The Dark Story of Eminem (2 page)

South of 8 Mile, an ordinary road as uncrossable as the Berlin Wall, blacks were abandoned, living among the cadavers of the factories that had tempted them from Dixie. Tax dollars had left for the suburbs too. In the black world of downtown Detroit, jobs, money and hope disappeared daily. And in 1967, this place of invisible apartheid became a site of race war, a vision of where such iniquity could lead.

There had been one race battle already, back in the boom year of 1943, a little after
Life
had realised: “Detroit is dynamite: it can either blow up Hitler or blow up the US.” 34 had died then, 25 of them black, in a 3-day battle finished by federal troops. That lit the fuse. And the 1967 eruption, in a decade of race riots, was the most vicious in America since the Civil War. In other cities in the Sixties, there had been order in the destruction, a concentration on white-owned businesses, a statement being made in the flames. Detroit was already too far gone. Sparked by a police raid on an after-hours drinking joint one hot July night, black rioters torched indiscriminately. A Vietnam general and nearly 5,000 paratroops were needed to pacify the city. In five days, 43 people were killed, 30 by law officers. There were 7,231 arrests. 2,509 buildings were looted or razed. Vacant lots from those days still pock Detroit. “It looks like Berlin in 1945,” Mayor Jerome Cavanagh said, looking at his smashed city. “America’s first Third World city,” it was also dubbed.

That was five years before Eminem was born. The riot’s ash hasn’t yet been buried. In 1967, a third of Detroit’s citizens were black. Now 80 per cent are. The quality of life in the metropolitan area that includes its suburbs is quite high. But in Detroit itself, it’s as if some organic, irreversible decay has set in. Since 1950, its population has shrunk by a million. Over 10,000 houses and 60,000 lots stand empty. A third of its citizens are beneath the poverty line. Many live in zones of hardcore unemployment, prospectless. In the Seventies and Eighties, when the race lines of other American cities blurred, Detroit’s hardened. It was de-industrialised, dead-beat. 8 Mile Road was the scar that showed its character.

There was a better history Eminem was heir to, a musical heritage of exceptional richness. In the early Sixties, black Detroiters Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson had founded Motown (a contraction of Motor Town), and quickly gathered other local talent including Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Supremes, Martha Reeves, and The Four Tops to the label. From Gordy’s modest home, with the wooden sign “HITSVILLE U.S.A.” on its roof, a hit factory was built to specifications as tight as Henry Ford’s. An Artist Development Department groomed raw teenage talent, while house musicians The Funk Brothers and house writer-producers including Robinson and Holland, Dozier & Holland maintained immaculate standards on smashes from ‘Stop ! In the Name of Love’ to ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’. Sent on a dangerous tour of the apartheid South in 1962, Gordy warned his stars they were representing “all of Detroit”. And, according to Gordy’s own accommodating beliefs, these records made in his seething, schismed city spent much of the Sixties integrating the pop charts with visions of yearning uplift, till they had fulfilled his boast to be “the Sound of Young America”.

Detroiters’ more complex, harsh reactions to the music, though, were proven when Martha & The Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’ became a rallying cry for thousands in the 1967 inferno. The label’s departure for LA in 1972 signalled the closure of another reason for hope in the city.

The more brutal realities of Detroit in the Sixties were translated into not only later Motown records like Gaye’s
What’s Going On
, but the grinding proto-punk garage rock of the MC5 and Iggy Pop’s Stooges. Pop said his sound was partly a product of the pounding noise of the city’s remaining auto factories, and garage rock continues to thrive in Detroit, oblivious to fashion, in bands like The White Stripes and Von Bondies.

Equally pivotal was the early Eighties creation of Techno, by three young middle-class blacks, Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunder-son, living in rural Belleville, 30 miles from the city. Representative of the obscure fact that, as Atkins told Simon Reynolds, depressed Detroit is “[also] the city that has the most affluent blacks in the country”, they made a kind of post-industrial, art-dance music, from influences including Kraftwerk and George Clinton. On tracks like May’s ‘Strings Of Life’ they made sounds of eerie, funky electronic beauty, the first to directly respond to the cavernous, closed factories that now littered Detroit, where they were only marginally liked.

As a major inspiration for the European rave scene which eventually popularised Es among Eminem’s set, May’s influence on the rapper can faintly be traced. The decline from popular music of aspiration to cultish music of devastation, though, shows more clearly where Eminem entered Detroit’s lineage.

In music, industry and politics, he lived in a place whose glory days had nearly gone. In a nation which by the Nineties was ruled by hip-hop, from East or West coasts, he rapped in the middle of nowhere. He was like the working-class men still scrabbling for auto jobs in the city. He lived in the home of Hitsville. But the Hit Factory had closed its gates.

Take a journey around Detroit today, though, and you’ll find new landmarks, staging posts in Eminem’s own story. Like his music, they’re inseparable from the fallen, fractured state of the city itself.

Midtown is as good a place as any to start. Walk through Wayne State University’s campus, towards the grand industrial skyline which was once the city’s heart, and you drop into an alien landscape, composed of all the things Detroit has lost. You can walk for 15 minutes, and not see another soul. It’s like touring Pompeii, soon after the volcano. The sense of some natural disaster is imprinted on every empty building. Rows of roughly cemented windows look like wet mould. The paint on every wall of what were once factories is peeling. It’s as if these streets have been dredged from underwater. Asbestos is left open to the air, hundreds of windows are simply smashed. One vast building’s roof is ripped off, and inside it seems a crashed plane of junk has landed nose-first, ploughing through its floors, filling it to the brim. The wind moves the debris, as if it’s alive. Nearby are great empty parking lots, long deserted alleys, wild grass patches. This nearly silent wreckage is peaceful and calming to a visitor. Only when bored youths appear in the distance do you remember people were meant to live and work here, and that Detroit is dangerous at night now, because they can’t.

Turn right along the old city limit, Grand Boulevard, and you’ve entered the Lower East Side, still the ghetto’s rotted core. There are charred frames of houses turned to ash here, cracked roofs, large muddy lots. Destroyed things aren’t replaced down here, just left as gaps and ghosts. Eminem lived here for a while, with Kim and Hailie. But not long enough to make you stop. To get where you’re headed next, you could speed up Gratiot, the freeway that splits this old neighbourhood. You’d move fast and see nothing, the way most whites from the suburbs like it; it would help explain how this place has gotten so isolated. But Eminem had no car, growing up. And going slower, a different way, will keep you to his path.

So keep going, straight across Grand Boulevard. Before long, you’ll be on 8 Mile Road. Eminem has talked about it so often in interviews, naming it “the racial borderline”, even calling his film
8 Mile
, so large does it loom in his mind, that you expect a simmering ghetto cauldron. It is certainly Detroit’s central fact, the end result of its racial history, the track Eminem boldly crossed onto the wrong side of, to make “black” rap music. But walk as far as you like along it, as it runs the length of Detroit’s northern edge, and its potency is invisible. It looks like just another American highway. It is lined with auto repair shops, warehouses, cheap motels. It is only when you choose a side of it that 8 Mile’s mystery is unlocked, and you truly start to step in Eminem’s shoes.

Turn right, back down into Detroit, towards 7 Mile (you can count a lot with numbers in this place; they go up to 19 Mile, and down into hell). Depending which junction you choose, you might not be sure on which side of Eminem’s border you’ve fallen at first. Walk one way, and you could be in a leafy English suburb, with mock-Tudor stone houses, substantial with wealth. Except every person you see is black. This is Bagley, one of Detroit’s oldest black middle-class districts. Keep going along 7 Mile and the ghetto soon appears. There are more broken-windowed factories, burned houses, scrubland. There are outposts of life, too: schools, churches, recording studios. Every face you see is black again. In Detroit, skin separates you.

Eminem lived here on 7 Mile, for a while. The Hip-Hop Shop where he honed his rapping skills was there (it’s now moved), so were his black friends in D12. And, as a teenager, he lived with his mother just south enough of 8 Mile, in a small, two-storey home, one of three white families on his block, behind the sprawling, ugly Bel-Air mall. And it was outside this mall that black teenagers stripped him to his underwear and jammed a pistol to his head, because he was white, before a passing, armed white trucker saved his life.

“If they grew up in Detroit, in the city,” Eminem complained to
City Detroit
magazine of his critics, when he first tasted fame, “they would know what the fuck is going on. They would know why I feel the way I do, and why I say the things I do. When you’re white and in hip-hop, everybody wants to know your background. You have to come from the ‘hood. And I don’t see the point in it. But it’s like, okay; if everybody in the world wants to know where I came from, then this is where I came from. And I’m gonna show you.”

The day before, he had done just that, taking MTV to his old home behind the mall. But he was being too defensive, back then. And he was only telling half the story. He was never just some white foundling, abandoned in a black world. The boy who as a national star would give himself new names and identities at will understood Detroit’s dangerously split personality from both sides. Step off 8 Mile the other way, into the white suburbs, and you’re still walking in his world.

You’ve left Detroit altogether now, according to the statutes barring its borders. You’re now in the city of Warren. Like 8 Mile, it is a place hardly anyone would have heard of, if Eminem hadn’t left it.

It is a sprawling grid of small, one-storey frame houses, replicas of the crumbling East Side it was built to replace, in the decade of the suburban dream, the Fifties. In the years afterwards, smashed windows, arson and violent threats greeted black Detroiters who tried to join whites’ flight to it. Eminem’s grandmother, Betty Kresin, lived in a trailer park here, and Eminem spent much of his youth there too. He has called this place “the white trash capital of the world”. Not for the last time, he exaggerated for effect. Walk through Warren to the school where he spent the most years, Lincoln Junior High, and the white ghetto you expect from his interviews is hard to find.

It has the feel of a quiet English coastal town, off-season. It certainly isn’t the home of people made wealthy by whiteness. It is just where Detroit’s white working class retreated to, as their own futures shrank. The strolling teenagers of 7 Mile, or the cramped bustle of the Lower East Side, are absent. Adults drive to and from here in their cars, some to factory jobs, still. More kids stick in school. American flags flutter in yards. Neighbourhood Watch signs are prominent. The few, white faces you can see are working on their small gardens. Their subtly, determinedly different wood houses are often chipped, as on 8 Mile’s other side. Some toys are left in the street, slovenly, but safe. There are wide mud alleys between the backs of some streets. The impression is of a place just keeping itself above the flood-line. “White trash” is too harsh.

Lincoln Junior High is on the corner of one of the wider avenues. A Drive-Thru Pizza place, a Rustproofing shop and a fire station are the nearby landmarks. “Thoughts and Prayers are with the Rescuers and Victims”, says a post-9/11 sign in this peaceful-looking, loyal American backwater. A white boy is crossing the school’s large parking lot suspiciously early in the day, with a rapper’s low jeans and lope.

Eminem was here from 1986 to 1989, when, at 14, he quit education, to rap. It is the only school where he stayed long enough to make friends. When his nomadic mother moved again to Detroit, he walked two miles back every day, so he could keep them. So this is as close as you will ever get to picturing his school days.

Those were over a decade ago, of course. But the long corridors, metal lockers, and din of fractious, spirited adolescents can’t have changed much. Only a small, significant number of black faces, and a few more white boys with a hopeful hint of hip-hop style suggest time’s passing. Principal Paul Young has been here three decades. In Eminem’s time, he was an English teacher. His take on Warren differs from his ex-pupil’s.

“It’s very much a blue-collar neighbourhood, of hard-working, honest people,” he says in his office. “It has areas that are very poor, and areas that are relatively well-off. Quite a few families moved here from the South, to work in the auto industry. To some extent, it’s been hit by that industry’s decline. And it’s an older neighbourhood. Some of the folks who have retired from the industry have moved further north. The area’s become somewhat more transient. When homes go up for sale, in many cases, they’re turned into rentals. As a result, the population’s become more fluid, and lost some of the sense of community it used to have. But it’s always supported the schools.”

His view of 8 Mile, a short walk from his school gates, is sanguine too. “At one time, there were some racial issues here,” he admits. “But I think that 8 Mile symbolism is less true today than it might have been when Eminem was a youngster. I think one of the reasons is that many of the whites who moved in to Warren from the South have retired and moved on. It’s now their kids that are here, and they’re more culturally aware, and more tolerant of diversity. Our school’s much more diverse than it was even 10 years ago, when he was here.”