The Dark Story of Eminem Page 14
‘Forgot About Dre’ was 2001‘s second single, reaching number seven in the UK in May 2000 (25 in the US). That month, Dre travelled with Eminem to Britain, to duet on all their collaborations at the Brixton Academy, to a sold out, racially mixed crowd. The dream ticket of the two together was plain again.
But the excitement that month was more immediate. Eminem’s buffeting by fame during the past year had not slowed his artistry at all. In December, he had started work on Slim Shady‘s sequel. And, as he and the world still reeled from their first contact, this fresh blast was about to be unleashed.
7
PUBLIC ENEMY
The Marshall Mathers LP was recorded in 20-hour, sometimes drug-fuelled sessions, in a two-month creative binge, nearly matching its predecessor’s 14-day birth. Holed away with Dre and the Bass Brothers in LA, the law-suits, family feuds and condemnations of the previous year could not touch Eminem. Reporters who watched him in the studio caught a rare glimpse of the personal control which had helped pull him from his old, incoherent life: the mature real man, Marshall Mathers, who allowed his unhinged artistic alter ego Slim to flourish. Asked about his work in these months, he was unusually forthcoming, describing alternating rhythms of icy perfectionism and druggy mental derangement. It was a good explanation for the seemingly free-styled and amorphous, yet somehow precise and pointed behemoth The Marshall Mathers LP would become.
“I’m focused when I’m recording,” Eminem told the website music365. “I slip into the zone. I don’t like to talk a lot. I like to stick to myself and get my thoughts together, think how I’m gonna map out each song. Each song is fairly easy to write. I record vocals on one day and take the tape home to listen to them overnight. Then I do more vocals the next day. I always do my vocals twice. I might have the skeleton down, the vocals and the beat, for two months before I think of the finishing touches to put on it, like sound effects, or if I want the beat to drop out right here. I take my time on my shit that way.”
As the May release date neared The Source found him listening to a playback of ‘Shit On You’ (a D12 collaboration eventually held back for their 2001 début, Devil’s Night), Dre nodding silently as his alleged protégé snapped off a list of delicate changes to a raptly listening engineer. “We’re going to sit back and listen to everything, listen to what I feel is missing on the album, if there’s anything missing,” he explained. “I want every song to be perfect.”
But at other moments, he revealed a more intuitive, if equally self-conscious method of creation. “I also got a studio in Detroit,” he told music365, “that I can go to if it’s the middle of the night and I want to lay some shit down. I can’t help when the ideas come. Most of this shit comes either when I’m laying in bed waiting to sleep, or if people are talking. If they say something, a lot of the time I’ll hear the way they’ve put words together, and they’ll be talking to me and I won’t even be listening to them because the last thing they said gave me an idea. I sit there with a blank stare and people think I’m on drugs constantly. I do that to my girl a lot. She’ll be talking to me and I’ll be like, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’ I’ll be looking off and she’ll say, ‘You’re not even listening!’ ‘Yeah, I am!’ ‘Repeat what I said!’ ‘I don’t know what the fuck you said!’ “
It was a distanced demeanour his Detroit schoolmates would have recognised, the almost autistic withdrawal of a mind constantly ticking at a depth mundane distractions could not touch. And now, he had unlimited access to instant shortcuts to that state, as he explained to Muzik: “For those who are curious about my methods in the studio, it goes a little like this. If I’m writing rhymes I smoke weed or take Tylenol, or muscle relax-ants, something to get the stories rolling. Or I take Ecstasy.”
“A couple of the songs on the new record were written on X,” he confirmed to music365 – at almost the same time as Dre too, and, more ambiguously, Missy Elliott bragged of the influence of European rave’s “love” drug. It had reached the US rap community a decade late and, judging by their music, seemingly stripped of its pacifying, loved-up powers, if not its hotwire route to raw feelings. “Somebody will just be looking at me wrong,” Eminem continued, “and I’ll just flip a table over, like, ‘What the fuck are you staring at?’ If you’re in a good mood you love everybody, but if you’re in a bad mood and you got shit on your mind, you’re gonna break down. The hardest shit I’ve fucked with is X and ‘shrooms.”
The wearing intensity of the hours, the sheer unwavering commitment to this phase of his artistic life, as if he knew that now were the months that mattered, the time that would prove his talent and establish his career, or leave him sliding back into the gutter, recall the legendary creative peaks of other musicians: Bob Dylan’s acid-heated mid-Sixties records and tours, or the intuitive, night-long small-hours sessions of Elvis Presley in 1969/70, recording whole albums on an evening’s whim; or, more pertinently, Eminem’s idol Tupac Shakur, who can be seen in studio home movies eagerly speeding from one track to the next, not even bothering to name them, expressing himself with such gushing force that even his murder could not stop the release of seemingly endless new albums, an undead flipped finger to his enemies.
Eminem, Dre, the Bass Brothers and their collaborators – principally bassist and keyboardist Mike Elizondo, keyboardist Tommy Coster Jnr., drum programmer DJ Head, and Dre co-producer Mel-Man – similarly seemed to thrive in the studio air. Eminem confessed to being a “studio rat”, happier when in the isolation bubble of writing and recording than anywhere else. Most of the key tracks on The Marshall Mathers LP cohered only thanks to the constant availability of musicians and technicians over such long, free-flowing sessions. “Every time we’re fucking around in the studio we seem to come up with the dopest shit,” Eminem commented in Angry Blonde. ‘Marshall Mathers’ came from Jeff Bass’s casual strumming of an acoustic guitar, ‘Criminal’ began with Eminem hearing Bass picking out an off-kilter piano line in the studio next door. Between them, the songs helped forge the album’s thematic core.
Such unrelenting work was also beating Eminem’s own rapping and studio techniques into shape. As he explained in Angry Blonde: “The more I learned about music, the more comfortable I felt behind the microphone and the more I could slip into character. It got to a point where I wasn’t just worried about getting the rhyme out and sayin’ it, I was worried about my pronunciation, about saying shit with authority, or even sometimes saying it softly. I learned to play with my voice. I made it do more things that I didn’t really know it could do. After The Slim Shady LP and Dr. Dre’s Chronic album [2001], I had simply had more experience behind the mic.”
But such technical advances only mattered because what Eminem wrote about had also expanded. Where The Slim Shady LP had been often playful in intent, its sequel eagerly fed on the anger he felt at his notoriety – the way fans who once didn’t know he existed now hounded him in his own home, while critics dissected and recoiled at his words.
A defining feature of Nineties fame was the manner in which it warped almost everyone it touched. The bleached, weird features of Michael Jackson were the most awful warning of how far success could remove you from common humanity, but everything about modern celebrity crept in that direction. Stardom had become a universal dream, but the few who attained it found themselves unable to leave their dream homes without phalanxes of bodyguards obscuring the view, unable to eat, drink or sleep safely with anyone not breathing the same rarefied air. Even in Britain’s more cynical, less hothouse atmosphere, previously well-balanced, mature people like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker felt themselves scorched by the skin-stripping intrusion that fame had become.
Many Nineties rappers obscured the problem either by rapping primarily about how great they and the trappings of their wealth were – a continuation of Run-DMC’s gold chain-wearing Eighties materialism – or by bringing as many of their street posses with them as they could, pretending, effectively, that nothing had changed. “Keeping it real” was a phrase rel
igiously toasted by nearly all the decade’s hip-hop stars, with goblets of the finest champagne, in videos showing them in hot-tubs full of compliant, bikini-bulging models. The real gangstas and bloodshed in the highest echelons of black showbiz, often associated with Dre’s one-time partner “Suge” Knight, completed the unappetising picture of rap’s dishonest response to fame. It was a vision Eminem wearily dismissed, on the new album’s ‘Marshall Mathers’: “And amidst all this Crist-poppin’ and wrist-watches/ I just sit back and watch and just get nauseous/ And walk around with an empty bottle of Remy Martin …”
Instead of colluding with his fame Eminem, alone among his contemporaries, used his new album to go to war with every aspect of stardom. He used intrusions on his private life to feed aggressive assertions of undimmed individuality – even as, on tracks like the soon to be infamous ‘Kim’, he destroyed whole new tranches of his privacy, scorched-earthing what might have been fuel for his enemies into energy for himself.
The smallest attack on him over the previous, wrenching year triggered hysterical lyrical overreactions, nuclear verbal force. At least one critic, NME‘s Sylvia Patterson, thought he had lost himself in the useless self-obsession also typical of today’s famous. But Eminem’s mind was far too lively to stop there. Although he regularly claimed once The Marshall Mathers LP was out that it was all about answering “the critics”, and showing people “the real me”, he was also drawn into far more important controversies in his year of fame. He had watched his label-mate and fellow young white American rebel Marilyn Manson have his name opportunistically associated by the authorities with April 1999’s Columbine High School shootings (in which two students in Colorado killed 15). Typically, he saw through this hypocrisy, with a force which at once made him a political threat to an American Establishment that consistently scapegoated pop for the nation’s deeper ills.
Eminem’s first Columbine reference on the new album was secreted in the speedily written (even by his standards) ‘I’m Back’: “I take seven kids from Columbine, stand ‘em all in line/ Add an AK-47, a revolver, a nine/ A Mack-11 and it oughta solve the problem of mine/ And that’s a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time.” As the LP’s release date loomed, it was these lines that Interscope put most pressure on Eminem to change, fearful of attacks from the parents of Columbine’s victims. Simultaneously, they were squeezing him for a “lead-off single” to boost their 2000 profits. Typically, these two impositions only focused his resentment, at both his paymasters and mainstream America’s deluded sensibilities. ‘The Way I Am’, written in Kim’s parents’ home after a month of fruitless, itinerant hotel room scribbling, addressed both frustrations in a hoarse, furious voice, over a nagging, claustrophobic keyboard loop. Snarling at how fame had changed his life (“But I can’t take a shit in the bathroom/ Without someone standin’ by it”) and commercial demands (“Let’s stop with the fables/ I’m not gonna be able to top a ‘My Name Is’”), he depth-charged this enforced bit of hit-writing with a still clearer, less apologetic Columbine reference: “When a dude’s gettin’ bullied and shoots up his school/ And they blame it on Marilyn … and the heroin/ Where were the parents at/ Middle America, NOW it’s a tragedy/ NOW it’s so sad to see, an upper-class city/ Havin’ this happenin’.”
“My whole thing was, what is the big fuckin’ deal,” he expanded, in Angry Blonde. “Why is that topic so touchy as opposed to, say, a four-year-old kid drowning? Why isn’t that considered a huge tragedy? People die in the city all the time. People get shot, people get stabbed, raped, mugged, killed, and all kinds of shit. What is the big deal with Columbine that makes it separate from any other tragedy in America?”
In an interview with The Face later that year, his status as an enemy of the state was reinforced. “Parents should have more responsibility,” he declared, asked about Columbine again. “Those parents just didn’t pay attention to their fucking kids. That kid’s getting bullied every day … I guarantee you, he’s coming home, punching some walls. And the parents aren’t talking to that kid. Okay – innocent kids died. But those other kids got pushed to the fucking limit. And nobody saw it from their side. Growing up in school, I was bullied a lot. And I know what it’s like to feel you want to kill somebody.”
To music365, he reflected more widely: “My shit was real political, but people didn’t see it like that, they thought I was just being an asshole. I look at the way I came up and the things I was around and the places I was raised, and I figure, that shit made me what I am. So if people perceive me to be an asshole, the way I live made me an asshole, what I been through has made me an asshole.” Lest there be any doubt, in discussing ‘Criminal’ with Muzik, he called himself a “political rapper”: “I’m taking stabs at crooked motherfuckers in the system. When someone says kids look up to me, I’m like, ‘Our President smokes weed and is getting his dick sucked and is fucking lying about it. So don’t tell me shit, I’m not the fucking President, I’m a rapper and I don’t want to be a role model.’ I’ll tell a kid, ‘Look up to me as someone who’s come from nothing and now has everything. Don’t look up to me for being violent and doing drugs. Don’t be like me.’”
‘The Real Slim Shady’, the eventual “lead-off single”, turned this politicised counter-blast at his detractors into a hall of mirrors from which no one escaped. Its genesis showed Eminem’s unapologetic skill, when he chose, at the old-fashioned, hit-making side of pop. It started with a hook he had stored up for a while. That came to life after hours of exhausting experimentation one Friday ended with Coster Jnr. finally finding the keyboard notes the track would begin with. Dre then added beats. The next morning, they met Interscope executives, who expected to hear the album-finishing hit they’d requested. ‘The Way I Am’, they judged, was “not the first song”. Eminem, at this stage of proceedings the industrious professional musician, not the “fuck you” rebel, promised he’d offer a completed ‘Slim Shady’ that Monday. Recent comments by Will Smith dissing the obscenity of stars like Eminem, and Christina Aguilera’s public mention of his marriage on MTV was typically petty fuel, as he blazed through the lyrics in a weekend. “I came in on Monday, recorded it, and was done. Interscope, obviously, was satisfied,” he noted proudly, in Angry Blonde. But ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s power as a pop hit, on permanent MTV rotation from its moment of release, went far deeper than a good hook and inter-celeb bitching.
The video, which added so much to the single’s impact, returned to the uplifting, disarmingly funny style of ‘My Name Is’, again emphasising Eminem’s comedic skill and charm. Beginning in a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest-resembling, nurse-ruled mental ward, where he was joined by D12, he leaned into the screen to put over his points, moving his hands like a hip-hop conductor. In an interlude at a Grammy ceremony peopled by stars including the real Fred Durst, and Eminem in the roles of a ditzy Britney Spears, a smarmy reporter, and himself, looking quizzical, the good humour was infectious. With lyrical digs at not only Britney, Will Smith, the Grammys, and Aguilera (no doubt regretting her MTV indiscretion after she was charged in the song with giving Durst head, and Eminem the clap), but gay marriage, bestiality on children’s TV, feminists who fancied him, Tommy Lee beating Pamela Anderson, and Eminem’s murder of Dre (the Doc’s scared face is hilariously “Missing” on the back of a milk carton Em places in his fridge), the impossibility of offence at this concoction was remarkable.
One reason was that, whichever flank you tried to attack it on, Eminem was already there to meet you. Sexual explicitness? “Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose/ But no worse than what’s goin’ on in your parents’ bedrooms.” Intolerance of every sort? “I’m like a head trip to listen to, ‘cos I’m only givin’ you/ Things you joke about with your friends inside your living room/ The only difference is I got the balls to say it in front of y’all.”
When you brought the whole album home, this self-consciousness spread everywhere: on ‘Who Knew’, in which Eminem proclaimed hi
mself blameless if millions wanted to buy and agree with his thoughts, even if some of them self-mutilated, or shot up their school; ‘Steve Berman’, in which his own label boss disowned him (“Tower Records just told me to shove this record up my ass. Do you know what that feels like?”); ‘The Way I Am’’s ju-jitsu flooring of his critics (“I am whatever you say I am. If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?”); and the fan love-hate of ‘Stan’.
But ‘The Real Slim Shady’ disarmed potential enemies, and became Eminem’s true anthem for more positive reasons. When its scattershot points were collected, it was about individuality, in a way at once personal and universal. There was no “real” Slim Shady, of course; he was just another, obnoxious layer of disguise Marshall Mathers had placed between himself and the world. But the frustration Slim/Eminem/Marshall felt at the hypocrisies and persecutions shackling him as he just tried to be true to himself were as real as could be, and spoke to people who would never have to worry about seating at the Grammys.
In its video form especially, what ‘Slim Shady’ most resembled was the MTV breakthrough of that first bleached-blond, white youth icon of the Nineties: ‘Feels Like Teen Spirit’ by Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana. But where that video disrupted MTV’s bland consumer parade by presenting mainstream teenagers as faceless, robotic cheerleaders, ‘Slim’ was more assertively subversive. It showed a secret production line cranking out and clothing blank-faced Eminems by the dozen; in another sequence, Eminem raps from a room filled with nodding lookalikes, clones he’s only slightly more authentic than: “And there’s a million of us just like me … And just might be the next best thing but not quite me!”