The Dark Story of Eminem (15 page)

The Slim Shady LP
was everything its backers had hoped it would be. Now, they went slickly to work to ensure their investment’s return. Marshall was a willing partner in their schemes. He wrote ‘Still Don’t Give A Fuck’ on the advice of Paul Rosenberg, effectively composing a sequel to order. He toned down his lyrics when asked, too, on ‘My Name Is’ and others, as Rosenberg admitted to the
LA Times
. “Have there been times when we had to change stuff [because of Interscope]? Yes. Em understands that he wants the stores to stock his records or he won’t be heard, so he’ll do what it takes for the most part, unless the complaint is just ridiculous.” A “clean” version of the album was even prepared, and released, allegedly as a sop to potential obscenity trials. Marshall claimed embarrassment, but let it happen.

As 1998 wound down, Interscope put their secret new star to work. He went out on rap’s prestigious Lyricist Lounge tour, and a radio-unplayable track from the album, ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, was selectively released as a single. Marshall naïvely spilled the strategy at work to
elamentz.com
.

“The Lyricist Lounge tour? My production company hooked it, I guess … I don’t really know. All I know is Interscope Records came to me and was like, ‘You’re doing the tour.’ The single that’s coming out, it’s mostly for the Lyricist Lounge. They’re like pressing up vinyl and shit to give out. You know, to get the buzz going. What they’re trying to do is elevate the underground buzz. Then they’re gonna drop the second single, probably right before the album. And then, um … the second single is gonna be called, ‘My Name Is’. It’s a song that Dr. Dre produced.”

There was a genuine “buzz” on Marshall by this time, anyway, from those who had heard
The Slim Shady EP
, or his stray verses on indie singles like Shabaam Sahdeeq’s ‘5 Star Generals’ (recorded for cash and forgotten about in his unsigned days, and suddenly selling), or seen him battle (he had even been on a Lyricist Lounge tour before). But the shift from underground to mass market, with credibility intact, was now fine-tuned. A subtly controversial sleeve for the album was prepared. On its front, Marshall and little Hailie stared thoughtfully from a pier’s edge towards the water, under an ominous moon. “Kim”‘s feet could be seen sticking out from a nearby car boot. On the back, a blue-lit, bare-chested Marshall shut his eyes and held his head, a picture of pretty-boy angst. For the record’s release, hundreds of interviews were arranged, along with mind-frying, demographic-bridging tours, playing to rock then rap audiences the same day, leaving no listener immune. Marshall would not complain, till he collapsed. He had worked hard at cooking meatloaf. He would work hard at this.

The true secret to
The Slim Shady LP
‘s mass acceptance, though, was much simpler: ‘My Name Is’, and its video.

Marshall had made one previous video, in 1998, for ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’. Mostly black-and-white, with uncensored lyrics, it was cheaply shot, for “underground buzz”. It tried to make him a threatening B-boy, emphasising his muscular arms, and surrounding him with women shorter than he was. Marshall scowled for the cameras, punched an old woman, and moved like a slasher movie killer. But the images were generic and incoherent, and Marshall was listless and unconvincing, detracting from his song. He looked like just another Detroit thug.

‘My Name Is’’s video bore more personal touches. “The thing of it is that, with the videos, people produce them and that,” Jennifer Yezvack reveals to me, “but I’m telling you – those are his ideas. He’s out there! He’s very imaginative. He’s creative. He’s an artist.”

The clip is the opposite of ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’, with a depth foreign to MTV, but a top kids’ TV show’s sense of controlled chaos, colour and glee that was addictive to its viewers. Starting in the living room of a sweaty, stereotypical white trash couple – him a fat pig in a vest cracking nuts, her a slutty tramp in a slip swigging whiskey – as they settle down for an afternoon’s mutual loathing and sappingly bad TV, their hopeless channel-hopping stops at
‘The Slim Shady Show – Starring Marshall Mathers’
.

The first Marshall we see is a bespectacled nerd, waving outside a picture-book Fifties suburban house, a straight white American ideal version of his Warren trailer. A hurled newspaper almost swats him in the face. A little nonplussed at this hostility, he gamely keeps smiling. Marshall Mathers did wear glasses at school, and was once that geeky and peaceable. But
The Slim Shady Show
could hardly stop with him.

The channels hop again, along with the song’s bouncing beats, but now Marshall/Shady’s on all of them, in a casual deconstruction of the clip’s medium, and a garish introduction to Shady’s head. He’s a golf swing-practising showbiz pro, a ventriloquist’s dummy, Marilyn Manson and President Clinton, in a variety of bad suits and wigs. The scene keeps switching too, even the film stock does, as the variety of scenarios Marshall packs into each verse becomes visually explicit: he’s falling drunk out of his car on
America’s Most Wanted
, being hurled out of a club by indignant strippers, and fervently moralising from the President’s podium, till we see his pants are down, and a Lewinsky-alike pops up guiltily wiping her lips, and trots off at
Benny Hill
speed (far from the last time he’d pull the President’s pants down in his work).

Like his album, though, what was most impressive and electric about the clip was the persona it kept defining, the many moods of Slim Shady it shoved at you. The jump in performance skill and personal revelation from the anonymous ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ was total. No longer just a moody bad boy, everything he did with his body looked original, the Lincoln class clown and sarcastic Gilbert’s Lodge cook merging with the snickering D12 filth merchant and snarling Shady, and adding to the confident, quickwitted Marshall Mathers Californian success had turned him into. Whether in a straitjacket (again, not for the last time in his video career) being inspected by Dre, or in a dream-zone with “Mom” – her hip whorishly cocked outside a white trash shack – or just as his smartly tracksuited self, he used his eyes and mouth for maximum, exaggerated expression, and moved his arms and hands in far more interesting shapes than the B-boy semaphor he’d started with. His eyes were charismatic black holes on the screen, too, however funny he was being. For someone who would prove a stilted stage performer, he had mastered this second medium right at the start. He had also stayed true to his roots, and made a social point, in his allotted four minutes. The white trash couple are shown coming alive as they watch him, not just slobs, but roaring and bonding, over someone as unashamed as them.

There was one more striking alteration in this second video. Marshall Mathers had always been a brunette. This new creature’s hair was dyed platinum blond.

The only drawback of the video as an introduction to Eminem was that it necessarily used the “clean version” of ‘My Name Is’ (with scared substitutions of many of his best lines – the one about slitting his Dad’s throat changed to the nonsensical
“if you see my Dad/ ask him if he bought a porno mag, and saw my ad,”
for instance). But that made it all the more perfect for MTV, who slapped it on heavy rotation to an almost unheard of extent for such a new act. “They jumped on the video before the video was even done, when they got the rough draft,” Marshall told
?
. “It’s like, ‘Finish it up. We wanna play it right away.’ So two days, three days later, they were screening it. And MTV is what made radio jump on it.” Interscope again cemented in all possible demographics, giving the station a clip in which Dre and Missy Elliott sang this new rapper’s praises. Advertising time was also bought to screen ‘My Name Is’ during Howard Stern’s prime-time TV show.

‘My Name Is’ and
The Slim Shady LP
both finally reached American stores on February 23, 1999. The appetite for what Eminem had to offer was far greater than anyone had expected, even after such careful cultivation. With first-week sales of 280,000, the album entered the
Billboard
pop chart at number two. It would become the R&B number one as well, the sort of double-header in which Elvis once specialised. In March, ‘My Name Is’ was a UK hit too, as was
The Slim Shady LP
, released there on April 10. By the end of that month, the album had sold two million in America.

Reviews were hardly relevant in such a frenzy. Critics anyway mostly saw him as amusing, if unmistakably talented, the rock press adding immediate if muted distaste at his woman-beating words.
Rolling Stone
compared him to comedians Rodney Dangerfield and Pee-Wee Herman, as well as helium-voiced rappers like the Beasties’ Ad-Rock and Cypress Hill’s B-Real; noting “the bitch-bashing gets tired fast”, and, insightfully, the loneliness of his white voice on the record (“he has hardly any homies”), it judged him to “earn his buzz as a bona fide rap star”.
NME
‘s Steven Wells led a still less serious British response, calling him a “Wonda-Wigga” and “squeaky motherfucker”, with a “comedy album” ideal “if you’re retarded, stoned or 12.” He then wondered why “all the women on this end up raped, battered or slaughtered white meat”, fondly imagining the day “a tuff lezzer is going to twat you between those baby-blue eyes.” ‘As The World Turns’ already imagined something similar, of course, drawn from Marshall’s life. But it was a sign of conflicts to come.

Somewhere among this, Marshall Mathers, the anonymous, abused boy from Detroit who a year before had seen only emptiness in a life he toyed with ending, disappeared. For the world at large, at least, that identity was no longer important. It was like Clark Kent, a boring front for the man who really mattered. From now on, except for a few in Detroit who knew the real Marshall he remained in his heart, he would be Eminem.

In a spare moment, he considered his position. “I dealt with a lot of shit coming up, a lot of shit,” he told
Rolling Stone
. “When it’s like that, you learn to live day by day. When all this happened, I took a deep breath. Just like: ‘I did it.’ “