, and Kim was threatening a restraining order to keep him from Hailie. Both were seeing other people; if the song is to be believed, there was talk of Kim making her new boyfriend and his son Hailie’s stepfamily, cutting Marshall out completely. With Kim’s stepfather allegedly threatening him too, Marshall’s resentment and apparent impotence at Hailie’s removal made him lash back with this swiftly infamous song, about the hours after his killing of Kim.

But, unlike its even more notorious 1999 prequel ‘Kim’, it is not at heart a misogynistic, violent song. As Marshall wrote in
Angry Blonde
, it had begun with his desire to write about himself and his daughter. “But I thought, ‘How can I make a song about Hailie?’ I didn’t want to make the shit corny or nothing, [and] I was also tryin’ to piss Kim off.” Of the massive invasion of Kim’s privacy that resulted, he explained: “At the most I thought it would be talked about in Detroit, but I didn’t figure I was going to get a deal and go nationwide with it.” Still, to anger Kim in the extreme, he used Hailie as co-vocalist. “I lied to Kim and told her I was taking [Hailie] to Chuck E. Cheese that day,” he told
Rolling Stone
of his daughter’s participation. “But I took her to the studio. When [Kim] found out, she fucking blew. We had just got back together for a couple of weeks. Then I played her the song, and she bugged the fuck out.”

It would not be the last time he’d profess naïve surprise at such outrage from Kim, after a verbal assault. But Hailie’s presence on this track, in a half-baby-talk dialogue with Dad when not yet even one, in fact softens the song, leaving its central subject as his love for her, as he’d intended. His fear of being “corny” – which hadn’t worried him when he wrote ‘Searchin’’, and he’d stop fearing again by
The Eminem Show
‘s heartfelt ‘Hailie’s Song’ – was, though, also allayed by creepy horror. To dreamlike, rippling harps, he quietens Hailie’s gurgling queries about why Mama’s sleeping in the trunk and smells so bad, why she has
“that little boo-boo on her throat”
(
“it’s just a little scratch – it don’t hurt”
), and why she won’t talk to her child, and wants to
“swim”
into a lake, late at night.