The Dark Story of Eminem (27 page)

On June 22, three days after
Devil’s Night
‘s release, MTV then banned its single ‘Purple Pills’ for its unmissable drug references. As with the “clean” versions of his solo albums, Eminem raised no murmur of protest, and D12 re-recorded the song as ‘Purple Hills’. He might believe in free speech, and think his band was “underground” but faced with people not buying his records, he always went with the flow.

July 5 saw a more serious attack, as Australian Prime Minister John Howard condemned an upcoming Sydney concert, saying Eminem’s lyrics were “sickening, demean women and encourage violence”. Ticket sales slumped as the possibility rose of his visa being denied. Christian Democratic Party MP the Rev. Fred Nile meanwhile called for the concert to be ‘R’-rated, banning it to under-18s, in the fiercest terms: “Eminem’s rap songs are obscene and provocative as they incite violence and rebellion against parental and police authority. The audience will also be encouraged to chant in unison socially unacceptable, obscene words such as FUCK, over and over again! … Something has to be done, as Australia already has the highest level of teenage suicides and increasing teenage school and gang violence, which is incited by Eminem’s violent, murderous message of death and depression.” In America, they could have used that on the posters. Of more consequence to Eminem was that, according to the Christian Democrats, they had the support of his mother. Raising her voice for the first time since her court humiliation, she was quoted as saying: “My son’s foul-mouthed material should not be heard by children. I would say ban these shows for people under 18.” On August 1, the Scottish Catholic Charismatic Renewal Group also handed a petition to Glasgow Council, calling for a ban on Eminem playing there that month.

As in Canada, and as in Britain previously, all this uproar amounted to nothing in the end. For all the traditional authoritarian language used by his official enemies, what Eminem was proving on this year of touring was that it was he, with his multinational backing, money, fame and free speech rights, who had the power in modern democracies. Ministers, church or Prime, could rant, but they were no threat to him now.

Dre, speaking to
NME
, did not even bother to hide the attacks’ positive effects: “It’s exciting to me as long as it doesn’t go any farther than this. I don’t want to go to a position where our stuff is being watched so closely that we’re going to have to watch what we’re saying in the studio. Any time you’ve got genius and you’re presenting it to the masses, you’re going to be looked at in a certain way. That’s the reason N.W.A. was getting so much flack, because we had every kid in the ghetto’s ear and they were ready to wear what we wore and said what we said, y’know? And that’s the reason for all the turmoil with Eminem.”

When Eminem reached Sydney in August, for a reputed (Australian) $1 million fee, his single show had failed to sell out, and his chainsaw’s teeth had been pulled, the furore doing at least that much harm. Still, he told the audience, “I’m lovin’ this shit … I might buy a fuckin’ house out here! Bet your fuckin’ Prime Minister wouldn’t like that though.” Kim was called a “cheating bitch”, he pretended to have brought his “pistol” with him. But everything else – the setlist, the props, the “pill-popping” – was the same pantomime routine he’d trailed round the world for over a year. And, as in Britain, the response, once the storm around it broke, was disappointment.
NME
‘s reporter noted that “it is near-impossible to take him even remotely seriously … he’s little more than a hip-hop Robbie Williams.”

When he returned to Britain at the end of the month, for his biggest ever gig there, a slot headlining the Reading Festival that court cases had delayed by a year, the response was muted, and the set was still unchanged.
NME
again: “Performing with D12 for the first half hour, with a ten-minute cartoon intermission and huge inflatable props, it seems like the most famous pop star in the world has difficulty walking his walk unaided.” A “secret” warm-up gig at London’s medium-sized Astoria theatre had failed to sell out, to smirks from a British music press which had previously stoked Eminem’s notoriety. But that fire could not be relit. In September, after almost 100 near-identical shows supporting
The Marshall Mathers LP
, a US version of Reading signalled the tour’s end. The idea of it had made him a national nightmare around the world. The reality had revealed too much of the nice American boy he could so often be. And, because it wasn’t a very good show, it had made him not only more famous, but less of a star. The “shack” ‘s demolition was long overdue.

With the very last juice squeezed from
The Marshall Mathers LP
, everything else that happened to Eminem in 2001 took on a sensation of drift. It was as if he had entered a sort of limbo between albums, with his celebrity sustaining enough atmospheric force to attract unrelated fragments of gossip, rumours of sex and violence. Cut loose from his teenage Detroit sweetheart, he was said to be dating other stars: first, 19-year-old R&B queen Beyonce Knowles of Destiny’s Child; then, Irish pop singer Samantha Mumba, 18, glimpsed with him in posh LA hotels; even the fading diva Mariah Carey was placed at his house. None of it seemed quite real.

Violence, meanwhile, now happened in his name, without him lifting a finger. In August, rival Detroit rapper Esham alleged he had been attacked by D12 and dozens of their hangers-on while on tour in New Jersey, and blamed the absent Eminem, although the accusation went nowhere. Eminem told MTV Asia that, when he rejected two groupies who followed him to his hotel after a gig and left them in a room, they fell to fighting on the floor over whose fault it was, and continued their wrestling in the parking lot. “Little did they realise I didn’t like either of them,” he smirked with lordly disdain.

In Britain, his influence was still more distant. In March, a 14-year-old Devon boy sent home from school for stabbing a girl with a pen kicked in his house’s door and stairs and scrawled on walls, after his mother criticised Eminem, whose “disturbing” lyrics were attacked by his lawyer. In August, a 24-year-old Kent man brutally thumped his girlfriend over the head with a dumbbell and shoe, and stabbed her foot with a screwdriver, after she turned off an Eminem CD because she didn’t want her four-year-old hearing his lyrics. In January, a coroner in Teignmouth had criticised those lyrics at the inquest into the suicide of 17-year-old David Hurcombe, who had printed out the words to ‘Rock Bottom’ before jumping in front of a train. In March, another inquest heard Hampshire 13-year-old Kayleigh Davies had become obsessed with Eminem before hanging herself. In July, an Oldham primary school headmaster discovered at least five of his pupils had cut their arms with pencil sharpeners, which they reportedly blamed on seeing “a fan” slash his wrists in ‘Stan’’s video (which contains no such sequence). “It has all been instigated by this idiot Eminem,” the headmaster decided. PC Graham Jones was called in to explain to pupils “that what their idols do is not gospel. It is quite worrying that parents are allowing children to watch things like this. It could lead to serious injury, even death.” The fact that those “things” did not exist to be watched in the first place showed the ill-informed, headline-led nature of the fuss. Eminem had done all he could to tell his fans not to follow his music’s example. This rash of sad deaths, stupid, thuggish violence and juvenile experiments in Britain merely showed that the lost and unpleasant young souls in his songs existed outside America. His name’s attachment to them showed it now had a life beyond his control.

In the absence of a new record, others also began to make records about him. In September, Tori Amos released
Strange Little Girls
, a selection of songs written by men but reinterpreted with female characters at their cores. Among covers ranging from Tom Waits’ ‘Time’ to Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’, Eminem’s ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ was the track critics zeroed in on. Leaving the lyrics as they were, Amos sang them starkly, in the previously erased voice of the wife lying in the trunk. By its existence, it dragged Eminem’s misogyny into terrain he could not have anticipated. A woman had finally returned his hate to him, in his own words.

“I’ve always found it fascinating how men say things and women hear them,” Amos told the
LA Times
. “In ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, that was Eminem – or one of the many people living inside him – and he killed his wife. What intrigued me in the way he told the story was this rhythmic kind of justification. You have to have empathy for him. I did when I heard it. But she has to have a voice.” To MTV, she spoke almost mystically of her relationship to the battered Kim of the song. “‘Bonnie & Clyde’ is a song that depicts domestic violence very accurately, right on the money. But there was one person who definitely wasn’t dancing to this thing, and that’s the woman in the trunk. And she spoke to me. She grabbed me by the hand and said, ‘You need to hear this how I heard it.’”

Like my female friend with experience of misogyny and male violence Amos, a rape victim, wasn’t threatened or surprised by the song, and wanted its angry, unchecked words to be heard. “Music is always a reflection of the hearts and minds of the culture,” she told MTV. “If you’re singing songs that are about cutting women up, usually these guys are tapping into an unconscious male rage that is real – they’re just able to harness it. So to shut them up isn’t the answer. They’re a gauge; they’re showing you what’s really happening in the psyche of a lot of people.”

It was as mature, insightful and fair a response as Eminem could have wished for; better than the man who on ‘Shit On You’ accurately rapped
“over-reaction is my only reaction”
managed to female and gay attacks on himself. Where she split from him was in his defence of his work’s careless extremity, repeated so often by now that he hardly seemed to hear the phrases as he mouthed them: that
“I didn’t know if you’d do it or not”
, that these were just words, that speech was free. “I would hear a lot of people say, ‘They’re only words, what is everyone going on about?’” Amos countered, to MTV. “I believe in freedom of speech, but you cannot separate yourself from your creation. Words are like guns. Whether you choose the graciousness of Tom Waits or the brutality of ‘Bonnie & Clyde’, they’re equally powerful.”

In the North-east of England, meanwhile, The Pet Shop Boys were recording a similarly cogent response to Eminem’s homophobia. “Eminem’s defence of the homophobic lyrics on his albums has always been that he’s not speaking as himself, he’s speaking as a character, and he’s representing homophobia in America,” their singer-lyricist Neil Tennant noted. “I thought it would be quite interesting to take that method and just to present rap in this homosexual context. I mean, there obviously are gay rap stars.”

‘The Night I Fell In Love’, one of the strongest songs on The Pet Shop Boys’ March 2002 album
Release
, was therefore a narrative of a teenage boy’s night of lust and love with a barely disguised Eminem. To a softly swelling, romantic melody, he’s introduced to this nameless rap star backstage, and taken to his video camera-equipped room for a
“private performance”
, ending with the rapper joking at breakfast the next morning
“about Dre and his homies and folks”
. Tennant had obviously thought about his subject enough to penetrate past Eminem’s image to his private character, as the boy notes,
“I was surprised he spoke so politely”
, and
“he couldn’t have been a nicer bloke”
; the boy’s seduction is gently consensual.

In some ways, ‘The Night I Fell In Love’ is an answer song to ‘Stan’, Tennant clearly inspired by it to write another angle on fan love, with Stan’s advances responded to more positively. Tennant’s rapper even quotes ‘Stan’’s lyrics, as if nervous he’s about to vanish into the song:
“Hey, man! Your name isn’t Stan, is it? We should be together!”
So Eminem’s greatest work had yet another layer added to it. Tennant’s cleverest critique, though, was simply to sing the fan’s memoir in his own fey, Northern English voice, bringing the rapper’s street Americanisms thudding down to earth. The breakfast they shared was surely an English fry-up, and Tennant saved his best deflating line for last, when the lovers part quickly:
“but I thought that was cool/ ‘cos I was already late for school.”

“I was thinking of the boy as the schoolboy in
Queer As Folk
, someone like that, going to see a concert at Manchester Arena or somewhere like that, and he ends up backstage because he’s cute, and he gets off with the rap star,” Tennant explained. “I think if rap’s going to be provocative that you can be provocative back about it. I like Eminem’s records. I think he’s brilliant.” “I’ve got his doll on the mantelpiece,” fellow Boy Chris Lowe added, helpfully.

When the schoolboy
“asked/ why have I heard so much about him being charged with homophobia and stuff/ he just shrugged”
. But Tennant, as a critical gay fan of Eminem, had constructed a far more accurate, effective undermining of his homophobic leanings than any of the outraged pressure groups who had tried to shut him up, and just fuelled his fire. ‘The Night I Fell In Love’ begged for a single release, to take the argument into the charts where it belonged. Eminem offered no public response to either Tennant or Amos (a spokesperson said he was “aware” of the latter’s effort, but “hadn’t heard it”).

Nor did he comment on the equally cheeky “Eminem Look-Alike 8-Page Pull-Out Special” in the April 2001 issue of gay porn magazine
Euroboy
. In dungarees (initially) and hockey mask, 18-year-old Matthew licked his chainsaw, and gently inserted it where even the toughest rapper might hesitate. Editor Sean Spence told
NME
: “The common consensus here is that Eminem is an asshole and gay men shouldn’t waste money on his records. But personally I like his music and think he’s attractive. We’re making a political statement and having a bit of a laugh. Matthew really wants to carry on as Eminem, stripping at hen parties and gay clubs.” Matthew himself added: “Even my mum thinks I look like Eminem. I love his music, his lyrics – in fact, I love everything about him. People say he’s homophobic, but I’d still like to give him one!”