The Dark Story of Eminem (7 page)

He remembered that sensation again when
Newsweek
suggested his own raps were harmful. “I don’t think music can make you kill or rape someone, any more than a movie is going to make you do something you know is wrong,” he said, “but music can give you strength. It can make a 15-year-old kid, who is being picked on by everyone and made to feel worthless, throw his middle finger up and say, ‘Fuck you, you don’t know who I am.’ It can help make them respect their individuality, which is what music did for me. If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible, as long as you keep workin’ at it and don’t back down. I didn’t have nothin’ going for me … school, home … until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.”

Of course, rap didn’t strike him like that all at once. After the first rush of Ice-T’s ‘Reckless’, and with Uncle Ronnie continuing to be his musical mentor, it was the fearless, taunting, street-wise raps of Queens’ L.L. Cool J which convinced him the music was for him. The attitude alone must have been a wistful fantasy, for a skinny boy preyed on so often by bullies he loathed, but couldn’t beat. “When L.L. first came out with ‘I’m Bad’, I wanted to do it, to rhyme,” he remembered. “Standing in front of the mirror, I wanted to be like L.L.” He would wear shades, too, lost in his superhero secret identity. And, in pursuit of this dream life, he became studious, in a way he never managed at school. “When my son first got into rap as a teenager,” his mother remembered to the
Mail On Sunday
with a sigh, “he would wake me at 5 am to ask me what words rhymed with what. I bought him a dictionary, and it all went downhill from there.” The capacious vocabulary this high school drop-out would go on to flex on records shows how deeply he absorbed that gift. His life with his mother was part of the reason. “We were so fuckin’ poor,” he told
Kerrang
. “My mother used to do so much fucked-up shit to me, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of that house and just …
do
something. Even my mother used to laugh at me about this rap shit. She’d hear me upstairs, I’d have two radios set up – one playing the beat, and the other one recording me rapping over it. She’d be going, ‘I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with that – you can’t rap.’ Thanks, ma!”
“It was like isolatin’ myself was healthy,”
as he rapped on ‘Revelation’; he was reading, listening and recording round the clock, abstracting himself from the futile, bored adolescent life he could have had. Instead of fading away on a street corner once his pressure cooker home flung him outside, becoming a petty criminal in a city with nothing for the young, rap had shown him a route out.

The records he heard as he moved through his teens replaced the education he’d abandoned at Lincoln. LA’s N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude) and Miami’s 2 Live Crew were among his favourites in the late Eighties. While the latter specialised in obscene, juvenile, sexist sex songs, without balance or apology – handy training for Eminem’s misogyny – they became best known for police and government attempts to censor them. These culminated in the 1987 arrest of a female shop assistant for selling one of their records, a 1990 Federal court ruling that their single ‘As Nasty As We Wanna Be’ was illegally obscene, and a contrasting jury trial finding 2 Live Crew themselves innocent of obscenity.

N.W.A. meanwhile provided a more skilful and complex lesson in what rap could say, and how easily it could appal figures of power and authority. Guided by ambitious producer Andre Young (aka Dr. Dre), and including main rappers O-Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) and Eric Wright (Easy-E, who also financed the group, initially with money from drug-dealing), N.W.A. pushed rap’s rebel appeal to the limit. On their début album
Straight Outta Compton
(1988), they replaced the more literary, distanced super-pimp persona of original West Coast gangsta-rapper and Marshall inspiration Ice-T with more lurid, exaggerated evocations of LA’s violent street life. Brightened by Dre’s bouncing, Seventies P-Funk sampling beats, they ranged between the poles of their first hit ‘Express Yourself ‘, Cube’s ode to rap’s inspiring of individualism, and the infamous anti-LAPD rebel song ‘Fuck Tha Police’. It was the latter which made the FBI fire off a threat to N.W.A.’s Ruthless Records, and police departments across America loathe them. Though their “gangsta” image was mostly a contrivance, intended to sell records to Compton’s thousands of real Bloods and Crips (whom Dre especially had studiously avoided in real life), the American Establishment easily confused art and reality, and overreacted accordingly.

Eminem would exploit, and suffer from, exactly that vein of lazy thinking. He would also, to his humble amazement, find that Dre, ten years after his teenage hero-worship, wanted to be his producer. Most important of all, perhaps, was N.W.A.’s tapping of an eager white audience for their gritty fantasias of black life, until suburban white kids became gangsta-rap’s main market, and the music’s gunplay and misogyny grew still more cartoonish, to reflect these outsiders’ expectations.

Marshall experienced this shift from a uniquely clear-eyed perspective: as a white boy partly from the suburbs, and partly from black ghetto streets like the ones N.W.A. eulogised. He was hearing a powerful fantasy and his grinding, inescapable reality, all at once. But what he responded to most was simple. In a home, neighbourhood and hormone-addled body that made him feel cramped and trapped, N.W.A. showed him how to scream with rage: fuck tha police, and everything else. Analysing his own audience later, he described the sensation. “My attitude attracts a lot of kids, especially white kids from the suburbs,” he told
NME
. “When someone comes along and goes against the grain and just truly doesn’t give a fuck, they wanna be that person. ‘Cos I know when I was younger and the Beastie Boys came out they seemed like they didn’t give a fuck, and when N.W.A. came out they
really
didn’t give a fuck. The whole attitude attracts people.” The Eminem anthem ‘The Real Slim Shady’ would imagine, and try to inspire, an army of such listeners. But he did so with such feeling because in 1988, aged 15, he was one of them himself, “putting on the sunglasses and looking in the mirror and lip-synching,” as he remembered, “wanting to be Dr. Dre, to be Ice Cube”.

Marshall would follow Dre and Cube out of N.W.A., into their solo work of the early Nineties. Dre’s
The Chronic
(1992), and his production on
Doggystyle
(1993) by Snoop Doggy Dogg, his first protégé, finessed Marshall’s favoured gangsta-rap into still more fantastic scenarios of super-pimp wealth, sex and violence, with complicating, residual touches of ghetto reality. Cube, meanwhile, a more talented rapper, kept a closer connection to the melting social situation on his home Compton streets, one of the few locations to make Detroit look good. But on his masterpiece,
The Predator
(1992), he, too, demonstrated that great rappers could turn themselves into fictional creatures on record, superheroic aliases with which to do their dirty work. In his private life, Cube was an essentially law-abiding musician. But as the Predator, he took on all the anger, paranoia and violence of South Central LA’s black population, slipping inside Rodney King’s body as the batons came down, then reappearing to gun down racist cops, till he literally exploded, laying waste whole city blocks when cornered, a lyrical thermonuclear device. This was the lineage from which Slim Shady emerged.

The final black rapper to rivet Marshall was in some ways the closest to him. Tupac Shakur (aka 2Pac) was Eminem’s predecessor as the top star on their label, Interscope. His 1996 drive-by shooting in Las Vegas by unknown assailants martyred him and, among black Americans, made him perhaps the most revered rapper of all. Album titles like
Me Against The World
(1995) – at the time, Marshall’s favourite hip-hop LP – suggested the mournful mix of deep paranoia, egotism, death wish and hurt which characterised much of Tupac’s work. But of more relevance to Marshall were the elements of social radicalism, low self-esteem and painful parental relations which he and Tupac shared.

The gangsta trappings for which Tupac became famous – trumpeted Crip affiliations, shoot-outs with cops, bragging after he was shot once, seeming to invite that second, fatal attempt, and jail-time for a rape conviction – were as much willed wish-fulfilment for him as they would have been for Marshall. Though he had lived in ghetto conditions as a child, Tupac was educated and intelligent, a trained actor, and not really tough; like the adult Marshall, the muscles he flaunted were those of a pumped-up, essentially mild-mannered stripling. He lacked Eminem’s ironically distancing wit, and pop instinct for truly overground hits (despite sometimes using Dre himself). But where the two men met was in the matter of mothers and fathers. Tupac never knew his father, either; even his mother did not know the man’s name for sure, and his only father-figure (and possible real father), Legs, appeared briefly in his teens, only to die of a crack-caused heart attack. It left Tupac feeling “unmanly”, insecurely angry, always with something to prove.
“Seeing Daddy’s semen full of crazy demons …”
, he would rap, cursed and crazed by fatherlessness, as Eminem would slit his dad’s throat
“in this dream I had”
; both felt emasculated, and could be stupidly macho. Both were products of an absentee-father America.

Tupac’s mother Afeni, meanwhile, was an ex-Black Panther, who mostly raised him alone, and would eventually become a crack addict. She called him her “Black Prince”, and filled him with revolutionary consciousness, which his records reflected. But, as poverty kept them on the move, he, like Marshall, found his sense of self a fragile, cracking thing. “I remember crying all the time,” he said. “My major thing growing up was I couldn’t fit in. Because I was from everywhere.” It could have been Marshall speaking. Shared knowledge of family breakdown would be among his strong bridges to black rap fans.

The differences between them were as acute, and revealing. As a politicised black man, Tupac could plunge straight into the racial realities of America as he saw them, directly and seriously preaching change from his first record. White boy Marshall, almost equally radical, in part from listening to rappers like Tupac, would mask his views on race and his country at first, adopting a more cartoonish, satirical persona. As a white rapper, he had no “people” he could feel a need to address. With no vacancy for a “White Prince”, rap’s new ruler would have to start as Court Jester.

Then, there was Tupac’s attitude to women. Though his mother worked for a while, her long-time crack addiction, and raising of him in shifting locations including homeless shelters, do not compare favourably to Mathers-Briggs’ “abuses”. But, though Tupac could sometimes conform to gangsta-rap’s thuggishly misogynist standards in music and life, his first hit, ‘Brenda’s Got A Baby’, showed woman-hating was not mandatory for a mother’s boy.
“We all came from a woman, got a name from a woman …”
, he reminded, as he
“gave a holler to my sisters on welfare”
. His later ‘Dear Mama’ was similarly sympathetic. But Eminem, an equally angry young man, would offer no such forgiveness. Denied race as a playground for his rage, he would spitefully attack women in his raps. Tupac’s unlikely white replacement would not worry about
“sisters”
. Only himself.

One more element was needed to make Marshall decide to be a rapper. He might put shades on his nose, look in the mirror, and imagine he was L.L. Cool J. But the face looking back at him was too pale to ever convince. It took The Beastie Boys’
Licensed To Ill
(1986) to reassure him that needn’t matter.

“When I first heard them, I didn’t know they were white,” he told
Newsweek
. “I just thought it was the craziest shit I had ever heard. Then I saw the video and saw that they were white, and I went, ‘Wow.’ I thought, ‘Hey, I can do this.’ “

“I was like, ‘This shit is so dope !’” he added to
Spin
. “That’s when I decided I wanted to rap.”

The Beastie Boys had grown up further from Marshall’s world than Tupac or Dre. The three of them were all upper-middle class Jewish New Yorkers (continuing a bond between black and Jewish American music, with Jews as the bridge to WASPs, which stretched back to Cab Calloway hearing his jazz howl first in the wails of Harlem synagogue cantors, and which has been constant since). But the brattish, loudly obnoxious per-sonas The Beastie Boys adopted were anyway ideal inspiration for Marshall, 14 when he heard them. Layered with ear-splittingly dense rock production by Rick Rubin, the Beasties’ obvious rap skills and adoles-cently sexist and violent poses, on record, and in tours replete with caged go-go girls and court appearances for minor acts of aggression, were almost a blueprint for Eminem. That it was all just a joke and an excuse for teenagers to let off steam, to “not give a fuck”, was certainly a lesson he learned. Their biggest hit, ‘Fight For Your Right’, meanwhile, could have been written for him at 14, when
“living at home is such a drag”
, and
“Ma looks in and says ‘WHAT’S THAT NOISE?’”
, till you
“get chucked out”
. Eminem would repeat such songs of valueless teen rebellion and, not bothering with the Beasties’ faked stupidity, better them. But the important thing was that these successful white rappers existed at all.

Having found role models he could aspire to, Marshall then had his dreams dashed by a man who would in some ways be his nemesis. Vanilla Ice, whose ‘Ice Ice Baby’ (1990) was the first US rap number one, was almost a parody of the racism in the American music industry. His records were mediocre, about nothing in particular. But, with his white skin, sculpted cheekbones, and stormtrooper square-cut blond hair, he could not have looked more aggressively Aryan. It was assumed rap had found its Elvis, its commercial messiah to suck in white masses otherwise scared of black music, in Nineties America’s segregated pop nation. His first album duly sold 18 million. To add to the insult of each sale to far better black rappers, listeners not only clearly bought him in such unprecedented numbers because he was white, but were not bothered that he looked like a Nazi. In fact, this deliberate styling must have been a selling point. Though Vanilla Ice vanished as swiftly as he had appeared (after being allegedly dangled off a 15th floor balcony by infamous Death Row label boss and Dre associate Suge Knight, over disputed credits for his black songwriter), his spectre would rise to haunt Eminem’s early success. “Vanilla Twice,” critics would sneer. Ice himself would reappear to taunt this rival white face. He, like Eminem, had as a boy been a genuine hip-hop fan. But, sucked into the mainstream music machine, encouraged to fake a gangsta past while being as Caucasian as Pat Boone, his success a pure product of racist avarice, he made the idea of white rappers again seem an offensive joke. Watching in Detroit, Marshall was mortified.