The Dark Story of Eminem (29 page)

The Southern funk of rap veterans and Eminem tour alumni OutKast and their massive hit ‘Miss Jackson’, and the sonically astonishing re-imagining of New York’s ghettos as electronic iron tombs to be transcended in Cannibal Ox’s
The Cold Vein
, indicated underground currents. Jay-Z, who by year’s end had registered his third straight US number one LP,
The Blueprint
, and 12 million sales, remained Eminem’s biggest commercial rap rival. White rock fans meanwhile, though still in thrall to the brainlessly macho nu-metal, were also favouring Slipknot, whose deliberately obscene style, and assumption of enough intelligence in their depressed, rebellious teen fans to understand its subtleties better than their elders, was precisely in Eminem’s vein. The success of acts like Nickelback and POD in early 2002, with their songs of white broken homes, wife-beating and teenage suicide, also showed Eminem’s heartland constituency was not changing in his time away.

The only seismic change in America as the follow-up to
The Marshall Mathers LP
gestated, in fact, had nothing directly to do with music. The terrorist obliteration of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 briefly made the solipsism of most modern American art seem foolish. The hysterical self-absorption of Eminem, as much as the narcotised materialism of many of his rap contemporaries, was brought into sharp relief by the sight of their fellow Americans windmilling to their deaths from high windows, or being squashed to paper thinness in rubble. The dark cloud of dust, stone and glass which rolled through New York City, coating it black, made even Cannibal Ox’s hellish vision of the city, or Eminem’s bullet-riddled Amityville, look tamely pleasant.

In the atrocity’s immediate aftermath, there was much talk of an end to senseless violence and “negative” feelings in movies and music, that America’s seemingly unquenchable taste for such art had been gorged by the real thing to the point of vomiting. That soon passed, of course. Six months later, the music and movie charts looked the same as ever. But for Eminem, who on
Marshall Mathers
had sometimes seemed ready to wrestle his country till one was bundled to the floor, the attacks had to be dealt with. Would the man who had dared compare Columbine unflatteringly to the forgotten carnage in Detroit’s ghettos be so bold, or feel the same, about New York’s 3,000 dead? He had called himself a “political rapper”. In a nation being kept in a state of insular panic well into 2002, hyped up for a phantom war by regular TV news stories showing gas-masked preparation for apocalypse, how far would he be able to take up that mantle? Appetite for the total freedom of speech he had advocated for so long had suddenly tumbled in America. Would he rise to the challenge, risk the martyrdom of a Lenny Bruce or Muhammad Ali, become truly great? Or fold? Or simply, and typically for his generation, find he still cared more about exploring his own fucked-up head, and the fucked-up family which orbited it?

The only instant reaction by any pop figures, oddly, anyway came not from him, but the other five members of D12. Stranded in London when planes to America were grounded after the World Trade Center was hit, they collaborated with Damon Albarn’s pop-rap band Gorillaz and ex-Special Terry Hall, on a track called ‘911’, which was released to download on the Internet within a month. “We had organised the collaboration beforehand,” Albarn explained, “and the terrorist attacks added a different context, to say the least, to what we did together.” Over sinuous Middle Eastern instrumentation and an ominous bass, D12’s disparate personalities worked to good effect, summoning the moment’s anger, helplessness and confusion. The traditional rap response of verbally gunning down all enemies, even before their names were known –
“whoever did this, we gonna getch’all”
– dominated. But Kuniva also sounded lost and frightened, imagining himself in ash-blinded New York:
“so much smoke you can’t tell the difference between night and day/ next time you hear a verse from me, you might be caged”
. Most affectingly, the track caught the spacey drift of five young men from Detroit stranded far from home, losing themselves in chaotic dreams of showering glass, perhaps putting themselves in those Tower-toppling planes:
“I ain’t never going home, ‘cos I’m too far gone/… as I sit in my seat and remain calm, I close my eyes.”

“You don’t have to tell me the world is fucked up”
was the nearest thing to a political statement from the rappers. Hall’s muezzin wail and Albarn’s chant of
“we are one”
in the chorus were attempts at balance from the Britons in the studio, at a time of heated jingoist rhetoric. The only hole in the track was where Eminem, still missing, should have spoken.

He did make two, relatively unremarked appearances without D12 in 2001. But neither really indicated new directions. First, there was that guest spot on Xzibit’s
Restless
, in which he tastelessly complained about Kim’s suicide attempt (
“she just slit her wrists over this shit”
). His part on ‘Renegade’, on Jay-Z’s massive-selling
The Blueprint
was little more revolutionary. But this meeting between the world’s most popular black and white rappers did reveal both were aware of their complementary roles in racially schismed America. Jay-Z, sometimes criticised for his money-loving raps, described how he was still
“influenced by the ghetto”
, and
“bring ‘em a lot closer to where they pop toasters/… I’ll bring you through the ghetto without riding around”
, perfectly capturing the voyeuristic relationship white suburban kids felt to the black rappers they worshipped. When Eminem spoke, he didn’t have to mention he had come from that world to meet Jay-Z in the studio. He simply admitted he also had an influence, then launched into one of his most surprising and challenging lists of what that might be:
“maybe it’s hatred I spew, maybe it’s food for the spirit/ maybe it’s beautiful music I made for you just to cherish.”
And yet still
“I’m viewed in America as a motherfucking drug addict”
, sparking another assault on his mother’s generation, and Bill Clinton’s:
“Like you didn’t experiment?/ That’s when you start to stare at what’s in the mirror/ and see yourself as a kid again and you get embarrassed/ stupid as parents/ you stupid do-gooders/ too bad you couldn’t do good at marriage.”

It was as incisive a dismissal of the hypocrisy of baby-boomer authoritarians, the faded, smug rock’n’rollers his contemporaries were displacing, as could be managed in so short a space: he stripped them back to their own hormonal, experimental, raging adolescences, when their faces were as twisted, silly and slapdash as his; then he left them mired in their messy attempts at maturity. It was a Biblical switch, staring out from their mirrors to ask if they were without sin. His religious description of his own work (
“food for the spirit … beautiful music”
) then led to a second verse which imagined him as
“Jesus Christ … Satan, a scatterbrained atheist”
, battling whole Christian sects. The fresh quirks in this short performance were added to by a chorus in which he screeched
“I’m a re-ne-ga-yaade!”
in a rising howl borrowed from rock’s former Anti-Christ, Johnny Rotten. It seemed he was now consciously exploring his lineage beyond rap. Producing the track alone for Jay-Z, its synthesised choirs, sombre strings and organ were also quietly effective.

The year’s last sliver of Eminem output was a video compilation of the cartoons that had interrupted his gigs,
The Slim Shady Show
, released in November in the UK, just in time for Christmas. Originally made for MTV at the station’s request, but fresh to most British fans, they were the worst thing he had put his name to. Relating the adventures of inept Marshall Mathers, evil Slim Shady and their friends (including Ken Kaniff), its animation was cheap even by MTV standards, and the pall of laughlessness that descended whenever they were screened at British shows was now stretched over 60 minutes. Hired scripter Matt Cirulnick gamely trotted out the usual targets, from Christina Aguilera to Kim (whose silicon breasts Slim rips off, having paid for them pre-divorce, the only interesting gossip, or slander, on view). But with Eminem and Paul Rosenberg as Executive Producers (for their own Shady World Productions), and Eminem as lead “Voice Talent”, the buck for the farrago stopped at Slim’s door. “If I read the script, and I’m not feeling it, I’m not gonna do it,” he told a “Making of” documentary, revealing how much he could misjudge a foreign medium. Still, it was his first vocal acting job, helpfully played out in a recording studio. He liked slipping “into character”, he explained of his technique. “You see the line, and just run with it.”

Other news around him had thinned to a drizzle. In September, ‘Stan’ was nominated for five MTV Music Video Awards. In December, with staggering cheek, De Angelo Bailey, the bully who had concussed the child Marshall Mathers by shoving him in a snowbank, resurfaced to sue Eminem for $1 million, claiming ‘Brain Damage’ had harmed his reputation, and hampered his ambitions in the music industry, apparently being pursued from his current position as a Detroit dustman. His lawyer said Bailey “completely denied” the song’s allegations, despite merrily elaborating on them to
Rolling Stone
in 1999. Following in the footsteps of Eminem’s mum, he also released a CD, threatening to break down the gates of his one-time victim’s new home and kill him, which didn’t really help his case. “He got my address wrong,” Eminem sighed to
The Face
, in mock-despair at his now-impotent tormentor’s carelessness. “He’s making himself a public figure, which is where my mother fucked up. But,” he added, with the mature perspective he was now gaining in non-family matters, “if you have nothing else and you haven’t made nothing with your life, then what the fuck? If Eminem says my name on a record, why not get money? I’d do it.”

By year’s end, though, such minor distractions ceased to matter. The stasis that had settled around his artistic life after
The Marshall Mathers LP
at last began to shake. A follow-up album was nearing completion. What’s more, a film with strong autobiographical elements, first called
Detroit
, and finally
8 Mile
, was due to wrap in December, with its own soundtrack album being written by Eminem and Dre. The next testing stage in Eminem’s career was suddenly thundering down the track. 2002 would secure his crown, or dash it.

8 Mile
was the main reason there had been any gap at all in his previous headlong rush. It had begun as a casual idea for a hip-hop equivalent of
Saturday Night Fever
or
Purple Rain
, during a conversation between Jimmy Iovine and Brian Grazer (producer of
The Nutty Professor
and
A Beautiful Mind
). Two other rappers were considered, before Grazer saw Eminem’s range of expression at the 2000 MTV Music Video Awards. Eminem had meanwhile been interested in an acting role beyond those hapless cartoons for some time, and there had been rumours of films before, no doubt floated by hopeful producers (
Lazarus
, in which he would have played an evil dead rapper returning to life, was typical). “Eminem had a lot of scripts. He didn’t want to do a jokey movie,” Bizarre confirmed to the
Launch
website. When Eminem agreed to meet Grazer, he was at first offputtingly aloof, not looking at him or saying much for 15 minutes, distrustful, perhaps, of Hollywood temptations. But when he did start to speak about his life, Grazer found him “articulate” and “passionate” about the subject, and “humble”, and “damaged”, he told
Premiere
. Eminem, a man who had never finished a book, forced his way into the script by Scott Silvers (
The Mod Squad
), and the deal was done. “It was a good enough script for me to put my music on hold for, like, four, five months,” he confirmed to
Premiere
, with a suggestion of the sacrifice that was to him in this central time in his musical life.

Curtis Hanson, of
LA Confidential
and
Wonder Boys
, agreed to direct, having decided his untried star’s potential was worth the risk, and immediately
8 Mile
‘s credentials climbed. The script, as it developed, seemed to adapt aspects of Eminem’s life with all the freedom a movie might take with some literary source, but the resultant fiction still let him draw on strongly personal memories: he would play Jimmy Smith, Jnr, a Detroit factory worker living in a trailer park with his mother (Kim Basinger), who has a fractious relationship with his girlfriend (Brittany Murphy), and hip-hop dreams he starts to realise, during one week in 1995. But neither Hanson nor Eminem wanted the rapper to simply play himself, and pushed hard together for something more. There was a generous six-week rehearsal period, during which the 57-year-old Hanson, a Hollywood veteran, became the first man since Dre to mentor Eminem in a new art. For a second, briefer time, he had a father figure to test himself against. “He was good to work with because he was real,” he told
Premiere
. “Curtis didn’t sugar-coat anything. If something sucked, he would say that it sucked. At first I would take it to heart – like, ‘Damn, how could he say that to me?’ And then I would take it in.”

Removing his blond bleach and disguising his tattoos, Eminem also worked to smother the inflections and rhythms he had developed on record. Effectively, he was killing Eminem and Slim Shady when on set, and replacing them with still another persona, this time with an actor’s sense of craft. Hanson’s instructions before filming had included handing Eminem a stack of films containing great breakthrough performances from young actors like James Dean, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. Hanson said his star had shown a special interest in Dean, astonished at his iconic fame after just three films. But, Eminem confessed to
Premiere
, he had, not for the first time, ducked his homework: “I was so into this movie, I didn’t wanna see what other people had done. I didn’t wanna copy anybody or anything. I felt like as long as I felt real in a scene, that’s all I needed.”