The Dark Story of Eminem (18 page)

Interscope meanwhile continued to push
The Slim Shady LP
, as 1999 ran down. In August, ‘Guilty Conscience’ was released as a single, making number five in the UK, and 25 in the States (his biggest home hit yet). The very popular video, dramatising the song’s three controversial scenarios, used stop-motion special effects to help create a new side to Shady’s visual persona. While Dre lumbered around the song’s tempted characters with the sluggishness of his raps, Eminem blinked and buzzed with manic energy, a super-speed blond irritant barely in control of a body being jerked by unseen hands. Dre shook him like a rag doll when he mentioned Dee Barnes, but just made him flap faster, till the Doctor threw in the towel. A fourth video, for ‘Role Model’, would chuck bustling, ‘My Name Is’-style business at a track finally too draggily downbeat to come out as a single. Only daring digs at the Catholic church (Father Eminem not only hearing a sultry teenage girl’s confession, but beckoning a young boy to his bed), and another fresh batch of acting styles from the rapper (from subtly intense sociopath to wide-eyed stooge) were worth watching.

September saw him win the first of what would become incessant music industry awards, at the Video Music bash by his friends at MTV, where ‘My Name Is’ (Best Male Video and Best Direction) and ‘Guilty Conscience’ (Breakthrough Video, whatever that meant) came first. It was appropriate his painstaking videos should be gaining as much attention as his music (which would win two Grammys in February 2000, for Rap Solo Performance [‘My Name Is’] and Rap Album). But fresh tracks, and the product-placement of old ones, also kept his momentum up as 1999 turned into 2000. Dre and Eminem duetted again on the
Wild Wild West
soundtrack’s ‘Bad Guys Always Die’, while the Schwarzenegger dud
End Of Days
and MTV’s
Celebrity Death Match
were seeded with
Slim Shady LP
cuts; Eminem meanwhile guest-rapped on indie 12-inches (some recorded before his success), and major releases from Missy Elliott’s
Da Real World
to the late Notorious B.I.G.’s
Born Again
. Quality stayed conspicuously high, as if he couldn’t let a single listener start to doubt he was here to stay.

His most high-profile new work, though, again emphasised his bond with Dre to the public.
2001
, released in November 1999, was the Doctor’s first LP since the string of flops that had preceded him meeting Shady. Now, his reputation was restored. It reached number four in the UK and two in the US. If anyone doubted Eminem’s part in this renaissance, they only had to listen to the album. It had more of the room-filling pop boom of
Slim Shady
than
The Chronic
‘s squealing funk, and Dre’s raps, poised between realism at his millionaire, near middle-aged family life and gun-wielding threats to pretenders to his throne, were unusually sharp. But there was also a languor to the record, and dull thuggishness to its many guest raps – until Shady walked in the door and, for a precious few minutes, electroshocked it to life.

‘What’s The Difference’ was his first intervention. “Stop the beat!” he woozily lurches. “Dre, I wanna tell you this shit right now, while this fuckin’ weed is in me – I love you, dog!” Everyone heard before, including Snoop Dogg, suddenly sounded anonymous, drowned out by this helium-voiced fool. And Eminem didn’t just praise the boss. He made the track another part of his expanding world, a footnote to ‘Bonnie & Clyde’ – observing, when he and Dre sentimentally swap offers to off each other’s enemies that, if he really wanted to kill Kim, afterwards he’d stick her body not in the boot, but the front seat, then add shades and wave her dead arm as he drove her rotting corpse from Detroit to California, where he’d dump her in front of a police station, and pull away with a screech. Like a novelist’s famous characters appearing in other books’ backgrounds, it was a satisfying, controlled cameo.

‘Forgot About Dre’ was still more impressive, with Eminem again injecting the addictive element. His rap was an unbroken but perfectly articulated stream of words with a racing, staccato beat, effortlessly increasing in speed as his anger increased, till he sounded like a tape flapping free of its machine. The virtuoso technique was a shocking advance on his own LP. And again, he added to his ongoing tale as much as Dre’s, telling Hailie she would now have to live with the Doc, as Dad was
“crazy”
.

‘Forgot About Dre’ was
2001
‘s second single, reaching number seven in the UK in May 2000 (25 in the US). That month, Dre travelled with Eminem to Britain, to duet on all their collaborations at the Brixton Academy, to a sold out, racially mixed crowd. The dream ticket of the two together was plain again.

But the excitement that month was more immediate. Eminem’s buffeting by fame during the past year had not slowed his artistry at all. In December, he had started work on
Slim Shady
‘s sequel. And, as he and the world still reeled from their first contact, this fresh blast was about to be unleashed.

The Marshall Mathers LP
was recorded in 20-hour, sometimes drug-fuelled sessions, in a two-month creative binge, nearly matching its predecessor’s 14-day birth. Holed away with Dre and the Bass Brothers in LA, the law-suits, family feuds and condemnations of the previous year could not touch Eminem. Reporters who watched him in the studio caught a rare glimpse of the personal control which had helped pull him from his old, incoherent life: the mature real man, Marshall Mathers, who allowed his unhinged artistic alter ego Slim to flourish. Asked about his work in these months, he was unusually forthcoming, describing alternating rhythms of icy perfectionism and druggy mental derangement. It was a good explanation for the seemingly free-styled and amorphous, yet somehow precise and pointed behemoth
The Marshall Mathers LP
would become.

“I’m focused when I’m recording,” Eminem told the website music365. “I slip into the zone. I don’t like to talk a lot. I like to stick to myself and get my thoughts together, think how I’m gonna map out each song. Each song is fairly easy to write. I record vocals on one day and take the tape home to listen to them overnight. Then I do more vocals the next day. I always do my vocals twice. I might have the skeleton down, the vocals and the beat, for two months before I think of the finishing touches to put on it, like sound effects, or if I want the beat to drop out right here. I take my time on my shit that way.”

As the May release date neared
The Source
found him listening to a playback of ‘Shit On You’ (a D12 collaboration eventually held back for their 2001 début,
Devil’s Night
), Dre nodding silently as his alleged protégé snapped off a list of delicate changes to a raptly listening engineer. “We’re going to sit back and listen to everything, listen to what I feel is missing on the album, if there’s anything missing,” he explained. “I want every song to be perfect.”

But at other moments, he revealed a more intuitive, if equally self-conscious method of creation. “I also got a studio in Detroit,” he told music365, “that I can go to if it’s the middle of the night and I want to lay some shit down. I can’t help when the ideas come. Most of this shit comes either when I’m laying in bed waiting to sleep, or if people are talking. If they say something, a lot of the time I’ll hear the way they’ve put words together, and they’ll be talking to me and I won’t even be listening to them because the last thing they said gave me an idea. I sit there with a blank stare and people think I’m on drugs constantly. I do that to my girl a lot. She’ll be talking to me and I’ll be like, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’ I’ll be looking off and she’ll say, ‘You’re not even listening!’ ‘Yeah, I am!’ ‘Repeat what I said!’ ‘I don’t know what the fuck you said!’ “

It was a distanced demeanour his Detroit schoolmates would have recognised, the almost autistic withdrawal of a mind constantly ticking at a depth mundane distractions could not touch. And now, he had unlimited access to instant shortcuts to that state, as he explained to
Muzik
: “For those who are curious about my methods in the studio, it goes a little like this. If I’m writing rhymes I smoke weed or take Tylenol, or muscle relax-ants, something to get the stories rolling. Or I take Ecstasy.”

“A couple of the songs on the new record were written on X,” he confirmed to music365 – at almost the same time as Dre too, and, more ambiguously, Missy Elliott bragged of the influence of European rave’s “love” drug. It had reached the US rap community a decade late and, judging by their music, seemingly stripped of its pacifying, loved-up powers, if not its hotwire route to raw feelings. “Somebody will just be looking at me wrong,” Eminem continued, “and I’ll just flip a table over, like, ‘What the fuck are you staring at?’ If you’re in a good mood you love everybody, but if you’re in a bad mood and you got shit on your mind, you’re gonna break down. The hardest shit I’ve fucked with is X and ‘shrooms.”

The wearing intensity of the hours, the sheer unwavering commitment to this phase of his artistic life, as if he knew that now were the months that mattered, the time that would prove his talent and establish his career, or leave him sliding back into the gutter, recall the legendary creative peaks of other musicians: Bob Dylan’s acid-heated mid-Sixties records and tours, or the intuitive, night-long small-hours sessions of Elvis Presley in 1969/70, recording whole albums on an evening’s whim; or, more pertinently, Eminem’s idol Tupac Shakur, who can be seen in studio home movies eagerly speeding from one track to the next, not even bothering to name them, expressing himself with such gushing force that even his murder could not stop the release of seemingly endless new albums, an undead flipped finger to his enemies.

Eminem, Dre, the Bass Brothers and their collaborators – principally bassist and keyboardist Mike Elizondo, keyboardist Tommy Coster Jnr., drum programmer DJ Head, and Dre co-producer Mel-Man – similarly seemed to thrive in the studio air. Eminem confessed to being a “studio rat”, happier when in the isolation bubble of writing and recording than anywhere else. Most of the key tracks on
The Marshall Mathers LP
cohered only thanks to the constant availability of musicians and technicians over such long, free-flowing sessions. “Every time we’re fucking around in the studio we seem to come up with the dopest shit,” Eminem commented in
Angry Blonde
. ‘Marshall Mathers’ came from Jeff Bass’s casual strumming of an acoustic guitar, ‘Criminal’ began with Eminem hearing Bass picking out an off-kilter piano line in the studio next door. Between them, the songs helped forge the album’s thematic core.

Such unrelenting work was also beating Eminem’s own rapping and studio techniques into shape. As he explained in
Angry Blonde
: “The more I learned about music, the more comfortable I felt behind the microphone and the more I could slip into character. It got to a point where I wasn’t just worried about getting the rhyme out and sayin’ it, I was worried about my pronunciation, about saying shit with authority, or even sometimes saying it softly. I learned to play with my voice. I made it do more things that I didn’t really know it could do. After
The Slim Shady LP
and Dr. Dre’s
Chronic
album [
2001
], I had simply had more experience behind the mic.”

But such technical advances only mattered because what Eminem wrote about had also expanded. Where
The Slim Shady LP
had been often playful in intent, its sequel eagerly fed on the anger he felt at his notoriety – the way fans who once didn’t know he existed now hounded him in his own home, while critics dissected and recoiled at his words.

A defining feature of Nineties fame was the manner in which it warped almost everyone it touched. The bleached, weird features of Michael Jackson were the most awful warning of how far success could remove you from common humanity, but everything about modern celebrity crept in that direction. Stardom had become a universal dream, but the few who attained it found themselves unable to leave their dream homes without phalanxes of bodyguards obscuring the view, unable to eat, drink or sleep safely with anyone not breathing the same rarefied air. Even in Britain’s more cynical, less hothouse atmosphere, previously well-balanced, mature people like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker felt themselves scorched by the skin-stripping intrusion that fame had become.

Many Nineties rappers obscured the problem either by rapping primarily about how great they and the trappings of their wealth were – a continuation of Run-DMC’s gold chain-wearing Eighties materialism – or by bringing as many of their street posses with them as they could, pretending, effectively, that nothing had changed. “Keeping it real” was a phrase religiously toasted by nearly all the decade’s hip-hop stars, with goblets of the finest champagne, in videos showing them in hot-tubs full of compliant, bikini-bulging models. The real gangstas and bloodshed in the highest echelons of black showbiz, often associated with Dre’s one-time partner “Suge” Knight, completed the unappetising picture of rap’s dishonest response to fame. It was a vision Eminem wearily dismissed, on the new album’s ‘Marshall Mathers’:
“And amidst all this Crist-poppin’ and wrist-watches/ I just sit back and watch and just get nauseous/ And walk around with an empty bottle of Remy Martin …”

Instead of colluding with his fame Eminem, alone among his contemporaries, used his new album to go to war with every aspect of stardom. He used intrusions on his private life to feed aggressive assertions of undimmed individuality – even as, on tracks like the soon to be infamous ‘Kim’, he destroyed whole new tranches of his privacy, scorched-earthing what might have been fuel for his enemies into energy for himself.