The Dark Story of Eminem Page 15

  As he would on ‘Stan’, he was taunting fans who lost their own identities in idolising his. But in ‘The Real Slim Shady’’s climactic lines, he also imagines a true army undermining America by petty acts of rebellion, detectable only in their hearts: teenagers spitting on fast food during serving jobs designed to deaden them, or swerving senselessly round parking lots, blasting music offensively loud for the sake of it, venting fury that can’t be coherently released at lives they don’t know how to change. The video shows a few of them, white kids clumsily acting out their Eminem moves outside the mall. They’re the lost young men Marshall Mathers would be among if music hadn’t saved him. And what ‘The Real Slim Shady’ offers to the millions he left behind is a happy, knowing song to holler along to when it comes on the radio, to go “circling, screaming, ‘I don’t give a fuck!’ “ to. It finishes with a response to its opening request for “the real Slim Shady” to “please stand up”. “Fuck it, let’s all stand up,” Eminem murmurs as it fades, Spartacus speaking to his rebel army of slaves.

  But there was another side to The Marshall Mathers LP, and to Eminem when he made it, which was far more difficult to defend. Though there were still some stray moments where he imagined himself insane, or impotent, or retarded, or deformed from his mother’s alleged drug use, or killed for his unshuttable mouth, the vulnerable autobiographical sections of The Slim Shady LP which had balanced its humour and rage were mostly absent. Instead, the violent fury of his imagination was turned outwards, at the enemies he now perceived to be circling him. When, as on those Columbine-baiting tracks, he traded blows with censors and officials, from parents to the President, he maintained a laser-sighted aim and class-based logic more intelligent than his detractors. But when he focused on individuals he wanted to batter and bruise, he revealed a more thuggish side. His new targets were not the bullies, absent father or black racists that had abused him before he was famous. That intimidating world of straight, violent males that had damaged him so much was left alone. Instead, he concentrated on verbally beating up, raping and strangling women, with a side-order of threats to effeminate gay men. If you were physically weaker than him, Slim Shady was going to get you.

  “If a critic calls me a bigot, a misogynist pig or homophobe I’m gonna be that,” he tried to explain to Muzik. “If your perception of me is fucked up, I’m gonna be fucked up. If your perception of me is that I’m a decent guy, I’m gonna show you a decent guy. It’s sarcasm which is too extreme to be funny. It’s me backlashing at people who take everything literally.” This ceding of moral and artistic control to a bunch of critics he felt unable to ignore was damaging and limp enough. But the obsessions thrown up by his “backlashing” made matters worse. Mock-encouragement to “slap bitches” in the otherwise innocuous ‘Drug Ballad’ added to a misogynistic slate also including ‘Who Knew’ (where he rapped, “rape shit”, and mentioned his wife being “Fucked up after I beat her fuckin’ ass every night, Ike” – a reference to pop’s première wife-beater, Ike Turner), the wife-murdering prequel to ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’, ‘Kim’, and the unequivocal ‘Kill You’, of which he bragged in Angry Blonde: “The whole hook is basically beating up women … then at the end of the song I say, ‘I’m just kidding ladies, you know I love you’ … like you can say whatever you want so long as you say you’re joking at the end. Which is cool ‘cos that’s what I do.”

  It’s true that it’s hard to stay offended at ‘Who Knew’ and ‘Kill You’, as both skid between flashing signposts telling you baiting the naïve is their intent (“You probably think I’m in your tape deck now/ I’m in the backseat of your truck with duct tape …”), defending his art in the context of American reality (“You want me to fix up lyrics while the President gets his dick sucked?”), and verbal swerves too giddy to do anything but laugh at (“Just bend over and take it like a slut, okay, Ma?”). ‘Kill You’’s references to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho‘s Norman Bates and O.J. Simpson, especially, make it a sort of woman-culling Americana pageant. But even as he slaps you round the head with your stupidity in getting wound up by a bunch of words, and triggers more useful, challenging thought than any politically correct liberal mantra, the chorus keeps coming: “Bitch, I’ma KILL you!” And when you do get to ‘Kim’, near the LP’s end, you know he’s not just joking, and that real misogyny is in this brilliant record, and him.

  His memory of writing it tells you so much. It was the very first song he recorded for the album, after he had finished Slim Shady, at the end of 1998. He and Kim were separated, and he spent an afternoon alone watching a romantic film at the cinema. It made him want to write a love song, to flush out all his feelings of frustration at the split. But he balked at being sentimental on record. Instead, when he began work in the studio that day, buzzing on Es, he decided, he wrote in Angry Blonde, to “scream”. “The mood I wanted to capture was that of an argument that me and her would have,” he added.

  Those must have been frightening times for his wife, if that’s true. Where ‘’97 Bonnie & Clyde’ depicted the aftermath of Kim’s imagined murder, and managed to be quite funny and tender in depicting him explaining what had happened to his daughter, ‘Kim’ is the opposite. In a raw-throated, barely relenting scream, Eminem enacts the pained emotions which, he said, meant that “at that time” he “actually wanted” to murder his wife. It’s the most queasy and questionable of all his tracks to date. Its scenario: Eminem has already butchered the man the then-estranged Kim was allegedly seeing, and his four-year-old son. While taking her to the lake in the boot of his car, his moods swing psychotically (“I SWEAR TO GOD I HATE YOU/ OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU”), but never stray for more than seconds from uncheckable anger, even as his voice hardly wavers from its grating roar. Near the end, it’s true, it does touch the distancing effect of, as he suggested to music365, “some movie shit”. When Kim makes a run for freedom, only to be chased down, slit in the gurgling throat, and dragged through the undergrowth, the sound effects make you imagine a cheesy slasher flick, more than a real woman’s fear. What’s more disturbing is the nature of “an argument that me and her would have”: the way his voice obliterates her feeble interjections (rapped by Eminem, too, in a weaker, scared scream), just as his multi-million selling songs about them have crushed her version of their lives together.

  “You never would’ve thought, but I played it for her once we started talking again,” he wrote in Angry Blonde. “I asked her to tell me what she thought of it. I remember my dumb-ass saying, ‘I know this is a fucked up song, but it shows how much I care about you. To even think about you this much. To even put you on a song like this.’” It’s unfortunate but fitting that this is the classic line taken by real wife-beaters and their victims – that he “cares” enough to hit her. And the despicable bullying of such actions sweats from ‘Kim’’s corners: “Quit crying, bitch, why do you always make me shout at you?/ … Am I too loud for you? Too bad, bitch, you’re gonna finally hear me out this time.” The last verse’s climax – “NOW BLEED, BITCH, BLEED! BLEEEEED!” – really gilds the lily.

  There are hundreds of precedents for such violent misogyny in rock: The Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’ and rape fantasy ‘Midnight Rambler’, Bob Dylan’s vituperative put-downs to exes, and Saint John Lennon’s “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man” in The Beatles’ ‘Run For Your Life’, all no doubt in the record collections of baby-boomer detractors of Eminem like Bill Clinton, spring easily to mind. The stabbings, shootings and beatings between men and women which litter the lyrics in pop’s primal root, country blues, are no better. The pervasive misogyny of hip-hop – largely the product of insecure black men from ghetto communities where few fathers are present, and “bitches” and “hos” are routinely demonised – hardly needs mentioning. The Geto Boys’ ‘Murder Avenue’ (1993), for instance, made me far more uneasy than ‘Kim’ when it came out, with its relished, seedy fantasy of breaking into a woman’s apartment, grabbing he
r from the shower and wrestling with her wet body before stabbing her over and over.

  And lest we forget, the these days mild-mannered Dr. Dre really, brutally beat up Dee Barnes, while Tupac was among hip-hoppers with a real sex crime conviction. Eminem, by contrast, claimed, “I’m not mad. I leave my anger in the studio.” Anecdotally, the girl I know who’s suffered the most male violence didn’t find Eminem’s attitudes unusual, and preferred to hear them in the open. But neither did she think they were anything other than classically woman-hating. Even his biggest female fans of my acquaintance would rather not listen to ‘Kim’. And, in a period of peace with his wife, once Marshall Mathers was out, Eminem himself admitted: “I just don’t listen to the song any more.”

  When The Marshall Mathers LP was released on May 23, 2000 in the US, and May 30 in the UK, the public’s phenomenal reaction anyway briefly crushed all complaints. It sold 1.76 million in its first week, breaking the all-time record for a solo artist, set, ironically, the week before by Britney Spears. It topped the US pop charts for eight weeks, and the R&B charts for four. ‘The Real Slim Shady’ and its addictive video was the key that unlocked popular success on a scale The Slim Shady LP never touched. It was played with a regularity far heavier than Heavy Rotation on MTV, and reached number four in the US, his biggest hit there. On July 2, it became Eminem’s first UK number one. “The Home Secretary should ban sales of records like this,” a Tory MP, Julian Brazier, predictably declared.

  Critics hardly seemed to count during such commercial carnage. But for the most part, despite Eminem’s paranoid hate of them, they found the LP’s quality, with all its unpleasantness, inarguable. NME called its maker “misanthropy’s smartest mouthpiece”. In “storytelling of breathtaking skill and dexterity, Marshall Mathers turns the torchlight on the deepest malignancy at the heart of our rotten society: rank, festering hypocrisy … And we have the audacity to slag him off?” To Rolling Stone, it was “a car-crash record: loud, wild, dangerous, out of control, grotesque, unsettling … [and] impossible to pull your ears away from.”

  The first loud dissenting voice came from the Gay/Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), decrying a strand of homophobia in The Marshall Mathers LP to them even stronger than its misogyny. A June 1 statement from the organisation declared: “[The] LP carries the warning ‘Explicit Lyrics’. That’s an understatement. Eminem’s lyrics are soaked in violence and full of negative comments about many groups including lesbians and gay men … The hatred and hostility conveyed on this CD has a real effect on real people’s lives as it encourages violence against gay men and lesbians. While hate crimes against gay people are on the rise, these epithets create even more bias and intolerance toward an entire community. The real danger comes from the artist’s fan base of easily influenced adolescents, who emulate Eminem’s dress, mannerisms, words and beliefs.”

  GLAAD’s record in choosing targets for its wrath wasn’t one to inspire confidence: its belief that the glossy bisexual killer thriller Basic Instinct (1992), which it picketed, was a threat to the well-being of gay and lesbian Americans was just one example of its propensity for confusing art and reality, which The Marshall Mathers LP so effectively examined. The phrase about “the artist’s fan base of easily influenced adolescents”, too, revealed them to be closer in their thinking to censor-happy, conservative anti-rock/rap groups like Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Centre (PMRC) than they may have wished.

  The offending lyrics were anyway more humorously delivered than the venom Eminem reserved for women, if just as blatant. The video to ‘The Real Slim Shady’ in which, to the line “there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope”, Eminem squeezes between two bearded marrying males with a face screwed up in comical disgust, was his most visible statement. But the LP’s closing track ‘Criminal’, in large part a good-humoured provocation which softens the bad taste of ‘Kim’, is more explicit. “My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge,” its first verse goes, “that’ll stab you in your head whether you’re a fag or a lez …/ Pants or dress – hate fags? The answer’s ‘yes’.” It goes on to joke about murdered gay fashion designer Gianni Versace, while elsewhere Em’s gay creation Ken Kaniff orally services Detroit rivals Insane Clown Posse, in ways which are just funny.

  Eminem was anyway wheeled out to deny he was homophobic to MTV’s Kurt Loder, in the wake of GLAAD’s condemnation. “‘Faggot’ to me doesn’t necessarily mean gay people,” he said. “‘Faggot’ to me just means taking away your manhood. You’re a sissy. You’re a coward. So, when I started saying ‘faggot’ on record, I started getting people going, ‘You have something against gay people,’ and I thought it was funny, because I don’t.”

  In NME later that year, though, he was drawn into a fuller response. “[Faggot]’s the worst thing you can say to a man,” he declared, “it’s like callin’ ‘em a girl, whether he’s gay or not. I don’t give a shit about gay, if they wanna be then that’s their fuckin’ business … Just don’t come around me with that shit, that’s all.” Why would that freak him out? he was asked. “Why would it freak me out? A man suckin’ another man’s dick?! I just said it! A man suckin’ another man’s dick.” Then, too late, he eased back. “It’s because hip-hop is all about manhood. It’s about competition, about bein’ macho. It just goes with the territory.”

  The fact that Paul Rosenberg had already called NME‘s reporter, Sylvia Patterson, to one side to condemn her story in the previous week’s paper detailing Cypress Hill’s similarly injudicious comments illustrates how routine instinctive homophobia like that “dicksucking” tirade is in hip-hop. Or, as Patterson noted, in any pub.

  With all his prejudices, raw nerves and blind spots, Eminem had still become inspirational like no one else in pop. The Marshall Mathers LP had put an uncensored, unhappy, angry, irritating individual at the centre of an American culture increasingly characterised by self-censorship, commercial second-guessing, and sanitised pictures of brotherly love between every race, sex and creed. Eminem brought the massive bulk of Americans too beaten down, hopeless or confused to be so perfect spitting back into the limelight, with a voice too clever and articulate to be ignored. His record stood at the top of the charts starting arguments, shoving and venting aggression. It was brutal behaviour, but the kind more Americans than their politicians and TV admit sometimes need to stay sane. The bruised feelings he caused were feelings, anyway. In my experience even his “victims”, gay and female, don’t fear his rage so much as recognise and relish such fury in themselves. There really is, it would seem, a little bit of Slim Shady in all of us.

  Unfortunately for Eminem, there was now more than a little Slim Shady in him. The Marshall Mathers LP may have been able to separate art and reality. But, as the dramatic months after its release would prove, Eminem’s relationship with his violent alter ego was no longer nearly so sure.

  8

  I AM WHATEVER YOU SAY I AM

  JUNE 3, 2000. Saturday afternoon, outside a Detroit Record Shack. Unknown Insane Clown Posse employee Douglas Dail is getting a car stereo installed. The mundanity of the act and setting show we are back in the real world, far away from the feverish insults to Dail’s bosses which litter the fantastic landscape of The Marshall Mathers LP. But here, driving by, comes the real Slim Shady anyway. According to the subsequent police report, the two exchange looks. Then Eminem steps out of his car, and says, not like a word-weaving artist, but a bar-room bully: “What did you say to me?” He is then alleged to have yanked out an unloaded, 9 mm semi-automatic pistol from his car, and screamed: “I’ll shoot you! I’ll kill you!”, before driving off.

  Hours later, and the possession of Marshall Mathers by his fictional creation seems to deepen. It is after midnight now, and he is with his wife Kim, outside the Hot Rocks club in Warren, not far from his old high school. It is reported he sees Kim “intimately kissing” former bouncer John Guerra and, assuming her unfaithfulness, assaults Guerra, some say pistol-whipping him,
with the same unloaded gun. When nightclub bouncers see it fall to the ground, they call the police. Eminem, Kim and two others involved in the mêlée are arrested. Kim is charged at the scene with breach of the peace.

  June 7, and Eminem turns himself in. He is photographed in the dock of Warren’s 37th District Court, handcuffed, soberly dressed in black suit and dark blue shirt. He peers slit-eyed and suspicious at the judge. He is charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, and carrying a concealed weapon. He speaks only to say he understands the charges. Lawyers enter a plea of not guilty on his behalf, and $10,000 bail is posted. The maximum sentence is nine years. On the 8th, he returns to face charges for his altercation with Dail: possession of a concealed weapon (a felony), and brandishing a firearm in public (a misdemeanour). $1,000 bail is paid. “I’m a CRI-MI-NAL!” he’d taunted the naïve, on the album he’d released only two weeks before. And now, look, he really was.

  In the April 2000 issue of Hip-Hop Connection, he’d wrongly claimed to be too clever for such a fall. “I can’t get away with as much as I used to. I can on record, but not in public. Now if I hit someone I make them rich, so if somebody gets to me physically, or there’s a confrontation, I have to bite my tongue. I have people who are there for me so that doesn’t happen, and to do it for me.”