The Dark Story of Eminem (36 page)

To white eyes he gave off the frisson of Mike Tyson in his animalistic prime. The concentration on his physical condition and presence typed him as a brutal black man, even as he was objectified and sexualised as much as any female R&B star, or hip-hop video honey. In the inner city, though, his history and image sent a different message. On a British TV documentary, black and white youths from areas like 50’s own said his being shot made them admire him more. He knew what they were going through; his raps were real.

For Eminem, his story’s new cast-member sent equally ambiguous signals. The demographic trade-off was similar but more risky than it had been with Dre. Next to 50 and his scars, Eminem could again seem like the skinny white dilettante he had once been scorned as. On the other hand, the more pictures of him that appeared with 50, Dre, and D12, the more black he might appear by association. No one white has yet been signed by Shady Records.

The final awkward twist was that, as Eminem started to offer black acts the patronage Dre had once bestowed on him, the brief historical inversion that had made Dre and Timbaland (with his find Bubba Sparxxx) black Colonel Parkers with pet white Elvises could seem reversed. If Eminem’s unique popularity made him not just an honourable white novelty in hip-hop, but its king and king-maker, resentment was bound to follow; within the year, it would.

Creatively and commercially, though,
Get Rich Or Die Tryin’
was a triumph. ‘Wanksta’, on the massively successful
8 Mile
soundtrack, was a carefully placed preview of 50’s qualities, as he wittily dismissed fake gangstas with his trademark taunting drawl. The album that followed was a full-scale attempt by Eminem and Dre to replicate their own successes with a fresh face. They contributed to almost all its tracks. The guinea pig-like nature of 50’s position was playfully admitted in the video to his first enormous hit, ‘In Da Club’, a return to top visual form for Eminem, in which he and Dre were mad Frankensteins, assembling the monstrous 50. On ‘Patiently Waiting’, one of two Em guest-raps, he extended the idea:
“Take some Big and some ‘Pac and you mix them up in a pot … and what the fuck do you got?/ You got the realest and illest killas, tied up in a knot.”

Dre’s back-room role was strangely under-sold.
Get Rich …
was released on his Aftermath imprint as well as Shady, and he produced four tracks (including singles ‘In Da Club’ and ‘If I Can’t’). With his trusted LA keyboardist Mike Elizondo heavily involved, he used stabbing organs and strings to give 50 knockout pop punch. But Eminem was close behind, having his hand in almost everything Dre didn’t. A mixture of the glum and the epic, his developing string and synth-heavy style was darker and narrower than Dre’s, as if his early hopelessness had stayed in him.

Get Rich Or Die Tryin’
was an instant phenomenon, selling nine million in a year, beating
The Eminem Show
‘s early sales. On Eminem’s July UK tour, it was 50’s support slot that attracted fevered press attention, not rap’s former demon king. Eminem seemed in danger of being outshone by his sky-rocketing, more obviously “authentic” protégé, even as it was the white star’s imprimatur that made this hardcore street material approachable for such unprecedented masses. It was an awkward ambiguity addressed on
Get Rich
‘s ‘Patiently Waiting’, where 50 loyally toasted Em as
“my favourite white boy … I owe ya for this one”
, before bemoaning
“this white man’s world”
. Eminem meanwhile tried to maintain his dangerous aura even alongside his bullet-riddled charge, by making his second outrageous verbal visit to the destroyed World Trade Center:
“You put your life in this, nothing like surviving a shot/ You know about death threats, ‘cos I get a lot/ Shady Records was 80 seconds away from the Towers/ them cowards fucked with the wrong building, they meant to hit ours.”

50, for one, had no doubt his boss was still relevant. “Em himself is nowhere near done,” he told
Bang
. “There was a point where he was really unexcited by hip-hop, he thought there was nothing going on. Em uses so much of himself that we know who Hailie is, we know who Kim is, we know his relationship with his mom. He’s using his life and as a person he’s gonna grow, he’s gonna feel new experiences, and you never lose something to rap about when you use yourself in your music.”

The charge that Interscope and Eminem were exploiting 50’s really violent ghetto life was also rebuffed. 50’s next release,
Beg For Mercy
by his crew G Unit, was not on Shady but his own new G Unit Records, exactly replicating Eminem’s founding of Shady with D12’s album, after being on Dre’s Aftermath. It looked more like a chain of saved lives than one rapper’s enslavement by another. As 50 pointedly told
Vibe
, “I own G Unit Records. I own G Unit Clothing. These are my deals that I made happen with the people
I
put in place. Every situation I’ve been through has enhanced my character, and when I get past it all, I’ll become what God wants me to be.”

Beg For Mercy
gave no clue as to whether the intelligent, learning man who spoke those words would soon appear on record. It mostly coarsened the Bad Black stereotype of his solo CD, as if all 50 had to offer was his “authentic” past, with monotonously martial music and thoughtless themes of rough sex and violence. But its sales the week of its November release – 377,000 in the US alone – proved that Eminem’s name, reinforced by 50’s, now guaranteed rap gold. Though on 50’s label, and mostly the work of his Long Island producer Sha Money XL, the cover still credited “PRODUCTION BY EMINEM AND DR. DRE” (Em’s crucial contribution? “Additional Production” on two tracks). 50 was spreading the Shady empire, the production line of which now rumbled night and day.

Luis Resto, now Eminem’s right-hand man at Detroit’s 54 Studios alongside guitarist-mixer Steve King, revealed their work rate, as the three men assembled music for new albums by Eminem, D12 and Obie Trice: “When Eminem’s in Detroit, we work together every day. A lot of times we’re writing for all three projects. You go in and you’re jamming, doing music, and it gets spread here and there. Some stuff goes to Eminem, some to Obie and some to other artists. We sit down and write and we parcel it out. Marshall takes home CDs and he listens to them, some things intrigue him, some things not so much - you keep backlogging the ideas, and see what comes of it.”

Detroit’s Obie Trice barely bothered to hide his resentment at Shady’s over-stretching. “The reason why it took so long to get my album done,” he offered, “is because Eminem was into a lot of shit. We didn’t get a chance to really get into the studio like we wanted to. He dropped D12’s album, he dropped
The Eminem Show
, then he went off into the movie thing. So
8 Mile
came about, the
8 Mile
soundtrack came about, all the time he’s busy doing this, busy doing that. I can’t get into the studio with him, I can’t get into the studio. Then around the
8 Mile
movie, 50 Cent was getting signed, he was coming to the table with an album damn near done. Then boom we dropped 50 Cent first. He had the momentum, this what you want to hear? He had the momentum, he had the buzz, he had all that shit from New York, he’s been shot nine times, yes, yes, you get what I’m saying? So, Obie Trice, now I’m here, that’s the thing. Why it took so long? We don’t want to know about that …”

Obie Trice’s début,
Cheers
, was Eminem’s most sustained work since
8 Mile
. He had a producing hand in almost every track, rapping on four. Obie, 23, with an adored five-year-old daughter, Kobie, made good company for doting dads 50 and Em. But he was a different proposition from 50, a natural joker and dirty ladies’ man. He raised a glass of Hennessy Cognac on
Cheers’
cover, happy to party and, at an Eminemlike 5
‘
8”, wasn’t eager to fight. Raised on Rakim, he was a similarly clear, confident rapper, with a sensitive side. Though the album’s big hit was the comic ‘Got Some Teeth’ (with a hilarious video of Obie explaining disastrous, drunken one-night stands to Eminem’s TV interviewer, despite his minimum standards in a woman:
“hopefully, she got some teef …”
), its best track was ‘Don’t Come Down’. A shamed lament at his drug-dealing youth, when his mother disowned him, it countered Eminem’s mother-cursing career. Its dramatic orchestral soul sound, sped-up, sampled Seventies female vocals and Steve King’s shamelessly stretched guitar solo was Em’s most imaginative production on the record, too: a rap power ballad. It was a style he would return to.

His guest-raps, meanwhile, though hardly full-blast, had intriguing touches. ‘Lady’ was a lighter variant on ‘Superman’, warning would-be lovers that if they did snare him, his insane jealousy would leave them the trapped ones, branded and shackled to the bed. ‘We All Die One Day’ imagined him as the al Qaeda shoe-bomber, while ‘Outro’ favourably compared him to his President:
“I don’t send my soldiers to war if I ain’t in the middle of the shit with them.”

Obie’s own essential good humour, though, was too often smothered in trite sexist and violent bragging. And Eminem’s production was not skilful or varied enough yet (over-fond as it was of repeating sounds, beats and even tunes from earlier successes) to save his second protégé from sounding half-baked, a potentially useful Joker in the Shady pack who had been misplayed. When I saw Obie’s UK début at the intimate London venue the Scala, it was enjoyable enough – at least until a shambolic sexy dancing competition between girls in the crowd for a Shady jacket, fun only for the harmlessly hot-blooded rapper. As he nervously clutched at his Detroit baseball cap, and the crowd went wild only at Eminem’s name, he hardly seemed ready for the big leagues, and Shady did not seem the new star-stuffed Motown.
Cheers
’ million US sales did, though, confirm Eminem’s Midas touch.

His most creatively successful 2003 release, however, was for the soundtrack to the documentary
Tupac: Resurrection
, where he would produce the first musical meeting of rap’s rival martyrs, Biggie and Tupac. The scale of the honour was humbling to Eminem. To reporters, he recalled feeling as if he and the childhood-damaged Tupac were growing up together, and his unreal daze as he watched ‘Pac’s death on Gilbert’s Lodge’s TV. His ‘Runnin’ (Dying To Live)’ built on the lesson of
Cheers
’ ‘Don’t Come Down’, again sampling and treating a soulful Seventies record. This time, it was Texan blues-rocker Edgar Winter’s forgotten, bleak cry –
“Why am I dyin’ to live, if I’m just living to die?”
Speeded to a girlish pitch, over surging strings, rolling brass, splashes of Luis Resto’s piano, clattering break-beats and excerpts of crackly interviews and defiant raps from Tupac and Biggie, and police radio news of Tupac’s death, Winter’s soaring vocal was powerfully redemptive, a resurrection prayer from the pit of his own despair. Winter himself wondered how Eminem had ever heard it, the old-school mark of sampling respect. In its complex arrangement and primal pop force, it showed significant progress, at last, in his producing. Eminem’s own guest-rap on Tupac’s ‘One Day At A Time’ meanwhile suggested they were both immortal originals. The presence of Eminem and 50 on
Resurrection
‘s two other unreleased tracks though prompted a more uneasy thought: that, thanks to sharing Tupac’s corporate home, Interscope, Eminem was expanding his empire to annex rap’s most potent myth.

The only ripple in Eminem’s calm private life now was revealed in another recording. On
Cheers’
‘Lady’ he gallantly told a lover:
“I’m a bachelor, bitch, and I ain’t in no fast hurry to run out and find another Mrs. Mathers, because technically, me and Kim ain’t back fully, but we still make booty calls occasionally, but be damned if I end up back in a pattern where we end up back in that tavern …”

As his grandmother had already told the
New York Post
, in October 2002, Kim had returned to live in Eminem’s mansion. “They’re back together and I think Marshall is very happy about it,” Betty Kresin said. “He loves Kim and Hailie, and Kim is the mother of his child. He is a terrific father, and very family-oriented. I’m not surprised he wants that stability. I want him to enjoy his life. Everybody deserves a piece of the pie.”

His attempts at relationships during their separation had always seemed sad and half-hearted. He had a brief fling with Brittany Murphy on the set of
8 Mile
, where he once again ruined his misogynist rep. “He was one of the first people I’ve met that made me feel comfortable with being every aspect of myself that I would want to possibly be,” Murphy gushed when it was over. “But he came, and went.” Mariah Carey, meanwhile, revealed that they had dated in only the most desultory way, never making love. “Maybe he thinks because nothing happened he’d look bad,” she puzzled, after he dissed her on ‘Superman’, and it was rumoured he would release old, erotic phone-messages from her. “I don’t know what the hell he’s doing. Doesn’t it seem a little bit girly? Like we’re in a catfight.”

Compared to these brushes with showbiz romance, Kim, who still knew him as Marshall, would always win. The defensiveness in ‘Lady’, trying to guard against the
“pattern”
of conflict whenever he inched open his heart to her, was understandable. One of the stolen, unfinished raps on the
Straight From The Lab
EP, ‘I Love You More’, switched tone between tenderness and violent rage, suggesting their relationship’s old bruising nature remained:
“Do you hate me? Good, because you’re so fucking beautiful when you’re angry.”
They often seemed more like the squabbling, inseparable siblings they were first raised as than lovers.