The Dark Story of Eminem (8 page)

“That crushed me,” he told
Newsweek
, of first hearing ‘Ice Ice Baby’. At first, I felt like I didn’t want to rap any more. I was so mad, because he was making it real hard for me. But then 3rd Bass restored some credibility, and I realised that it really depends on the individual. Vanilla Ice was just fake. 3rd Bass was real.”

New York Jews like the Beasties, 3rd Bass were the last white rappers of substance before Eminem. Their
Cactus Album
(1991) was a more media-literate, serious and sly work than
Licensed To Ill
, addressing hip-hop culture from their own position, not impersonating blacks like the Beasties and Ice. ‘Product of the Environment’ in particular addressed the racial loneliness and pitfalls of Marshall’s decision to rap, but also indicated why he might survive.
“His reward was almost a bullet in the chest,”
as MC Serch rapped of his early days.
“… ‘Cos I’m a product of the environment/ there it is, black and white.”
But as he recalled an early performance, the tone was almost of a vision, of race ceasing to matter, of rapping skill and true street knowledge saving him:
“Never had static, ‘cos everybody knew me/ … I’m protected and respected for my own self/ ‘cos of talent, no shame or nothin’ else/ In a time of tension, racially fenced in/ I came off, and all the others blessed me.”

The teenage Marshall must have ached for such acceptance. The journey he had started by listening to such records so reverently, though, and by choosing to make hip-hop his life, was unavoidably one of racial transgression, with its history of hostility and risk. Norman Mailer’s epochal essay
The White Negro
(1957) had first sketched the opportunities and dangers that becoming lost in black culture could give to whites: once jazz (rap’s first ancestor) had entered white society as “a communication of art because it said, ‘I feel this, and now you do too’ “, Mailer’s hipster “White Negroes” swapped middle-class repression for the swifter, riskier, nerve-end reactions of life on the edge, where poor black Americans had to live. Shrugging off restraint, they would value “the naked truths of what each observer feels at each instance of his existence”, a prophetic definition of rap’s uncensored, individual’s art. The essay’s predictions were erupting in underground America as Mailer wrote, in the musical miscegenation of rock’n’roll, as poor white Southerners like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley learned from the black musicians around them. But somehow, as everyone in Nineties Detroit could attest, America’s racial walls had never truly tumbled. So rap had to breach them again.

The cover of Ice-T’s
Home Invasion
LP (1993) showed the music’s intent. It pictured a white suburban teenage boy with Iceberg Slim and Malcolm X books by his side, headphones clamped to his ears as he listened to Ices T and Cube and imagined a scantily clad white woman, maybe his mother, grabbed roughly from behind by one darkly masked man, while another coldly slaughtered a white man, maybe his father. It was many white parents’ worst nightmare, the explicit truth of what Elvis, and Little Richard, and Louis Armstrong had threatened, the reason, Ice-T knew, that gangsta-rap was condemned in America. Like jazz, it was another ghetto “communication of art”, of ideas of violent rage, rebellion and injustice. It too said, to unprotected white ears in their neighbourhoods, “I feel this, and now you do too”.

Home Invasion
could also have been drawn from life in Marshall’s bedroom. When he achieved stardom as Eminem, and his background of gangsta-rap addiction was revealed, he seemed to be the living proof of the cover’s prophecy, the first fruit of gangsta-rap’s demon seed in white youth. The difference, though, and the reason it would be Marshall who took the white rap crown, was that he was not solely some slumming suburban kid. He was also a true product of ghetto streets, a “White Negro” almost from birth. Beaten up and taunted by black neighbours, a white boy struggling for acceptance in a black medium, he was as much a victim, and creation, of the racist barriers erected by whites generations before as anyone. He did not cross the tracks to become a rapper, as the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis had done to learn rock. The tracks crossed in him. He was a new kind of white American, the end-result of the experiment Norman Mailer first noted. And to strike out and succeed, to top the rap records he loved, he would first have to face down concerted black racist contempt – to be treated like a minority.

He was helped by one of his closest friends, future D12 MC Proof (real name, Deshaun Holton). The two met when both were 15 (13 in some stories; but Eminem stuck ruthlessly to his false age back then, and 15 fits other facts better). Proof was idly sitting on a brick wall outside his mostly black school, Osbourne High, when a white boy unusually walked towards him, and handed out a flyer. “They was for a talent show he was doing,” Proof told
Spin
. “He said he was a rapper.” Immediately, they traded rhymes. When both matched “first place” with “birthday” (which takes some doing), they recognised kindred spirits. Soon, Proof was introducing Marshall to a would-be producer who lived round the corner, Kon Artis (aka Denaun Porter). Kon remembered the day in a way which made clear the exceptional steps Marshall was taking. “Motherfucker came to my door, and I’m like, ‘Hmmm, what the fuck? White boy at my door!’” he drawled to
Spin
. But it was Proof and Marshall who kept the closest bond. Blasting out his stereo “as soon as my Mom would leave to play bingo”, staying with Proof’s mother when his own home overheated, Marshall continued his rap education with his friend. “Basically, we checked everything,” Proof told
icast.com
. “No matter if it was wack, we would know, because we were bright. Every tape that was out, we bought it. He had a tape collection that was incredible. I had the vinyl, and he had all the tapes.”

It was around this time, aged 15, that Marshall took serious steps to be a rapper himself. When not annoying his mother with his primitive twin-radio recording set-up, he was, he told
Spin
, “picking up a pencil and like getting busy and shit. I started, you know, getting better and better. Then I was like, ‘Yo, I want to do this.’” Proof gave him the first opportunity to test himself, at Osbourne High. “Listen, I’ll tell you this,” he said to
icast.com
. “I went to a black dominated high school, and I used to sneak him in there into the lunchroom. And they’d be like, ‘We want to battle you.’ ‘No, you can’t battle me, why don’t you battle the white boy first?’ And everybody would be like, ‘I’ll kill him.’ Then Em would come out and kill the whole lunchroom, which was a black dominated school and would be looking like, ‘Damn !’ It was like
White Men Can’t Jump
.”

Other encounters, though, were more traumatic. “When you’re a little kid, you don’t see colour,” Marshall considered to
Spin
, “and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager, and started to rap. Then I’d notice that a lot of motherfuckers always had my back, but somebody always had to say to them, ‘Why you have to stick up for the white boy?’ I’d hang out on the corner where kids would be rhyming, and when I tried to get in there, I’d get dissed. A little colour issue developed, and as I got old enough to hit the clubs, it got really bad. I wasn’t that dope yet, but I knew I could rhyme, so I’d get on the open mics and shit, and a couple of times I was booed off the stage.” One incident in particular lodged in his mind. “I remember I used to go to this place called the Rhythm Kitchen way back in the day,” he said. “I was probably 16 or 17. The first time I grabbed the mic, I got booed before I even said anything. As I started to rap, the boos just got louder and louder, until I just got off the mic.”

When it happened again, at another venue, it terrified him. “The first time I grabbed the mic at The Shelter [a Detroit MCs’ hangout], I got dissed. I only said, like, three words, and I was already gettin’ booed as soon as the mic was handed to me. I was like, ‘This is fucked.’ I started getting scared, like, ‘Is this gonna happen? What the fuck is gonna happen? Am I gonna make it or not?’”

Many would have quit after one of those nights. For a teenager with self-esteem which was already battered, getting on stage must have been bruising enough. For jeering crowds to let him know he was not wanted in the places he most craved acceptance, sometimes before he could say a word, must have crushed him. The obsessive love of hip-hop he expressed in ‘Revelation’, the sense that only it could save his desperate life, must have had something to do with him picking himself up. But it was also true, as his subsequent career proved, that the beatings, insults and disappointments of his early days did not leave him shaking and weak. Instead, they toughened him, fed him aggressive resentment and rage, determined him not to be broken. The pressure of those early open mics only intensified his will to succeed. And the racist nature of the taunts, like the racist assaults he had suffered, did not make him stupidly racist back. Instead, it made him despise all racism, with a black rapper’s force.

He gave his most thoughtful account of his resentments to
Spin
. “In the beginning,” he recalled, “the majority of my shows were for all-black crowds, and people would always say, ‘You’re pretty dope for a white boy,’ and I’d take it as a compliment. Then, as I got older, I started to think, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Nobody asks to be born, nobody has a choice of what colour they’ll be. I had to work up to a certain level before people would even look past my colour; a lot of motherfuckers would just sit with their arms folded and be like, ‘All right, what is this?’ I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it’s like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can’t speak on it, because I wasn’t there. I don’t feel like me being born the colour I am makes me any less of a person.”

That diffident, defensive last sentence could have come straight from the mouth of one of Martin Luther King’s black marchers, 40 years before. The weird racial inversion of Marshall’s America was proven by the outlandish thing he said next. “There was a while,” he admitted bravely, “when I was feeling like, ‘Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this shit.’ I’m not ignorant – I know how it must be when a black person goes to get a regular job in society. But music, in general, is supposed to be universal. If I’m a white 16-year-old and I stand in front of the mirror and lip-synch every day like I’m Krayzie Bone – who’s to say that because I’m a certain colour I shouldn’t be doing that? And if I’ve got a right to buy his music and make him rich, who’s to say that I then don’t have the right to rap myself?”

He was less considered, but as truthful to
NME
. “People say I’m offensive. Know what I find offensive? People always dwelling on me being a white rapper, a white this, a white that. That shit makes me sick to my stomach. It’s not like it’s a huge fucking secret! I wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see I’m white, thank you! It doesn’t make what I do any less valid. I’ve lived just as hard a life as anyone in America. I’ve been to all-white schools, all-black schools, mixed schools.” He paused, to make his most meaningful point. “I’ve seen it from every angle, and I’ve always been poor. I’ve always been poor.”

It was at another Detroit venue that the tide at last turned for Marshall, and racist contempt changed to respect. The Hip-Hop Shop, on 7 Mile, was the rap record-selling property of hip-hop clothing entrepreneur Maurice Malone. Proof would become an account executive for the company’s fashion wing, before D12 claimed all his time. But on the Saturday afternoon which let Marshall know his dreams of rap success might yet succeed, Proof was in charge of the Shop’s first open-mic session. Another future D12 member, Head, was the house DJ. He remembered how Marshall rose to the challenge of a full-scale rap battle – a gruelling baptism with no rock equivalent, in which contestants duelled vicious rhymes about each other till one fell, with the crowd’s roar as judge and jury; an artistic adaptation of the street’s rough logic. “I seen Em take this motherfucker out in like five, six lines,” Head told
Spin
. “It was an open-mic battle, the first one we did. Three hundred people, lines out the door. It was a ruthless, cut-throat battle. And he won it.”

Marshall told his version of events to
msn.com
. “The first time I ever got respect was when I grabbed the mic at The Hip-Hop Shop. I had said some shit and people was quiet at first, then cheers and applause, and it got louder and louder. That was the spot I started going to every Saturday. They would have official announcement battles every couple of months, and I kept winning them.” Of his change in fortune, he considered: “I think it was something a little different about me. I started growing up, and I just got better. At 15 or 16, I was wack. But at 18, 19, I started learning, this is how I should sound on the mic. Learning how to battle, practising freestyle. That was what I was known for in Detroit, in the underground, for a couple of years.”

Of his Detroit contemporaries, Kid Rock, the white, rap-influenced, porn-minded, long-haired rocker who was the first to gain national success, was his only significant idol. Marshall would haunt his record signings, and beg him to battle. “I was 15 at the time, and he was a couple years older,” he told
Spin
. “He used to always kind of laugh it off and say, ‘Battle me in record sales.’ He saw a little bit more about the record industry than I did. That’s probably what I would have told somebody.” He paused, and considered. “No, I don’t think that’s what I would have told somebody. Back then, I was all about battling.”

The Hip-Hop Shop’s hothouse forged bonds with Detroit rappers closer to home anyway. It was Proof’s idea for himself, Marshall, DJ Head, Kon Artis, Kuniva, Bizarre and Bugs, all regulars at the Shop and like-minded friends, to join forces in 1995, in a rap super-group of local unknowns. Proof gave them their name, D12, for Dirty Dozen – each of the six who rapped would have two aliases. It would be a little while before Slim Shady made himself known to Marshall/Eminem, making the concept concrete. But the group were soon working on rhymes. “We was gonna do this Western song where we were all outlaws, like the Dirty Dozen,” Marshall recalled for
Spin
. He squinted to remember its lyrics. “I said something like,
‘I ride rails to cover wide trails/ Slide nails to a killer inside jail, denied bail/ Tell him I’m-a break him out tonight/ And we gonna unite/ So be ready for a gunfight.’
Some shit like that.”