by Amaranthine » Apr 7th, '12, 21:36

The Way I Am

Shady Bizzness

Whatever You Say I Am

The Dark Story of Eminem

Anthony Bozza - Whatever You Say I Am

Our journey in 1999 ended in a snowy trailer park, but it began in New York in the bathroom at his manager’s office, where I met Eminem by accident just after he’d finished throwing up a fifth of Bacardi and a slice of pizza. It was all he’d eaten that day but was only an appetizer for what was to follow: three club appearances spiced with four ecstasy caps, chased with ginger ale. Cruising from Staten Island back to Manhattan that night, Eminem was a different kind of tour guide. Riding a high that would floor most people, he was a lyrical Tasmanian devil, spitting couplets at all of us—his manager (Paul Rosenberg), DJ Stretch Armstrong, collaborator Royce Da 5'9", and a few others—that caused combustive laughter, jaw-gaping awe, or, often, red-faced embarrassment for the subject of his well-aimed darts. He was a living, breathing, drinking, falling, and reeling Slim Shady that night. His energy was almost tangible, as if you could see his synapses firing. The bits of stimuli before him flooded into his dilated pupils, coursed over his brain, and were spit back out at us, redefined in rhymes, jibes, and insults impossible to rebut. He commanded the room, the limo, the afterparty, wherever we were, not because we, his entourage, were a doting audience—in fact, there were many wits in the bunch—it was because no one could touch him.

Back home in Detroit, it was business as usual, which meant that Eminem didn’t even have a home. He’d been staying with his friends, or his mother, until she moved away temporarily. When he signed his record deal, he’d bought his mother’s trailer from her, out in what he called “hickville bumfuck,” because his daughter, Hailie Jade, liked it. His mother left Detroit for her native St. Joseph, Missouri, because of some trouble with the state of Michigan. Apparently she’d allowed Eminem’s half brother, Nathan, then about ten years old, to skip too many days of school (the legal limit in Michigan is one hundred). She’d lost custody of him but, after months of appeals and fighting through red tape, had won him back and promptly left town.

After the night of shows and after we’d missed a few planes, I spent the flight talking to Eminem while everyone around us slept. We broke down his broken home, his mother, his grandmother, and the family history that is now the stuff of lyrics. He was very different during that quiet time, as he was on the driving tour of his hometown and as he always is one-on-one. He expressed himself thoughtfully, without boasts or poses. He’s nothing if not kinetic, but it’s a quick, often subtle switch from Shady to Eminem, from Eminem to Marshall, and back again. It seems to happen as soon as you (or he, maybe), think he’s settled into one of them too long. The real Marshall Mathers, the one I met before the fame and have seen less of since, is the most interesting side of him—he’s angry and sensitive, shy and curious. The real Marshall is who America is really consumed with. He’s a whole new paradigm of the white male: talented, humble, proud, mad, frustrated, hateful, and capable of compassion. At his best and worst, Eminem embraces the contradictions at the heart of our society.



It might have been his hangover, or it might have been my empathy and enthusiasm, but Eminem was relieved that he could relate to me, and he told me as much as he’d told any journalist, at first, to the healthy dismay of his eavesdropping manager. I can only guess, but I think it was somewhere in the air between New York and Detroit that Eminem decided to let me be the one journalist he’d arrange to have interview his mother. It was a coup, the Holy Grail found before the search began. The honor did not come without responsibility. For several months after the story was published, Eminem’s mom, then called Debbie Mathers-Briggs, would phone me. Those talks were long, strange, and upsetting, some of the saddest speeches I’ve heard from anyone. We’d chat about Marshall as a child, and from my vantage point on the outside, her recollections sounded like tales of a family making do with what they had and finding happiness in their shared struggle. She would ask me why Marshall hated her now and why he was doing what he was doing to her. She stopped calling after she filed her legendary lawsuit against her son and, I assume, heard that the tape of my initial interview with her would be filed by the defense as evidence, should the case come to trial.



By the time we had wrapped that first session together in Detroit, it was late and Eminem, Hailie Jade, Kim, Paul, Larry Solters (Eminem’s first publicist), and I were in a van humming along the frozen highway to hickville bumfuck. Well past the townships of Warren and St. Claire Shores, where Marshall spent plenty of time earning the minimum wage and miming Tupac and the Beastie Boys in his bedroom mirror, everyone began to nod off, Hailie first, Paul second...Eminem sat on the bench seat in front of me. He had barely slept for three days. He sat erect, staring at the passing road, blinking, thinking, and flicking his hand to the beat. He seemed very far away. Looking back, I see that moment and that night as the final calm before the storm to come for him. As I’ve followed his career since 1999, spent time with him personally, and interviewed him again and again, I’ve seen the effect that that storm has had on him.

It is March 1999 and it is cold in Detroit, the kind of cold that freezedries sound. Snow piled in banks frames the sides of the road and grows higher the farther the avenues ripple out from the center of the city. The roads here are small highways, just two lanes each way. Far from downtown, off the interstate, the roads narrow. The lights are fewer and the trees are taller. Standing not far from one of these byways, ankle deep in snow, I hear the woosh of a lone passing car. Behind me, the

trailer park is silent and as still as a morgue. It is two in the morning. In front of me, a blond guy in baggy clothes trudges up the stairs of a trailer and reads the eviction notice on his front door. “We took care of that one,” Paul Rosenberg says. “Don’t worry about it.” The blond guy doesn’t answer, he just rips it down and opens the unlocked door. “He doesn’t lock it?” I ask. “No,” Paul says. “They’ve had so much shit stolen over the years, he doesn’t give a fuck anymore.” The double-wide trailer is warm, and I sit on the couch. Before me, on the floor in front of the TV, is a much smaller couch. A groggy, swirly-haired little girl curls up on it while her mother readies her bed. Above her on the wall are glossy photos in black frames: two of Eminem and Dr. Dre dressed as patient and analyst for the “My Name Is” video shoot, the other a solo shot of Dr. Dre with a scrawled note that reads, “Dear Marshall, Thanks for the support, asshole” (mimicking Slim Shady’s autograph to a fan

working at White Castle in “My Name Is”). The CD rack holds 2Pac Shakur, Snoop

Dogg, Mase, Babyface, Luther Vandross, and Esthero. On a wall by the kitchen hangs a photocopied list titled “Commitments for Parents.” The first line reads, “I will give my child space to grow, dream, succeed, and sometimes fail.” “My mother moved back to Kansas City, so I bought this trailer from her,” Eminem says, sitting on the couch. “Hailie feels really comfortable here, so I took over

the payments. I’m paying rent for no reason because I’m never here anymore. But when I am, I need a place to stay.” Kim Scott lifts their daughter from her nest and takes her into the second bedroom. Hailie’s bed is dwarfed by a mountain of toys, clothes, and boxes. Kim soothes her in hushed tones. It has been a long day that began tonight; a driving tour not sanctioned by the city’s board of tourism, through the Detroit streets and neighborhoods where Marshall Mathers spent the better part of the past twenty-six years.



“Man, driving through town tonight brought back a lot of memories,” Marshall says, lowering his voice. “I’ve been through a lot of shit, man. If I sit and think back on it, it’s really fucked up. I mean, all my life has been fucked up.” “Now that you’re out of that life, how much does the past bother you? Do you feel sorry that you grew up that way or just unlucky?” I ask. “No, man,” he says. “It’s just my life, that’s it. When you’re living in some fucked-up shit, it doesn’t really seem that fucked up to you when you’re in it. All you think is ‘What am I gonna do now?’ Day to day, I’d have to think about what I was gonna do. Even though I had a job for three years, I wasn’t making enough money to pay any bills. Me and my girl would get a house with my daughter; we could never stay more than three months. I would try to pay rent, always get behind, and we’d get evicted.”



He walks to the kitchen to throw the eviction notice, still crumpled in his hand, into the trash. “The only houses I was able to afford were in the gutter slums of Detroit,” he says. “I lived on Fairport on this shitty block and we had this crackhead that kept breaking in. Me and Kim and Hailie caught him one time. Just after Hailie was born, we walked in the house and there was a crackhead in there and all of our shit was gone. We had got robbed at the house we had been in before this one—cleaned out. So when we walked in and I see the TV gone and I’m like, ‘What the fuck!’ I start screaming, I set

Hailie down, and then I hear all these footsteps coming down the stairs. Oh fuck! So I grab Hailie and run outside and Kim runs out. I shut the door and we’re out on the lawn, wondering what to do. It was only one dude, but he was coming so fast he sounded like a bunch of people.”



He rubs his eyes at the memory. “The guy walks out the back door holding a wrench or something and he sees us out there and he’s like, ‘I seen ’em! They went that way.’ So I didn’t run after him directly, I ran through the house and grabbed the first thing I could find, a frying pan off the stove, and I came through the back door after him. He ran, and I tell you, man, this motherfucker was so cracked out, he hopped over this fucking fence that was huge. He just hopped right over it, and I couldn’t get up anywhere near the top. That whole time was fucked.” Kim closes Hailie’s bedroom door and sits beside her boyfriend on the couch. He looks at her sidelong. “Remember the crackhead?” he says through a smirk at the recollection.



“He left ashes all over the fucking floor, had lunch, and left,” she says with the

kind of annoyance reserved for inefficient salesclerks.



“Yo, this guy felt so comfortable stealing there,” he says, shaking his head. “He broke in three times, and the last time he did, he made a sandwich and left the fucking peanut butter and bread on the counter. And he left his coat there.” “Marshall pissed on it and I took one of Hailie’s shitty diapers and wiped it all over it and left it on the porch,” she says. “And he fucking came back,” he says. “We could never catch that guy. By the time he was done, he’d taken every fucking thing we had except the couches and the beds. This motherfucker took the pillows, pillowcases, clothes, everything you can imagine. He even cleaned out our silverware.”



I look around at the brand-new television, VCR, and the couch we are sitting on, all obviously bought in the past six months, and I realize that Marshall already lives the entertainer’s life. He won’t feel afloat existing in hotels and out of suitcases from now on. He has only known flux for the past twenty years, moving from home to home, living in different cities, changing schools, and working more than he didn’t, at one job or another, since he was fifteen. His anchors in this world are here in his mother’s double-wide: his daughter, Detroit, Kim, and the pen and pad on the counter. There are no mementos of Marshall’s childhood here; they exist in his mind, caught in the chaos he churns into words. Those mental pictures have sold 500,000 albums in just two weeks.



It is later than late now and time for me to go. Kim gets up drowsily and Marshall puts his arm around her. I look around the trailer once more, knowing I’ll never see it again. Soon enough, neither will they. A few weeks later, they will move in with Kim’s mother; some of her neighbors, excited to see Eminem on their block, won’t realize he is actually Marshall, Kim’s boyfriend, the one who has been stopping by off and on since he was sixteen. Just two weeks after the release of a debut that will go on to sell three million copies in one year, garner two Grammys, and inspire a call to censorship by the

editor in chief of Billboard, that Marshall, the one who cooked and cleaned at Gilbert’s Lodge for his minimum wage, is already gone. The cold air wakes me as I crunch through the snow on the stairs. Marshall stands in the doorway, Kim at his side, one of Hailie’s blankets in his hand. He nods a good-bye. Standing there, the next rap superstar doesn’t look dazzling. He looks weary, wary, and

content. He’s as home as he can be.

In 1996, just before Christmas and Hailie’s first birthday, Eminem was fired from his job at Gilbert’s Lodge. He was rehired six months later, this time for a few months, and then fired again, almost exactly to the year. In those interims, he worked where he could, mostly at a Little Caesars Pizza chain. It became so tough to make ends meet while raising Hailie that Eminem stopped rapping and writing for a time. Kim and Marshall fought bitterly, breaking up and making up with schizophrenic regularity. Eventually she moved back in with her family, who had long disapproved of Marshall and made it difficult for him to see his daughter. It was his lowest point, and a time when Marshall Mathers saw suicide as a viable option, nearly ending his journey before it began.



By this time, Eminem had already met Paul Rosenberg, an attorney and onetime rapper he met at the Hip-Hop Shop. Rosenberg had rapped in the early nineties under the name Paul Bunyan, with a group called Rhythm Cartel...Rosenberg met Eminem’s longtime partner Proof at one of these parties and Eminem actually saw Rosenberg perform there before they met. At the time, Rhythm Cartel, Eminem, a transplanted East Coast rapper named Bukari, and DJ Houseshooz were the only white regulars to speak of in the Detroit scene.



Proof introduced Rosenberg to Eminem one night at the Hip-Hop Shop. “The first time I met him,” Rosenberg says, “Proof had him at the Hip-Hop Shop late in the day, after all the freestylers had cleared out. He had him sort of audition for me, although I don’t think Em knew that’s what Proof was doing. He just had Em up there rapping by himself over instrumentals and not too many people were around. I was just checking him out and I thought he was really good. The day we really met was when he had just started selling his Infinite album. All his friends were really excited because he had

product, you know, which was a rare thing. And his was fairly professional-looking compared to what other people’s homemade product was looking like, so he was excited. He was in a battle that day and he won.” At the time, Rosenberg was in his second year in law school, pursuing a degree in music law. He had given up rapping years before, but was intent on representing Detroit’s untapped talent. “I talked to Em after the battle that night, told him who I was, and he was really standoffish and shy, as he usually is when he first meets somebody. I just got his phone number and I bought his tape off him for six bucks. Best investment I ever made.”



Rosenberg became a friend first, a manager-lawyer second, as he is today. Eminem’s circle at the time were his classmates in rap school, the peer group with whom he honed his skills: Proof (born DeShaun Holton), Denaun Porter (a.k.a. Kon Artis), and Rufus Johnson (a.k.a. Peter S. Bizzare). Proof had made his own reputation as a battle MC, an omnipresent figure at Detroit open-mike nights. By the midnineties he’d begun hosting the Saturday night proceedings at Maurice Malone’s Hip-Hop Shop. Proof was Eminem’s mentor and sponsor on the scene, encouraging him to rap at events where

Eminem would otherwise be a spectator, banking his own name on Eminem’s skills. Eminem began to write and rap with Proof and the others, throwing down at the Hip-Hop Shop and other local venues, such as St. Andrew’s Hall, the Rhythm Kitchen, and anywhere else they had the chance. Proof and Kon Artis, whom Eminem approached for production assistance on Infinite, gathered the rap troop that now call themselves D12, short for Detroit Twelve and Dirty Dozen. Proof’s goal in creating D12 was to form a band of MCs in a loose collective like the East Coast’s Wu-Tang Clan. He approached the rappers he felt were skilled but were stylistically on the outskirts of the Detroit scene. The D12 concept evolved further on a car trip back from a rap convention in New York, when Proof floated the idea that each rapper in the group create a dark-half alter ego to allow each of them to experiment with hardcore styles unlike their own. “The whole thing in D12 was to have a personality where you would just say anything,” Proof says. “You just didn’t give a fuck. Your persona was almost like a mask to hide behind, know what I’m sayin’? We all took our different identities, and Em took Slim Shady and he ran with it. He took it way more serious than all of us, that motherfucker.”

“I was taking a shit, swear to God,” Eminem says about the morning he thought up Slim Shady. “I was sitting on the toilet and boom, the name hit me. I started thinking of all of these words I could rhyme with it. So I wiped my ass and got off the pot and went and called everybody I knew. I was like, ‘Bada-boom, badabing, wanna go with it, or no?’ Once I came up with the Shady concept, I wrote the Slim Shady EP in two weeks.”

“The night before I went to the Rap Olympics in L.A., I had to break into that fucking house and sleep on the floor because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No heat, no electric, everything was shut off. I woke up the next day and went to L.A. I was so fucking pissed then. I had gotten fired from

Gilbert’s for the second time, we got evicted, and that guy ran off—we still haven’t found that motherfucker.”

“[At the Rap Olympics] He was going to do the team battle, but our focus was the individual battle. That battle ended up taking so long that he didn’t get to compete in the team battle. Actually, the individual battle took so long that they didn’t really get to finish the Rap Olympics.”



By the time he reached the Olympics, Eminem was at the end of his rope, financially and spiritually. He was hungry for a break. “Right before the battle in L.A., I took him to a bar,” Rosenberg says. “I said, ‘I know you want to win, but if you don’t, it’s okay. Do your best.’ My god, he was unbelievable. I was sitting in there next to this big black guy and after the first round he shouted, ‘Just give it to the white boy, it’s over. Just give it to the white boy.’”



“I went in there just shitting on everyone, man,” Eminem says of the competition. “I had nothing to lose. I took second place and I was very unused to that. Everyone said I looked like I was ready to cry. And I was so mad. Steaming, dog. I had nowhere to live back home. The winner of Rap Olympics got, like, five hundred dollars. I could have used that, man. Second place got nothing.”



By most reports, Eminem was defeated twice at national MC competitions in 1997 by the same man, J.U.I.C.E., a talented freestyle MC from Chicago, who took first prize away from Eminem at the Rap Olympics as well as Scribble Jam in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many who witnessed both called it a victory for Eminem or a tie that Eminem lost to his competitor’s loyal fanbase or a color bias. Many others don’t even remember who won, just who was good.

Two Interscope assistants, Dean Geistlinger and Evan Bogart, son of deceased disco kingpin and Casablanca Records founder Neil, approached Rosenberg and Eminem after the Rap Olympics. They felt strongly about Eminem but were careful about pushing his music across the boss’s desk. “We stayed in touch with them,” Rosenberg says. At the time he still worked as a personal-injury lawyer and stayed after hours at his firm to call labels on the West Coast on Eminem’s behalf. “At some point I called the guys we knew at Interscope and was like, ‘OK, we’re coming to town; I’m bringing Em out and I want to set up a meeting because he’s starting to get really discouraged.’ There were a whole slew of labels flirting with it, but nobody was biting because he was white. Aside from the moderate success of 3rd Bass, there really hadn’t been a successful, credible white rapper. They thought he was talented, but they were scared of it.”

“When I met Dre I was nervous, man,” Eminem says. “I was just like, ‘what’s up,’ and looked away. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t want to be starstruck or kiss his ass too much. I told him later that I’ve been a fan of his since I was little, since N.W.A. He was like, ‘I didn’t even think you liked my shit.’ I was like, ‘Dog, you’re motherfuckin’ Dr. Dre!’ I’m just a little white boy from Detroit. I had never seen stars, let alone Dr. Dre. That shit was bananas.”

The first day they worked together, Dr. Dre and Eminem recorded four songs in six hours. Two of them, “My Name Is” and “Role Model,” made the album and distinctly defined the Slim Shady persona.

At the 8 Mile premiere, Christina Aguilera gushed, “Everyone has that right to get out and be artistic in any way, shape, or form and express themselves. I’m a big supporter of someone who’s trying to go out there and do their thing.” Barbra Streisand’s reaction was supremely strange: “Most of the language I couldn’t understand,” she said of 8 Mile. “It was like watching a foreign film. But it’s a real slice of life. This kid Eminem is really interesting, I can relate to the truth and I can relate to the emotion and I can relate to him in some strange way. I was raised in the projects, I was born in Brooklyn. We were poor. I relate to that stuff because it’s my heritage. That’s a big part of me, that kid playing in the street.”



Strangest to see, though, was Eminem as the topic of coffee talk on The View in December 2002. Cohost Mererdith Vieira admitted to liking him, as did guest Whoopi Goldberg. A short discussion ensued when the raspy-voiced Joy Behar reviewed 8 Mile as if it were a home movie from the Mathers’ family archive and predicted that Eminem would lose credibility with his fans for appearing vulnerable in the film. “Once a tough guy like that shows he’s vulnerable, it’s over,” she said. “No one wants to see that.”

After the release of 8 Mile, Eminem avoided the spotlight as much as possible. In paparazzi photos he looked somber, and at the forty-fourth Grammys on February 23, 2003, he looked stoic but emotional. After the ceremony, Eminem passed on the parties much as he did at the L.A. premiere for 8 Mile, where he left the business of Hollywood to his costars and ran the red carpet like a fifty-yard dash. Eminem stopped for just one interview that night, with the hosts of a local hip-hop radio station. At the premiere party for the film, he sat surrounded by his friends, separated from the two thousand or so guests by a phalanx of security...He went to Hollywood on his own terms; he showed up, but he didn’t play any game but his own.

“Buuuuhhhhhpp,” the blond kid blurts from inside the bathroom stall. There is silence for a minute, then he emerges, his face red and his eyes watery. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve and leans on the sink. He looks at me, then washes his hands and his face. I don’t know him yet, so I stand a little to the side, not knowing whether to say hello. I must look like I want something from him, maybe just a clear path to the stall, because he stands there tense, his body language betraying his awareness of my presence. When he’s done washing, before I can even say “hey,” he swaggers by me woozily, eyeing me on the way out.



“I just threw up everything I had,” he announces to the people in the conference room down the hall. “All I ate today was that slice of pizza and that fifth of Bacardi. Feel good now, though.” He ducks into his manager’s office, leaving the rest of us, his fellow rapper Royce Da 5'9" and his boys, Dennis the security guard, and me to chat among ourselves. When he comes back in, it is to crack jokes on every topic in the air and every person in the room but me. Sure, he sees me, but he says nothing to me for the first twelve hours that I’m in his orbit. It’s a blessing and a curse: I’m never the target of his pointed jokes, but that only means that to him I don’t exist.



Two hours later, nine of us get into two limos, one of them white and immense, the other black and shorter. DJ Stretch Armstrong ducks his lanky frame through the car door and sits next to Eminem; he is singing, as he was in the elevator, an appropriate interpretation of a Cream song: “In the white room, with white people and white rappers.” The long white limo is now full; Eminem is deepest in, sitting behind the passenger seat. His manager and bodyguard are on one side, and as I get in, I am last on the bench...There is a rap at the window and the security guard rolls it down. A guy in a hood looks in at me with his hand out, nodding for me to do the same. I do and a pile of pills falls into my hand. I feel a kick in my knee and turn to see Eminem, crouched forward with his arm outstretched,

holding money at me. I exchange the pills for the cash through the window. Eminem’s manager, Paul, puts his head in his hands. “I don’t believe this. Are you fucking stupid?” he says. “Do you know what you just did? The guy from Rolling Stone just bought your drugs. That’s it, fuck it. You’re on your own tonight.” Paul gets out of the car. He will rejoin us when we leave thirty minutes later.



“Hey, Paul, you’re already fired, you fat fuck,” Eminem yells at the slammed door. “You’re so fired and rehired, you’re tired, you skinny fat fuck! Fuck you, you baldfat fuckin’ fuck. Fuck you fuckin’ fuck, your life, it’s over.” Eminem loves the word fuck. He uses it like a basketball player uses a dribble, to get from here to there. “Ohh, yeahh,” Stretch Armstrong says, imitating Eminem’s lecherous gay character, Ken Kaniff, from his albums’ skits. “Paul’s sexy when he’s mad. Oh, yeah.”

Ken Kaniff was the goof persona of underground rapper Aristotle, who recorded a skit of a prank phone call to Eminem on The Slim Shady LP. After the album’s success, as with so many relationships ruptured by unequal fame, Aristotle and Eminem had a falling out over who had the right to play Ken. On his next records, Eminem, an able mimic of any voice, performed the Ken Kaniff skits. For his part, Aristotle recorded anti-Eminem songs in the Ken Kaniff persona and set up a website to sell an album of Ken Kaniff raps.



“Yo, pass me a ginger ale,” Eminem says. “I need some shit to settle my stomach.” He swallows a hit of ecstasy with his first gulp. “Ohh, Eminem, yeah, I bet you melt in the mouth, not in the hand,” Stretch says, bugging out his eyes and baring his teeth. “Ohh, yeah, you fuckin’ fuck,” Eminem says. “Fuck you, you fuckin’ fuck. You’re Stretched, you fuck. You’re so thin you can’t spin, you skinny fat fuck.”



As the E starts to hit him, Eminem becomes a word dervish, a rhyme tornado, a spaz, and a force that can’t be reckoned with. In most people, ecstasy brings on a state of bliss. In Eminem, it brings out Slim Shady. Right now Slim Shady is cranked up to eleven and bristling with energy he can’t contain. His drug-fueled rhymes are sharp, and he cannot sit still. When the radio catches his ear, he’ll rap along perfectly with OutKast’s “Rosa Parks” or DMX’s “Ruff Ryders Anthem,” until the next bit of stimuli redirects him. At a red light, behind the blacktinted windows that keep the New York noise out and the riders’ noise in, he starts talking to the Sikh cabdriver next to us in Shady’s version of Hindi.



“S’cuse me, talkin’ a me, no?” he says, banging hard on the window. “S’cuse me fuckin’ a talkin’ a me? No? I’m a fuckin’ a talkin’ a you!” The man sits resolute and unaware, less than a foot away through the glass. He doesn’t hear and doesn’t respond, so Slim Shady fills in his half of the dialogue, too, all the while banging on the window. He’s soon conducting both sides of the “conversation” in a wacked-out language known only to him. The rest of us can’t even hear it because we’re laughing so hard.



“You’re all fired!” he yells at us, as the cab pulls away. “You fat fuckin’ fucks!” At the next light, a couple sits next to us in a Lexus. “Oh, yeahh,” Eminem says. “Mmm, yeah. Ohh, yeah. I’m Ken Kaniff from Connecticut. Can I ride with you? I wanna ride in that car of yours, mmm, yeah.” The more oblivious the other motorists, the more incited the joker. When a nearby driver suspects something, it kills us even more; the poor guy might hear Eminem pounding on the window or might be trying to divine who is in the stretch, but when he stares at Slim Shady while the rapper screams, “Oh, talkin’ a me!,” it’s like witnessing a police lineup, performance art, The Tom Green Show, and the greatest Candid Camera episode ever imagined, all combined.



“Somebody tell Paul he’s fired,” Eminem says. “Right now. Fire that fat fuck. Then rehire him. He’s over. He’s done. His life is garbage. Ay yo, Paul, what’s up?” At the opposite end of the limo, Paul cocks his head and looks at Eminem, then back out the window.



Eminem is starting to burn—his face is flushed and his eyes are wild and hungry. They twinkle with the unbalance of a madman and the steel focus of an athlete; his pupils are the size of pennies. Five blocks from Staten Island’s Club Carbon we see it: a mass of kids in the street, blocking traffic. It’s hard to tell how big the club is, but this mob looks big enough to fill it—and they’re the kids who didn’t make it inside. They are a teen amoeba on the blacktop: Every time a car comes through, they separate in blobs to let it pass, then rejoin. The limo creates a frenzied reaction. As we inch slowly into the crowd, the kids realize that the show has arrived and they move in to consume it. They surround the car entirely, forming a layer of insulation between us and the building. Guided by two

harried beat cops trying to direct traffic, the limo turns around slowly, honking constantly, and pulls up to the curb. Kids are trying to look in, waving, banging on the windows, and pulling the door handles. “Look at this place, man,” Eminem says, dead serious for a moment. “Fuckin’ fuck.”



“Staten Island in the house,” Stretch Armstrong says, grinning ear to ear. “We’ve got white rap in the house, Staten Island. We’ve got white people and white rappers in this white car for you.” We sit in the limo at the curb and wait while the police and venue security clear a path for us. Along with Eminem’s bodyguard, we form a phalanx at the car door as the crowd starts to freak out. The kids push forward, some getting stuck between the cops and our ride, some climb over the limo’s wide hood. They yell at Eminem, or just about him, as if he were in front of them, not live, but still in two dimensions, on their MTV. “You look good!” shouts one girl, who can’t be more than fifteen. “Oh my gawd, he looks so much better in person,” another says, as much to us as to her friends. We are in a tight circle, being pushed and pulled along, the kids packing in against the guards who can’t quite surround us. It is slow going, like swimming upstream, and we won’t fit through the doors of the venue without breaking rank. I’m holding on to one of the crew members as we push through the doors, flattening a few teenagers on the way. I start slipping behind as bodies push in against me and try to break our human chain. Eminem’s security guard pulls me forward by the neck of my shirt just before I’m squeezed out of the pocket and into the mob. Kids are screaming all of his names

now—Shady! Em! Slim!—and trying to high-five him over the human wall.

Waiting in the room, between boxes of plastic cups, is a man sporting Sopranos chic. “Hey, nice ta meet ya,” says the club owner in a thick Staten Island accent. “This is our big night. My daughter told me to get Eminem, so I got Eminem. It’s her fourteenth birthday today. Come on over here, say hi to her and her friends.”



Eminem is ruddy, bewildered, high, and suddenly shy. He looks pissed off. But he switches gears, takes off his coat, and poses for pictures while answering statements pronounced as questions, such as “You’ve got a cool video?” The girls say little beyond how much they totally love “My Name Is.” When his guests leave, Eminem retreats to a back corner by the chips and salsa with his stage gear: a towel and four bottles of water. He sits backward on a chair, resting his arms on its top. He is brewing, silently fuming. He’s quiet for the first time in hours, giving Paul Rosenberg a break in the hire-fire cycle and not talking to or about anyone else in the room. The rest of us chat, Stretch Armstrong cracks jokes as we all steal looks at Eminem. I’m trying to read him; wondering how much of his static stare is raw intensity how much meditation, how much preparation or chemical side effects. I’m wondering if he’s freaked by the crowd, their numbers, ferocity, or demographic. He must see, as I do, that these aren’t all underground hip-hop heads; these are MTV kids waiting to see him, their Total-ly Request-ed favorite, Live.



We climb down the ladder and once again fall into a tight pack, gripping each other’s clothes and pulling and pushing our way to where the screen used to be. These predominantly white kids are in such a frenzy, shouting, waving, and shoving so much that our entire entourage is coralled onto the tiny stage. We take positions along the back wall, forming a semicircle that touches the front edge of the stage at both ends. We’re told by venue security, military style, that after the last song we must immediately exit stage right, where police officers will escort us through the side door into the alley to our vehicles. Venue management and the present law enforcement officials are concerned about the possibility of a riot. I stand third from the edge of stage right, an arm’s reach from kids piled on top of each other.



Eminem heads over to the front of the stage, in front of me, and leans out over the audience. One of his more aggressive female fans reaches up and grabs his crotch, then looks at her friend with the wide-eyed pride of a victorious daredevil. Her friend gives her an “I don’t know” look, spying Eminem’s crotch where it hovers a foot in front of her face before she foists a demure grab of it. If Eminem feels the action through his baggy pants and boxer shorts, it doesn’t show; he’s so engaged in rapping the third verse of the song that it sounds like he may inhale the mike. He’s rattling off words, and heaving, and he looks like he might fall down, but instead he wanders back to the front of the stage as the beat stops and for a second there is silence.



“I touched his dick!” one of the two girls says loudly to the other. “I love you!” screams a different girl, directly in front of him, with her arms outstretched. “I love you, too,” he says, and in a moment of ecstasy-fueled affection and poor judgment bends over to give her a hug. She lays a kiss on his lips, and instantly the girl next to her clasps his head with talon-tipped hands and pries his face away. She kisses him, completely, with opened mouth and tongue. A forest of arms reaches out and nearly

pulls Eminem forward into the crowd. “Ohhh, shit!” he says, pulling free and falling back on his ass. “I’m going to jail tonight!”



...We pile into the car, flushed with the adrenaline rush of our exit. As we wait for the police to clear a drivable path, a sexy young girl who looks no more than fifteen taps on the window, inches from Eminem. “I want to fuck you,” we see her say. She pulls down the front of her halter top, exposing all of her cleavage. She flicks her pierced tongue at the window. “I want to fuck you, too,” Eminem says. “But I won’t.” He looks at her a moment longer and then sits back, his head deep in the corner of the seat, his eyes darting about, taking us in.



“Hey, you fuckin’ fucks! Why is everybody so quiet, you fuckin’ fat skinny fucks! Fuck you, you fuckin’ fucks! You’re so quiet, you’re tired, you’re so boring, you’re snoring, you’re so garbage, your life is over!”

In his first appearance on MTV’s TRL, the same week The Slim Shady LP was released, the rapper was subtly hilarious. The show’s co-guest of the day was pop-rapper-turned-underwear-model-turned-actor Mark Wahlberg, there to promote his current film, Three Kings, to the channel’s teen audience.



“Marky Mark, fucking asshole. Bastard prick,” Eminem told me about that day on TRL. “I don’t know what the fuck his problem was. He walked up in there like fuckin’ ‘What, is there supposed to be some fucking tension in here?’ He’s a fucking little faggot. I’m standing with Carson Daly and we’re off air. And some dude who works for MTV tells us Mark Wahlberg is coming in, says he’d appreciate it if we don’t call him Marky Mark. I thought that was kinda funny. I wasn’t planning on doing that shit anyways. Little fucking homo. Then he comes up and he’s standing on the side when we was off air and he’s like, ‘What, is there supposed to be some fucking tension in here or something?’ I pretended like I don’t hear him and shit. Then we’re on air and Carson calls him on set and I’m like, ‘What up, Mark?’ He shakes my hand but he don’t even look at me. He goes, ‘Where do you want me to stand?’ Carson’s like, you can just stand there. I’m like, ‘We’ll just stand around here like one big fun bunch!’ So I threw a stab at him. He didn’t want me to say Mark-y. Probably didn’t want me to say funk-y neither.” Eminem punctuated the “fun” moment with a bug-eyed look at the camera. Wahlberg looked as if he had forgotten his next line in a scene.



“Marky looked away and shit when I said that,” Eminem said, “with a look that was like ‘fuckin’ dick.’ So Carson congratulates me on my sales for the week and Marky Mark is like, ‘Oh, you got an album out?’ Fucking dick! Nah, you fucking bitch. You already heard it everywhere, you fat fuck. You probably got six copies, you fucking little queer. After I leave, Carson and Mark are talking about Korn on the air and Marky Mark says, ‘I like Korn. Ice Cube turned me on to them. I usually don’t like white people who do music, though.’ Trying to throw another stab at me I guess. What the fuck is he? Because he don’t do music now, he don’t like white people who do music? How’d he do albums? I’ve never even mentioned his fucking name anywhere!”

“Eminem’s style is incredible,” Dr. Dre said a few months after finishing up The Slim Shady LP. “He has his own thing and he sounds like nothing else out there. He’s saying some shit your average MC isn’t even going to think about. He has this one line on ‘Role Model’ that sticks out for me, it’s kind of grotesque: ‘Me and Marcus Allen were buttfucking Nicole, when we heard a knock at the door, must have been Ron Gold [sic].’ You know what I mean? It’s dope, it’s entertaining, it’s just bad taste.”...“Nobody is excluded from my poking at,” Eminem says. “Nobody. I don’t discriminate, I don’t exclude nobody. If you do something fucked up, you’re bound to be made fun of. If I do something fucked up, I’ll make fun of myself—I’m not excluded from this.”

“I remember the first time I saw Eminem rap,” says Sway Calloway, MTV News correspondent and host of the influential L.A. radio show, The Wake Up Show. “I noticed how he really assumed this identity when he started to rap. He looked kind of weird in the face, kind of crazy, and that was his thing. He was this little white guy, who when he rapped, looked kind of like a jerking mannequin. Every punch line he would jerk and bob his head really hard and he was saying the craziest shit, just the most extreme, outlandish, and really humorous metaphors. Before he showed up at our show the first time and I saw him do his thing, I remember we had a copy of his tape, I think it was just the Slim Shady EP on cassette. We were the first people in L.A., on commercial radio at least, to play ‘Just Don’t Give a Fuck.’ At the time, that was very extreme; nobody would dare to touch that lyrical content. But we banged it right off the cassette because this guy was just so extreme and crazy as shit, sayin’ ‘Fuck the world, like Tupac,’ and telling you ‘put my tape back on the rack.’ That’s funny shit.”

“I do most of my stuff at my home studio,” Eminem says. “I make the beat and, depending on how late it is, I’ll either write the rap there or wait until the next day. I’m taking whole days to write songs now—before I might do them in twenty minutes. Once I lay down the vocals, then I see what the beat can do, where it can drop out, what else can come in—most of that shit I learned from watching Dre. Sometimes, though, I get a couple of lines in my head and find a rhythm for them, then I’ll go downstairs and make the beat to that rhythm. That’s why a lot of my drum patterns are kinda crazy and offbeat, because they were made to follow my rhyme. Now more than ever I try to make my rap go right with the beat. I listen to my older shit, even from just two years ago, from the second record, and I can’t stand it. I think I fell behind the beat too much.”

“I was out in Detroit to shoot pictures of his house where he grew up and bits and pieces all around town for the inside of The Marshall Mathers album,” Jonathan Mannion says. “Afterward we were hanging out and I had heard just a couple of the songs they had finished for the album and a couple of others that were just vocal tracks and I was already, like, blown away. So he says he’s going to play one more and he puts on ‘The Way I Am.’ And he spit that, word for word, the whole thing, man. I took my friend’s camera right out of his hand and started shooting, like, ‘Sorry, man, give me that.’ Just to hear that song for the first time with him spittin’ it like that. Oh my God, I was floored, the kid was just fucking amazing. He’s out of here, no question.”

“I fucking hate ‘My Name Is,’” Eminem said in 2002. “I didn’t hate it when I first made it. When I do a record now, there’s an instinct thing that kicks in when a song could be big. When I listen to a song a few times and it starts to become cheesy to me, that’s when I know it could be a big record. Like ‘The Real Slim Shady,’ that started to get cheesy to me and I said, ‘I think people may like this.’ You know, the shit I really, really put my heart and soul into I don’t get recognized for. My serious shit like ‘The Way I Am’ is where I really dump out my true feelings. There’s a difference between being funny and being real and I feel like I don’t get recognized for the real shit, my best shit.”

“I sampled ‘Dream On’ for ‘Sing for the Moment,’ and Aerosmith cleared it,” Eminem says. “That’s really great of them because it’s one of my favorite songs in the world. I was talking to Steven Tyler about it the other day and he said some true shit. He said if I have to make songs that appeal to everybody—like to get people to listen to my realer songs—that’s what I’ll do. Basically, my theory is the same: If I have to make cheesy songs to get people to listen to my harder songs, then that’s what I’ll do. That’s the theory that everyone in the business sticks with but it’s cool to see, especially those guys, they’ve been in the business so long, it’s great to hear that you have the same

theories. You gotta play the fucking game, man, you gotta play the game I guess.”



Eminem is a perfectionist, a rapper who prefers the studio to the club and who has evolved into a producer quickly. “He’s a studio jockey, man,” Dr. Dre says. “He wants to get in there and make records. I admire that kind of energy, it keeps me on my toes.” Eminem’s growing production prowess is in the rolling, bombastic vein of his mentor, but with a rock-and-roll sense of drama.



“It really bugs me out that Eminem has this conception of himself that he thinks his older music was silly and his real music is this incredibly grimacing method acting shit he does,” says Village Voice critic Frere-Jones. “I thought that early music was a little bit happy and maybe him being a little bit silly, but none of it is exactly happy; it’s a strange hybrid of happy and twisted.”

[Of the psuedo-gangsta persona] “His persona, to me, has changed almost entirely for the worst,” says Sasha Frere-Jones. “But to be sympathetic to him, instead of just looking at the text of all the shit that happened to him in the last two years, with him hitting people you could see him

completely mythologizing himself. He got famous really quickly, seized up, thinking everyone’s looking at him and thinking he has to act tough, doing all this stupid shit because he’s in this tornado of people looking at him all the time and asking him for things. That’s also just what happens to people. We should all be glad he’s not dead, because it wouldn’t have been very surprising.”



“I don’t know if you’re going to see Slim Shady more on the next album,” says Eminem’s publicist Dennis Dennehy. “With the stuff going on around him, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but he’s had a lot less fun. It has nothing to do with his probation, he’s just working his ass off. He’ll hang out with his friends and have a good time, but he doesn’t take a break. He is always working and thinking about music. Everything that happened to him in the past year and a half was a lot more serious than what came before that. The music that’s going to come out of a time like that is definitely going to be more serious. If you look at it as Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers, he hasn’t had a lot of room for Slim Shady in his life lately.”

There is a twelve-pack of Mountain Dew on the floor, hip-hop magazines on the coffee table, a big FedEx box on a chair, and an enormous security guard outside in the hallway.



“So I was thinking,” Eminem says. “About the angle for this here article. And I think it should be all about what school I went to and how I dropped out.”



“I’m with you,” I say, smirking. “That’s a good place to start. And then I’d like to cover your family life, and I’m kind of wondering if you’ve ever felt, as a rapper, judged for your race?”



“Well, you know, not really, no,” he says, picking at his food. “And I’ve got a good relationship with my family. I spend most of the day with all of them. We just sing songs and pick flowers. And that’s me, that’s just all the me there is to me. We done?”



“Yeah, I think that covers it. Well, just one more question, I was wondering, doyou get any kind of presidential treatment in this room? Does it come with, like, hotel Secret Service or some Oval Office special massage or something?”



“Yeah, you get dirty whores,” Eminem says with the half-cocked smile of a kid about to pop a wheelie. “You want to get some? We can get some dirty whores up here. We could get my mom up here.”



Eminem has done other interviews today, some for television, some for England, and at least one for another magazine, but I don’t think those started like this. Then again, you never know. He’s one-third slaphappy and two-thirds tired, as if he’s coming down from a Mountain Dew rush, even though the box is unopened. This is his first meal today, but he’s not complaining. I flash back to how he could barely contain his energy back in 1999. He seesawed between manic and shy in proportion to the size of the crowd. He was living moment to moment then, expecting the roller-coaster ride to end.



“So I’m thinking,” I say, “that we should forget the music—no one who reads Rolling Stone cares about it anyway—and make up new rumors about you, because everybody knows all the old ones. We could call the article “Eminem, the Born Again.” Or “Eminem, Saved by Scientology.” What do you think? Would the public bite?”



“The public?” Eminem says. “Oh, I’ve got something for them to bite on. Yes, I do. And I feel like I have a story to tell, man. I’ve got things to say. But I’ve got a better idea. We’ll sit here, crack jokes for two days, and then you can just read The Source interview I just did and then rewrite my bio. Fuck it, we’re done! Let’s go.”



Eminem looks healthier than he has in the last four years—his skin is clear and he is toned from the workout regime he started for his film debut in 8 Mile. There is a clarity to him I’ve not seen before, a kind of bright-eyed aura coupled with restraint. At first his new mood seems odd to me. In a few days, I’ll realize that this is Eminem calmer than he’s been for the better part of his life. The past year for him was sobering, dotted with lawsuits, his divorce, Kim’s suicide attempt, and his two-year probation sentence. Professionally, his responsibilities were daunting: a film, producing and writing for three albums, touring. The pressure in his personal life has lifted, but his professional trials

haven’t even begun. I know why he’s calm. He can handle the entertainment. It’s life that’s scary.



I watch Eminem pick through the rest of his food, and I listen to him talk about the calm he enjoys in Detroit. His speech has changed, too. The stretched vowels of his hip-hop patois are now a clean Midwestern dialect for the most part. He is still quick to respond when he’s passionate about a topic, but now he takes his time to structure the answer. When my tape recorder is rolling, Eminem is forthcoming, but the situation is more of an interview than it has ever been. We break up the questions with the kind of banter that editors cut and only musicians and fans care about, discussing in nontechnical terms (i.e., “I like old keyboards because you can get those, like, music-box kind of sounds.”) the science of mixing and mastering, the uncelebrated genius of the Pharcyde’s first album, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, and the side effects of overanalyzation (paralysis, paranoia) brought on by too many interviews or too much psychotherapy, which are more or less one and the same. We skip tangentially over the past two years of his life and the album and film that capture and

encapsulate it, and I feel like he’s practicing, testing out subjects and answers for future meetings with writers he doesn’t know. In the months to follow, I see some of those same answers in print in other magazines, said better than today, with the afterthoughts born of repetition.



Eminem sits hip-hop style in a lounger: leaned way back, legs akimbo, one arm hanging over the armrest, a pose at once stately and disheveled. We’re talking about the pains he’s taken to be clear in his lyrics on The Eminem Show, about how he’s tired of being misinterpreted, about how the controversy in the past few years took attention away from the music. We’re talking about the mainstream press, the mainstream listener, the casual MTV viewer tuning in to Eminem for the first or second time and whether they’ll see “Without Me,” the first single from The Eminem Show, for its high-speed irony. I ask him if he thinks fans and critics who have followed him from the beginning will

appreciate a thematically heavier Eminem. His eyes widen and he stares straight ahead at the horizon, along the top of his right Nike Air Max where it rests on the coffee table. He’s seized by a thought. I’ve seen him this way before. We were on a plane and Eminem was talking about his mother, he was telling me a story about food poisoning and hot dogs and about being arrested on his birthday. He froze like he did now in the retelling, picked up a pad covered with his small, crooked scrawl, and proceeded to scribble rhymes with his left hand, keeping time with his right. He doesn’t do that now; this Eminem has probably already made a lyric of this feeling.



“I have to tell it like it is,” Eminem says, not looking up from his shoe. “What I sit around and talk about, you know, I have to go say to the world, otherwise what would I be? If I’ve got any balls at all, I’ll come out and say it, which is what I do. That latest Source article—I’m just not happy about it. I felt like there could have been more said and it could have been said in a different way. Whatever.”

In the magazine’s “Quotables” column, copy devoted to the best rhyme of the month, Eminem felt his best rhymes never made it to their pages. “It’s funny, it’s like that, though,” Eminem says. “Every rapper, especially me, always dreams of getting a Quotable in The Source. When that magazine first started, it was the bible of hip-hop to me. The first thing me and my friends would do is open it to see whose verse got the Quotable—whoever it was was God for that month. I’ve gotten

them now, but the shit I’ve gotten Quotables for is, to me, not my best shit. I can’t believe I got a Quotable for my verse in ‘Forgot About Dre.’ To me, that’s nothing compared to my third verse in ‘Criminal.’ In all my songs, I try to start the song off real slow, then in the second verse I amp it up a little bit, and the climax is the third. I think that last verse in ‘Criminal’ is one of my best. Or my verse in ‘Fight Music’ on the D12 record. The things of mine that I like most get slept on, and the shit that’s routine for me ends up becoming Quotables. It’s weird.”

“I know that plenty of artists, not just rappers, who sell a lot of records are looked up to and sometimes it’s deserving and sometimes not,” Eminem says. “A lot of people could be saying that I don’t deserve it. You know, failure has always been the scariest and biggest motivation for me, just the fear of losing and somebody getting the last laugh on me. In the back of my mind my worst fear is that I wake up tomorrow and I won’t be able to write nothing. That’s why this is good. If people stop writing about me tomorrow I might not have shit to write about. If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, and all that shit, my songs would be really wack. They’d just be boring.”

“No one will admit to it,” Interscope Records president of publicity Dennis Dennehy said in early 2003, “but when I started doing the press on The Slim Shady album, Eminem had done a few big

interviews, and at the tail end of it we tried to get him higher profile press and some TV spots. He’d sold two million records and people didn’t want him on their shows. At that point, people at the big shows and the others were like, ‘Eh, I don’t know.’ I don’t want to name names, but it was a bit of a hard time. It was actually difficult, because he got a lot of press, but there was an attitude like ‘this is a fad,’ and people questioned whether he would even be around for the next album. Of course, all of those people were delightfully proven wrong.”



Major-label publicity folk receive a pile of clippings every morning; faxes of the press their artists have garnered overnight. Dennehy has watched Eminem’s pile grow rapidly in the last year alone; at the height of the hype, it reached two inches daily, then leveled out at around an inch.



“If you look at the press he’s done, in terms of the quantity,” he says, “it’s been fairly static, album to album to album. He always does about the same number of real interviews—it’s the stuff around him that’s grown. It’s gone from press interest to press fervor on the Marshall Mathers LP, when he was public enemy number one, to a long and heated debate that’s still going on, about whether it’s okay to like him or not. When this started, I had friends giving me crap for working with him at all.”

Anyone who missed that Eminem is a card-carrying member of the hip-hop nation, from his walk to his product, wasn’t spending enough time on him. This wasn’t a charade by a clown who learned rap from MTV, it was a deft underground MC who had paid his dues.



“There were a few other underground rappers coming up when Eminem did who stood out as innovative lyricists,” says Sway Calloway, MTV News correspondent and longtime cohost of the influential L.A. hip-hop radio show The Wake Up Show. “Eminem found a way to do things better. And Eminem stayed on the grind. He just continued to come by our show and drop freestyles. I got so much stuff that he did. He was doing his footwork. And the thing about him I noticed each time I saw him back then—and it’s still going on—is that he keeps getting better and better. He came to our studio to record ‘Get You Mad’ [on Sway and King Tech’s 1999 album, This or That], and that’s when I first started noticing, damn, this dude keeps getting better. His metaphors are ridiculous. I could just tell he wasn’t going to run out of things to say or how to say them after one album. So many rappers do when they lose touch with the reality that got them there in the first place.”

Eminem’s first high-profile detractor was Timothy White, the deceased Billboard editor in chief. White devoted his page-long column the week The Slim Shady LP came out to a benefit album for Respond, an organization for battered women, as part of his denouncement of the misogyny in Eminem’s music, which he felt perpetuated cycles of violence against women and made “money off the world’s misery.” Eminem made White insult fodder in “Bitch Please II,” from The Marshall Mathers LP, and speculated on the validity of White’s assertions in “Criminal” and other songs.



“He’s a fucking asshole,” Eminem said about White the week the Billboard issue hit newsstands. “Fucker. He took everything I said so fucking literally it disgusts me. He should be able to tell when I’m serious and when I’m not—it’s not fucking rocket science. He didn’t even realize that ‘Guilty Conscience’ was a concept song. It’s about the way people are in the fucking world and how evil always seems to outweigh good, whether it’s in your conscience or in the world and in America especially. In the song, we’re talking about the devil half of you and the angel half of you. Nine times out of ten, the devil’s gonna win.”

If he hadn’t had street cred from the start, he’d have never even made it out of Detroit. As it was, getting out was a feat in itself. “We talked to everybody, every label,” Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, says about landing Eminem a record deal. “I mean, at the point that he did get signed by Dre, we just wanted a deal. Everybody passed on him. To them, it was a risk. Most people don’t officially pass on an act; they sort of string you along because if something happens they don’t want to be sitting there looking like a dickhead. So that’s how they handled it. They didn’t know what they had, but, honestly, neither did we.”

“The controversy didn’t surprise me,” Eminem says. “I knew there was something coming. I didn’t know exactly what it was yet, but Dre told me I’d better get ready for some shit. He was like, ‘You’re gonna go through it. Believe me, I went through it with N.W.A.’ But I had no idea all of that was gonna happen. You know, selling all the records I sold off The Marshall Mathers LP out the gate was strange to me. Not that I feel undeserving or anything like that, but I was just like, ‘Holy fuck, this is me doin’ this.’ That’s the biggest weirdest thing to live with. I had no choice but to get used to it. But it’s still strange.”

“Somebody called me during that time, around The Marshall Mathers LP, who is a homosexual,” recalls publicist Dennis Dennehy. “He’s with a website and he supports art that’s labeled obscene—Robert Mapplethorpe and other artists that Middle America find obscene. He called me to say that of all the controversial art he does support, he could not support Eminem. Yeah, you know, because it pissed him off. It’s fine to promote art that doesn’t piss you off, that pisses someone else off. But once it strikes a nerve, it’s a different story. You’ll defend something until it actually affects your world.”



To hip-hop fans, Eminem was different, but the harsh themes and violence in his music weren’t too terribly new. But the attention afforded him indicated a subtle racial prejudice. Eminem’s opponents, by singling him out, suggested that the same themes, as chronicled by black rappers, were somehow more acceptable. “I think it was about the messenger,” Sia Michel, Spin magazine’s editor in chief, says of the controversy surrounding The Marshall Mathers LP. “It was sort of this kind of weird racism, where it was like, ‘Oh, well, you know how those gangsta rappers are, they say lots of crazy shit.’ As if we don’t expect anything more from them. And then a couple of years later, the white guy comes out saying similar things and it’s like, totally shocking. This white, blond man is saying these things, we’re going to take umbrage at this. It is kind of racist, just assuming that Eminem should be any less violent or use any less offensive language than anybody else, simply because of his race. It was harder for people to stomach.”

NOW [National Organization for Women] must have been dismayed by Madonna’s open letter to the Los Angeles Times in defense of Eminem: “Since when is offensive language a reason for being

unpopular? I find the language of George W. [Bush] much more offensive. I like the fact that Eminem is brash and angry and politically incorrect. At least he has an opinion. He’s stirring things up, he’s making people’s blood boil, he’s reflecting on what’s going on in society right now. This is what art’s supposed to do. And after all, he’s just a boy.”

The first time I met Eminem, I asked him about the effect of his music on kids who may be too young to tell when he’s joking and when he’s not. He answered me then as he has everyone who has asked since. “My music is not for younger kids to hear,” he said. “That’s why there’s an advisory sticker on it. You must be eighteen to get it. That doesn’t mean that kids won’t. I got 2 Live Crew tapes when I was twelve. I’m not responsible for every child out there. I’m not a role model and I don’t claim to be. It’s what the song ‘Role Model’ says. I say that I do everything in the song, but it’s all fucking sarcasm. How can people not get it? … That’s fucking ridiculous. It’s obviously saying, ‘You wanna grow up to be just like me? Fuck no, you don’t!’ The message is: Whatever I say, do the opposite. You do that, you’ll be good, because my whole life is the opposite of good.”

Eminem’s duet with Elton John at the ceremony was calculated to soften his tag as a homophobe. But Eminem couldn’t resist stirring the waters again shortly after the event, claiming in an interview that he wasn’t aware that Elton John was gay. The truth of the matter was seen backstage at the Brit Awards, the U.K. equivalent of the Grammy Awards, later in the year, when a writer from London’s Daily Express observed Eminem, standing in the backstage bar, having a drink with his crew and being watched but left alone by the cream of the Brit pop-music scene, when he was greeted by John with a huge bear hug and a “Come here, darlin’!” If anyone still wondered about his views at that point, Eminem the homophobe didn’t flinch or shy away from John, he just grinned.



“It amazes me that people can’t see that what he is doing is a performance,” John told the reporter that night. “He plays a part onstage and he pushes buttons. I think he’s incredible as a performer and a person. The music industry needs people who can be subversive. As a nonsubversive songwriter, I particularly appreciate and admire his lyrics. I spent three days with him in America and I can tell you, he’s very calm, very modest, very sweet, and very shy.”

“His profile now is that he’s obviously here to stay, he’s obviously an artist with something to say,” Interscope Records head of publicity Dennis Dennehy says. “There’s no longer a debate about whether he is viable, or appropriate. The cultural argument, in this new world, is whether there’s any point in getting wound up about this stuff anymore—obviously America’s got more serious problems. Then it was the movie and more people talking about him. I wouldn’t say he’s a media darling, though. People, of course, want to talk to him, because who wouldn’t tune in to see it. Even the people who hate him all want him on the show. The people who spend hours deriding him in the media? They all want him on the show.”

Despite across-the-board praise, there are still two critics of stature in America who have not altered their stance against Eminem. Music critic Jim DeRogatis doesn’t see the voice of a generation in Eminem; he sees a packaged product—a rebel yell manipulated by Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, and Interscope Records, as he said in an interview for this book.



“We’re talking about Generation Y, the second largest generation of teenagers in American history. There are seventy-two million kids in Generation Y, after seventy-six million of their parents, who are the Baby Boom generation. There’s a mere seventeen million of us Generation Xers sandwiched in between them. This is a consumerist generation so far, and the vast majority of Generation Y has yet to wake out of its consumerist slumber. I think of the pod people in The Matrix, everybody plugged into the machine. It’s a video game, television society, and everything can be solved with a quick trip down to Abercrombie and Fitch—and Eminem plays into that. He is product on exactly the same level that Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera and everybody else that he’s made fun of in his lyrics is. There is no difference, except that his tactic is cheap sensationalism and shock, as opposed to showing your fake boobs like Britney. Pop music is inherently disposable trash, and I’m not saying there can’t be great pop along those lines. But rarely has there been great pop that gives you that quick sugar fix, that had so much hatred intertwined, whether it’s hatred for specific people or hatred for groups of people. If you have a serious problem with a woman, to fantasize about killing her and slicing her and dicing her—there’s better ways to address your problem. Especially when you have vocal skills like he does.”



DeRogatis cites a “critical overcompensation” toward Eminem to explain his widespread praise by an older generation of music writers. “There is a problem with forty-year-old white guy critics, and now most of them are fifty,” says the thirty-eight-year-old DeRogatis. “They desperately want not to seem out of step with young tastes, so they go overboard in praising something popular with young people. I don’t have that problem. I know what my emotional reaction to Eminem is. I know what

my critical reaction to Eminem is. I have no problem standing up and saying it’s shit.” DeRogatis sees wasted talent in Eminem—and no one is calling him on it. “He gets covered in two ways: by people who don’t know hip-hop, who see him strictly as a sensationalistic scourge—and I don’t think he’s a plague on society, fuck that crap—or he gets covered with glowing hyperbole. There’s very little in between. If Bob Dylan had released an album in the sixties praising Richard Nixon as a great force in American society, his wrong-headedness would have been attacked and assaulted by his generation. I think that’s what the critical response should have been to Eminem. There’s this thing of thirteen million record buyers can’t be wrong, to which I say, where is Hootie and the Blowfish today? America voted for Ronald Reagan—twice. Tell me again that the American masses can’t be wrong. The tragedy is to have Eminem’s talent and to do so little with it.”



Richard Goldstein, editor in chief of the Village Voice also came out against Eminem just as the national opinion rose to unprecedented pro-Em levels. Goldstein sees the rapper as part of a tradition of celebrity bigotry and aligned him more with conservative Republicans, such as George Bush, than free-speech liberals. “Eminem is a paranoid personality,” Goldstein said in an interview for this book. “A paranoid male personality with an intense sense of aggrievement that is out of proportion to reality. That is projected through his music so that millions of people sign on to the paranoia. This is a dangerous phenomenon. What’s happening now with 9/11 is that this came together with

politics and is now a true orthodoxy, sublimated into militarism.”

All the Detroit newspapers ran stories featuring interviews of Eminem’s neighbors in the plush gated community that he now calls home. They told reporters about Eminem’s contribution to the

neighborhood—sleigh rides for the children at Christmas. They chronicled his trick-or-treating with Hailie, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and hockey mask as Jason from the Friday the 13th films, the same mask Eminem wore each night at the start of his show on the Anger Management Tour. “Marshall is a very good father and a very nice person—very down-to-earth,” his forty-five-year-old neighbor Cathy Roberts told the Detroit News. The same paper interviewed another neighbor, fifty-seven-year-old Dave Crorey, who met Mariah Carey when Eminem brought her over to meet the Croreys during the pair’s brief romance. “He seems a little timid,” Crorey said of Eminem. “He’s

nothing like he’s portrayed—a wild kid and all that. Seems a little on the shy side.” There were Eminem cover stories gleaned from what seemed like twenty-minute interviews and endless articles about the concentric circles of his life, necessitated since at the time the man himself was not doing press. At the height of it all, three different houses in Detroit that were reported to have once housed Eminem went up for sale on eBay. The bidding price of the home pictured on the back cover of The Marshall Mathers LP, which had been appraised at $120,000, headed north of $10 million. It wasn’t exactly a slow year for celebrity culture, but the excitement, curiosity, and embrace of Eminem outshone everything. America, for better or worse, must have seen itself reflected in Marshall Mathers, and rushed to join the fan club.



“Everyone seems to love Eminem,” says Frere-Jones. “I think short of killing his own daughter, it doesn’t seem like he could do anything that would repel people. You open the paper and Jimmy Carter is saying, ‘Oh, I like Eminem’—they’re clambering on top of one another to be offended less and less. I’m not trying to sell my cure or anything, but Eminem, what is this idea that people hate you? As far as I can tell, nobody hates you, other than Richard Goldstein—God bless him for being out there on his own.”



“The challenge now is,” says publicist Dennis Dennehy, “to keep from willfully overexposing him. I don’t think he’s overexposed, but he’s everywhere. When you really get down to it, in the last year, he’s done maybe seven interviews in this country. It’s going to be a challenge with the next record, or the next whatever he does—but we’ve got to maintain the press he gets without giving him away. We could go out tomorrow and do an interview with almost any outlet in America—no one would say no to an interview with Eminem. But there’s nothing to be gained by it. He’s got a lot to say, he

explains himself really well. But it’s better to maintain some mystery. I think for anyone who really cares about artists, your favorite bands are always the most mysterious. You didn’t read about them everywhere—so when you did, it was a big deal.”



The truth is that Eminem doesn’t like to do interviews; he prefers to save his sound bites for song. That’s not to say he’ll make the experience unpleasant. He is civil, charming in a subdued way, passionate, and if he’s not too swamped or tired, a lot of fun to be around. He’s learned to do interviews well over the years—probably to make them go faster, since he thinks they’re pointless at their worst and redundant at their best. As for the storied past and personal life he chronicles in verse, he prefers to keep the intimate details private. “If you listen to the songs and don’t take the words out of context,” he says, “it’ll tell you why I’m saying this or why I’m saying that. I might say it in the song later on, but you’ll hear it. If you don’t listen to the whole song, it’s like watching the middle of a movie and turning it off and then talking about it. Just listen to the fucking songs. If you listen to them, they will tell you. The album’s like a fucking instruction manual—and sometimes interviews are like somebody trying to put something together but they don’t know how. Read the instructions! Why are you making me sit here and tell you?”



But Eminem being Eminem/Shady/Marshall/him/them, it can’t be that simple. There are subtexts, metaphors beneath the metaphors—right? “Somebody asked me today in another interview,” he said in 2002, “‘When you said you feel like your father, you just hate to be bothered—what did you mean by that?’ And I sat there for a minute and I was like, fuck! What did I mean by that? They almost had me thinking that there was a deeper meaning to it. No, dummy, it’s a metaphor! My father didn’t wanna be bothered with me. And I hate to be bothered by everything. Man, when people start to overanalyze, I tend to start overexplaining myself and in my head, I’m questioning it instead of taking it the way I meant it. It’s like, ‘I like to wear my raincoat in the rain’—what did I mean by that? I couldn’t have meant, like, that I like to wear my raincoat in the rain! Could I? Do I? Do I like when it rains, so I can wear my raincoat?”



“The truth is, at the end of the day,” Eminem says, “I really don’t care what people say about me because it’s people like me who give half of these people their jobs. They keep their jobs if they have something to write about, and if they write about something good all the time they’re not gonna sell papers, they’re not gonna sell magazines, and they won’t make a name for themselves. All of them dream of being a famous writer and whatever it takes and whatever they gotta do to slap a fucking headline in the fucking papers that says ‘Teen Murders Himself Because of Eminem’s Lyrics,’ they’ll do. That’s what’s gonna sell papers and magazines, so that’s why they do it. At end of the day, it doesn’t really matter to me. Ya know, it’s just kinda funny. I didn’t blow me up half as much as the press did. I couldn’t have sold myself half to these kids the way the press did. If they write that the Eminem album is gonna cause kids to go and murder and shit, they’re gonna go fucking buy the album and see what it’s about. And you know, it ain’t nothing but music.”





“Stop here,” Eminem says, sitting behind the driver of the van, on the bench in front of me. “That was our house.” The steep brown roof is broken by a deep-set window. The short porch is covered in snow, as is the car in the driveway. A light is on in the front room. The street is still. The house is sixty-two years old; as of this year, 1999, it’s been in Eminem’s family for nearly fifty years. Two years from now, Eminem will re-create the house’s facade for a concert tour spanning America and Europe. He will begin each show standing before it in overalls and a hockey mask, wielding a chainsaw. Three years from now, his uncle, Todd Nelson, will sell this house for $45,000. Four years from now, the new owners, a lawyer and a real estate developer, will watch eBay bidding on the

house reach $12 million, then yield nothing.



“My room was upstairs,” Eminem says, his breath fogging the window. “I was at my grandmother’s a lot, but this is the house I grew up in. This neighborhood is all low-income black families. Across 8 Mile back over there is Warren, which is the low-income white families. We lived over there in a park; people think they’re all trailers, but some of ’em are just low-income housing parks.” He points past me at another house. “Some redneck lived over there,” he says. “They were the only other white people.” No cars, animals, or people of any color stir the dusk. Eminem’s eyes run over the house, scanning details. He has shared troubled memories of this place with me, but his eyes aren’t melancholy, they’re proud. “I want you to see the walk I did every day to junior high,” he says.



Along the way, the van rolls past Osbourne High School, Eminem’s rap alma

mater. He attended Lincoln High School in Warren but snuck into this predominantly black school with Proof to battle-rap in the cafeteria, in the bathroom—anywhere a crowd might gather...A week from now, I will call every “D. Bailey” in the Detroit Yellow Pages and find D’Angelo. When I do, I’ll listen to him recount the beatings warmly, his memory either blurred by time or quasifame, denial or ignorance. Bailey once slammed Mathers onto frozen asphalt at recess, sending him to the hospital with a concussion, but Bailey will remember it as good fun. Before he will say goodbye, Bailey will ask me for Eminem’s phone number so that they can catch up on old times. [ ] When I don’t offer it, he will ask me for tickets to an Eminem show that is a few months off. Three years from now, Bailey will file a million-dollar lawsuit against Eminem for invading his privacy, defaming his character, and hindering the sanitation worker’s efforts to launch a rap career.



We trace Eminem’s old walk to junior high school. It is more than a mile from Eminem’s house, farther from his grandmother’s house in Warren, across 8 Mile Road. The van heads in that direction, on 8 Mile and slows down at the entrance to the Bel-Air Shopping Center. There is a long stretch of grass, wider than a few cars, running along the parking lot. At one end is a wall, beyond it a few hundred feet of empty land.



“I got jumped by a whole crew right here,” Eminem says, looking over his shoulder at me. “I was sixteen, I was skinny as fuck, and I couldn’t fight as a teenager. I was walking home from my boy Howard’s house through the Bel-Air and I stopped at Toys “R” Us on the way to warm up ’cause it was winter. I came out of there and all these black dudes rode by in a car, flippin’ me off. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ and I flipped ’em off back. They kept driving and I didn’t think anything of it. I’m walking down this long patch of grass right here to the wall at the end right there. Two dudes come from around one end of the wall and it’s them. One dude walks past me. The second dude stops and asks me what time it is. I’m like, ‘I ain’t got a watch.’ Dude who walked past came back and said, ‘What you say to my boy?’ And hit me in the face. I fell into all this mud.”



Once on the ground, Eminem realized that he was surrounded. “I got up and was afraid to swing,” he says. “I was like, ‘What did you do that for?’ And the dude’s like, ‘For the same reason I’m gonna do this.’ And he pulls out a gun. I turn around and ran, right out of my shoes. That’s what I thought they wanted. I had them new LL Cool J Troops and shit. I ran right out of them and didn’t even mean to.” Eminem had run past the wall in front of us, into the empty field on the other side, toward his grandmother’s house.



“The other dudes from the car started chasing me, and one caught up to me and threw me down in the mud,” he says. “I jump up and this dude is tall as fuck and I swing and hit him in the face and he just laughs. He hits me in the ribs and I fall down again. I’m in my socks, in the mud. I get up, start running again, and they don’t chase me, and I’m thinking they’re getting the car again. Then one of them shoots at me. Just one shot. As soon as I heard it, I thought I was shot but I couldn’t feel it yet. I just start screaming and don’t stop.”



A car had pulled up next to Eminem, on the shoulder of 8 Mile Road. “This guy throws open his door and I don’t even stop or look back—I thought it was one of the dudes chasing me. But this guy had seen what had happened and pulled a gun on them and scattered them. He drove to catch up with me, and I’m running on these train tracks over there past the field, cutting my feet up on ’em. This guy, he was a white guy, finally starts yelling at me, ‘It’s all good, it’s all good, get in.’ He drove me the rest of the way home, which by then, I had run so fast, I was almost there. I asked the guy to wait and tell my mom what had happened, but he took off. I was fucked up—face all swollen, feet bleeding and muddy. I slammed the door and screamed at my mom ‘Why the fuck do we live here! I’m getting fucked with every day!’ It was totally racial. I know it because the next day I went back and my shoes and hat were right where they came off. At least they could have jumped me for my shoes. The only reason they could have done it is because I’m white.” The headlights eat the dark between the traffic lights along four lanes sprawled each side of a wide divide. Electrical transmission towers form a spine up the median, carrying 200,000 volts through the city. Strip malls advertise sex and cars, mattresses and meals, glowing in the gray landscape. To one side of the road, the city’s residents are 82 percent black. To the other, the suburban county’s residents are 83 percent white. The white van slows to turn into a grid of streets. Each house we pass has a square patch of grass and a driveway wide enough for one car; some have fences, some have shingles, some are brick-faced. All are modest.“Stop here,” Eminem says, sitting behind the driver of the van, on the bench in front of me. “That was our house.” The steep brown roof is broken by a deep-set window. The short porch is covered in snow, as is the car in the driveway. A light is on in the front room. The street is still. The house is sixty-two years old; as of this year, 1999, it’s been in Eminem’s family for nearly fifty years. Two years from now, Eminem will re-create the house’s facade for a concert tour spanning America and Europe. He will begin each show standing before it in overalls and a hockey mask, wielding a chainsaw. Three years from now, his uncle, Todd Nelson, will sell this house for $45,000. Four years from now, the new owners, a lawyer and a real estate developer, will watch eBay bidding on thehouse reach $12 million, then yield nothing.“My room was upstairs,” Eminem says, his breath fogging the window. “I was at my grandmother’s a lot, but this is the house I grew up in. This neighborhood is all low-income black families. Across 8 Mile back over there is Warren, which is the low-income white families. We lived over there in a park; people think they’re all trailers, but some of ’em are just low-income housing parks.” He points past me at another house. “Some redneck lived over there,” he says. “They were the only other white people.” No cars, animals, or people of any color stir the dusk. Eminem’s eyes run over the house, scanning details. He has shared troubled memories of this place with me, but his eyes aren’t melancholy, they’re proud. “I want you to see the walk I did every day to junior high,” he says.Along the way, the van rolls past Osbourne High School, Eminem’s rap almamater. He attended Lincoln High School in Warren but snuck into this predominantly black school with Proof to battle-rap in the cafeteria, in the bathroom—anywhere a crowd might gather...A week from now, I will call every “D. Bailey” in the Detroit Yellow Pages and find D’Angelo. When I do, I’ll listen to him recount the beatings warmly, his memory either blurred by time or quasifame, denial or ignorance. Bailey once slammed Mathers onto frozen asphalt at recess, sending him to the hospital with a concussion, but Bailey will remember it as good fun. Before he will say goodbye, Bailey will ask me for Eminem’s phone number so that they can catch up on old times. [] When I don’t offer it, he will ask me for tickets to an Eminem show that is a few months off. Three years from now, Bailey will file a million-dollar lawsuit against Eminem for invading his privacy, defaming his character, and hindering the sanitation worker’s efforts to launch a rap career.We trace Eminem’s old walk to junior high school. It is more than a mile from Eminem’s house, farther from his grandmother’s house in Warren, across 8 Mile Road. The van heads in that direction, on 8 Mile and slows down at the entrance to the Bel-Air Shopping Center. There is a long stretch of grass, wider than a few cars, running along the parking lot. At one end is a wall, beyond it a few hundred feet of empty land.“I got jumped by a whole crew right here,” Eminem says, looking over his shoulder at me. “I was sixteen, I was skinny as fuck, and I couldn’t fight as a teenager. I was walking home from my boy Howard’s house through the Bel-Air and I stopped at Toys “R” Us on the way to warm up ’cause it was winter. I came out of there and all these black dudes rode by in a car, flippin’ me off. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ and I flipped ’em off back. They kept driving and I didn’t think anything of it. I’m walking down this long patch of grass right here to the wall at the end right there. Two dudes come from around one end of the wall and it’s them. One dude walks past me. The second dude stops and asks me what time it is. I’m like, ‘I ain’t got a watch.’ Dude who walked past came back and said, ‘What you say to my boy?’ And hit me in the face. I fell into all this mud.”Once on the ground, Eminem realized that he was surrounded. “I got up and was afraid to swing,” he says. “I was like, ‘What did you do that for?’ And the dude’s like, ‘For the same reason I’m gonna do this.’ And he pulls out a gun. I turn around and ran, right out of my shoes. That’s what I thought they wanted. I had them new LL Cool J Troops and shit. I ran right out of them and didn’t even mean to.” Eminem had run past the wall in front of us, into the empty field on the other side, toward his grandmother’s house.“The other dudes from the car started chasing me, and one caught up to me and threw me down in the mud,” he says. “I jump up and this dude is tall as fuck and I swing and hit him in the face and he just laughs. He hits me in the ribs and I fall down again. I’m in my socks, in the mud. I get up, start running again, and they don’t chase me, and I’m thinking they’re getting the car again. Then one of them shoots at me. Just one shot. As soon as I heard it, I thought I was shot but I couldn’t feel it yet. I just start screaming and don’t stop.”A car had pulled up next to Eminem, on the shoulder of 8 Mile Road. “This guy throws open his door and I don’t even stop or look back—I thought it was one of the dudes chasing me. But this guy had seen what had happened and pulled a gun on them and scattered them. He drove to catch up with me, and I’m running on these train tracks over there past the field, cutting my feet up on ’em. This guy, he was a white guy, finally starts yelling at me, ‘It’s all good, it’s all good, get in.’ He drove me the rest of the way home, which by then, I had run so fast, I was almost there. I asked the guy to wait and tell my mom what had happened, but he took off. I was fucked up—face all swollen, feet bleeding and muddy. I slammed the door and screamed at my mom ‘Why the fuck do we live here! I’m getting fucked with every day!’ It was totally racial. I know it because the next day I went back and my shoes and hat were right where they came off. At least they could have jumped me for my shoes. The only reason they could have done it is because I’m white.”

The dance floor is full now, but no one is dancing. These VIPs pose, striking a stiff posture of nonchalance while shifting to glimpse the party’s honoree walk across the room. Eminem has seen enough of these events to expect that he’s still onstage at private parties, that everyone here is either desperate or too proud to talk to him...He moves slowly, looking at people, talking

to no one. Guests approach him cautiously. A few women flirt with him. His friends circle around and joke with him. He returns to the booth soon. “See anything interesting?” I ask him.



“Nah, man,” he says. “These things are all the same, you know. It’s weird to meet people like this. It’s funny, I mean, most of them want something from you. They might just want you to tell them stories and shit and entertain them. Some people are cool, but some don’t realize when I go out like this with my friends, I just want to have a good time. I don’t really take too many days off, so why do I want to entertain like that when I’m out with my friends? That’s what I do on stage.”



“You can’t really let loose when everyone here is here to meet you, I guess.”



“I can’t really let loose at all right now, I’m on probation,” he says, and laughs. “But yeah, I wouldn’t want to anyway; you never know what people want from you or what they’d do. I’ve had so many fucking lawsuits, man, it just isn’t worth it to me. I just hang out when I’m in Detroit. Just hang out with my friends, that’s it.” Eminem looks past me at a girl waving to him from across the room.



“I thought I knew her for a second,” he says. “You know all this shit really isn’t important to me. All I care about is making music, man. If I could live my life in the studio, except to be with my daughter, that’s what I would do.”

A rusted-out red Toyota sputters next to me; I hear the tattered muffler above the noise of the road and the stereo. Two black men in the car talk intently and nod. They lag behind, then cross from the left lane to the right. They drive beside me, then ahead. A red light stops the traffic, and the Toyota stops next to the Mercedes. The driver leans out of his window and talks to the one-way glass. Eminem rolls his window down and nods slowly as he talks. He is handed a tape. The traffic light changes and the cars drive off.



“Those guys shopping for a record deal?” I ask him later. “Yeah. They had a tape they wanted to give me,” Eminem says. “That’s cool. I did that shit, too. Everywhere that I might meet someone, I’d show up with a tape. I never gave them to rappers, but everybody else that I could. That’s what you gotta do, man. You gotta stay hungry, you gotta get your shit out there, you gotta show up places. You

gotta just live for rappin’, man. After my uncle Ronnie got me into it, that was it for me. As fucked up as shit got for me, I just lived for rap. It’s the only thing that got me through the day.”

“Em’s worked really hard to get where he is,” Bizzare, of D-12, says. “He went everywhere back in the day, battles, conventions. I was one of the first to take him out of town, actually. He had never been nowhere besides Kansas City and Cedar Point in Michigan. Around ’94, I think it was, me and him drove down to the How Can I Be Down? conference in Miami. There was like five of us in a Honda Accord, driving all the way down there. We didn’t do too good, we passed out a couple tapes, we didn’t get no respect, whatever. We had to leave early because all this bad shit was happening back home with Kim at the house Em had with her. They was getting broken into and they was getting evicted. Me and him had to get back to Detroit right away so we tried to catch a bus and they wouldn’t let him on it because he had his clothes in a garbage bag. He had to, like, put the clothes on and put shit in my bag.”

“The top two rappers right now, as far as skill, writing, and delivery, are my partner Big Boi and Eminem,” says André of OutKast. “That’s truly how I feel about it. I mean, I can tell that it’s real for Eminem. It’s a passion for him, you know. It ain’t just like fly by night, he’s jumping to it.”

“Being in battles keeps Eminem grounded I think,” says Sway Calloway. “Back in the day, that’s what helped develop and shape who he is. The only thing that was at all good about his whole ‘beef’ with Benzino is that it reminded Eminem where he came from. This is still rap, and guys like

Cannabis or Benzino or whoever are still gonna come for you and you gotta prove that you’re still a warrior, a gladiator, no matter how many millions you sold. That’s what keeps a rapper’s arrogance, his spirit, his edge, going.”

“Eminem came out of the box with this surreal violent thing going on. It wasn’t just that, it was also really funny, even more because he aimed so much of it at himself,” says the Village Voice’s Sasha Frere-Jones. “That was the huge difference. Everyone in rap has shot everyone else a hundred times, and everyone’s done mean things to people, and I really don’t need to hear that again. But, like, suicide and self-mutilation analogizes a useful state of mind—which is, ‘okay, I feel bad about myself.’ That’s a huge, not very well-explored part of hip-hop. I know people who think even that part of Eminem is a moral force for bad. But, you know, I don’t know anyone who thinks he’s not a good

MC. He’s like Biggie, and I’ve never heard anyone say that Biggie wasn’t dope. Nobody didn’t love Biggie—and it was the same thing when Eminem first came out; everyone’s running around with the same look on their face like, ‘Did you hear this shit?!’ When Ready to Die came out, it was the same thing—you couldn’t open the door without somebody quoting Biggie.”

On The Eminem Show, the rapper makes reference to retiring his jersey at thirty. He knows that hip-hop isn’t a forgiving medium: Fans move quickly, and a weak album may be a rapper’s last—as a white rapper of his stature, the pressure is double. “I’m gonna stop when I’ve got nothing left to say,” Eminem says. “As soon as I don’t feel it, that’s it, it’s over.”

“For white rappers, there’s such a fine line between shit you can and can’t do,” Eminem says. “The main thing is to be yourself. A lot of white rappers—look at Vanilla Ice. Yo, he got exposed. You can only put up a front for so long before people start coming out of the woodwork like, ‘Yo, you didn’t grow up here, you didn’t do this.’ You talk about guns in your rhymes and you never shot a gun! Talkin’ about shit you never lived, you’ve never even seen. If you ain’t got the balls to walk up and sock somebody in the mouth, don’t write it down, because if you say that shit on wax, you’re gonna get tested. If you’re not that type of person, don’t say it! Don’t talk about growing up in hard

times in the city if you grew up in the fucking suburbs. White rappers, if they grew up in the suburbs, should play off it, like, ‘Hi! I’m white.’”

Eminem sits on the dressing-room counter, leaning against the mirror, a Game girl at each leg. The security guard plays bouncer, quizzing the crowd at the door. He turns away a group of girls who just want to say hello, then a pair of dudes who are not who they claim to be. The door closes. There’s a knock again: MC Serch, one-third of the well-respected, early-nineties white rap group 3rd Bass. The rapper comes in and gives Eminem a hug. Three years from now, Serch will leave his native New York to host a morning radio show in Detroit for WJLB, the station that Eminem mentions in “Rock Bottom” (The Slim Shady LP) to criticize them for their lip-service-only support of local hip-hop. Two knocks later, West Coast rapper Ras Kass slides in; the room is now past full and Ras must leave his boys outside...Insistent knocks go unanswered; Eminem’s security guard just leans against the door now. After a few minutes, he opens it a crack to see who is pounding. Standing there

is a guy who says he manages Miilkbone, the white rapper whose anti-Eminem track, “Presenting Miilkbone,” will be released next month on the ill-conceived (produced from his prison cell) Death Row Records compilation Suge Knight Represents: Chronic 2000...Miilkbone's manager is denied entrance. Next there is a trio of white girls who squeeze by the manager, attempting to pass Eminem’s security guard while he is talking. They’ve tried three times so far. Patience failed to get them in; flirting, too. This time, they try sympathy. The guard is holding the door open, blocking traffic, allowing smoke and heat out of the room and only air in. “We just want to say hi. We’ve come all the way from New Jersey,” one of the girls says. “Oh, yeah, all the way from New Jersey?” the guard responds.

“Yeah!” another says, hopeful. “We came all the way just to see him. We love him. We promise we won’t bother anybody. We just want to say hi and we’ll leave.”

“Can’t do it. Too many bodies in here.”

“But we came all the way here just to see him,” the first insists, “We’re small, we can fit. You won’t even know we’re in there.”

“You’re gonna see him onstage in a minute. Ladies, you gotta move back.” A smallish guy in a baggy leather jacket tries to slip through the door. “Hey, who you with?” Eminem’s security guard asks.

“I was just in there, dog. I’m with all of them, yo.”

“What’s your name?”

“I’m K, man. KG.” The guy looks past the guard into the room at one of Royce’s crew facing him. “Yo, dog, what’s up man? How you feelin’?”

“Aiight.”

“He wit you?” the guard asks.

“Nah. I don’t know him.”

“Who you with?” the guard asks the guy.

“I was just in there, man. I know the guy at the label.”

“What label?”

“Shady’s label, man. Dre’s label,” the guy says. “I’m KG, man.”

“There’s no one here from the label tonight,” the guard says. “Keep it moving.”

KG steps back but doesn’t leave. The girls move in for another round. “Sir, I promise, we’ll just say hi and leave,” two say, almost at the same time. “We promise, we just want to say hi.”

We in the room move toward the door when it opens, breathing in the cooler air as the smoke escapes. The guard has had it. “Everybody! Get away from this door right now. Do not block it. Move outside unless you were invited in here. I am closing this door!” A line of people wring themselves out of the room, Game girls included, then the door again seals in the bong-water humidity. In the confusion, to the Jersey girls’ dismay, two different teenage white girls have pushed themselves in and now sidle over to Eminem.

“Hey, Slim Shady,” one of them says, “I like your song.”

“Oh, yeah?” Eminem says. “Which one?”

“The one with the video,” she says. “It’s really good.”

“Yeah, when you dress up like Marilyn Manson,” the other says. “That shit’s really funny.”

“Thanks a lot.” He looks unimpressed. “Hey, have you met Paul?” he says, looking at his manager. “He’s a fuckin’ fuck. His life is over.”

“You’re too late,” Paul Rosenberg says, bemused. “I already quit.”

“Oh, yeah? Well you’re so fired then that you’re rehired, you fuckin’ fuck. You know why? Because you’re fat, bald, and Jewish.”

The girls smile awkwardly.

“Can I get a beer?” one asks someone next to the cooler. He doesn’t notice.

“So you’re from Detroit?” her friend asks Eminem. “What’s it like?”

I predict, to myself, that this will end her interview.

“It’s aiight,” Eminem says, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Hey, you two know

Dee, right? You’ve met Dee?”

The girl crinkles her nose. “Dee who?” she says.

“Deez nuts!” Eminem shouts in her face. The joke is a hip-hop test and it looks like these girls have failed. “Deez Nuts” is a classic gangsta rap track featuring Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Warren G, and Daz from Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992); it starts with a phone call skit much like the joke Eminem just played. “Deez nuts” is big in Eminem’s crew right now; anyone answering a “who” or “what” often gets “deez nuts” as the response. “Deez Nuts” are tough to avoid even if you know the joke; as the newest hanger-on, I myself am served plenty of “deez nuts,” the loudest set coming in the middle of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. I didn’t sta