The Dark Story of Eminem Page 27

  The unauthorised internet release in December of five songs he was working on for his next album – dubbed the Straight From The Lab EP – showed Eminem’s true attitude to his government. ‘We As Americans’ – titled like an alternative State of the Union address – included these lines: “Fuck money, I don’t rap for dead Presidents/ I’d rather see the President dead”. His press office immediately distanced him from the “lost or stolen” songs. But, in the prevailing mood of jittery paranoia, the shadow of the Secret Service fell on him anyway, as they considered how potent his implied desire to assassinate Bush might be. The agency was “concerned about communications that can be interpreted in a manner perhaps not intended by the artist”, spokesman John Gill intoned. On December 8, however, this threat was removed. It was a rare moment of common sense. But the Shady file in the alcove of state where earlier radicals like John Lennon had been monitored surely thickened another inch.

  Eminem’s official releases in 2003, though, were desultory and absent-minded. In the UK, ‘Sing For The Moment’ was The Eminem Show‘s third single. Eminem’s disengagement was shown by the video. Where the clips from his first two major albums had been marvels of inventive wit, now dull tour footage sufficed. The clip for final American single ‘Superman’ just enhanced its misogyny, as Eminem cavorted with a silicon-pumped porn star. This was an extra on 8 Mile‘s DVD, a greater priority by now than the LP he had honed so lovingly.

  During this new period of apparent drift, Eminem’s presence was, as always, still felt in the world. In Istanbul in November, Hayrethin Demir hawked T-shirts of the rapper with the cry, “Eminem, my Eminem!” It was the name of a passing 19-year-old’s mother. In the knife-fight that resulted, the teenager was killed. On the internet, sites of “slash” fiction (erotic fantasies about the fictional or famous) proliferated, as women and gay men imagined Eminem, Kim and others in a series of obscenely unlikely positions. On the BBC, meanwhile, Nobel-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney was asked if anyone now stirred interest in language in the way Dylan and Lennon used to. “There is a guy Eminem,” he said at once. “He has created a sense of what is possible. He has sent a voltage around a generation. He has done this not just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal energy.”

  Eminem’s greatest impact in 2003, though, was not as a writer, but as a businessman. This was the year he parlayed Shady Records into an empire. And the champion who carved out that kingdom for him was called 50 Cent.

  Born in 1976 and raised by his drug dealer mother in the Jamaica district of Queens, New York, 50 Cent’s early life under his given name Curtis Jackson was so appalling, and yet unexceptional, it made Marshall Mathers’s sufferings seem mild. Marshall’s mother wished he was dead. Curtis’ mother just died. He was eight.

  “She got killed,” he explained to Bang. “Somebody put something in her drink and then turned on the gas to cut off her circulation, but her lifestyle was kinda like that. Of all the things that have happened to me, some of it is hard to explain even to myself.”

  Abandoned by a father who was rarely around anyway and raised by his grandmother, Curtis gravitated to his mother’s old crooked acquaintances, the only people he saw with money and power. He became a crack dealer, soaking up violence and jail-time. Any softness in his nature was shut down, any emotional wounds cauterised.

  Did he have a conscience? Vibe recently asked. “A little bit,” he replied, “but it goes away. Anger is my most comfortable emotion. If you hurt my feelings, instead of hurting, I get angry. When you come from my neighbourhood, you don’t walk around crying. I spent my childhood learning not to cry. I’ve adjusted to situations because I don’t want to get killed.”

  Rapping as 50 Cent seemed a safer way than dealing to help provide for himself and son Marquis, born in 1997. Around that time Run-DMC’s Jam Master Jay (mysteriously shot dead in 2003) spotted his talent, and the Trackmasters produced his first LP, Power Of The Dollar, on Columbia. But, scared no “buzz” was building on his one shot at ghetto escape, he released the almost literally suicidal single ‘How To Rob’, threatening violence to a string of rappers, hoping for notoriety. In May 2000, massive retaliation came when he was shot by an unknown gunman – once in the cheek, once in the hand, and seven times in the legs. In the hospital, he was dropped by his fearful label, and his album was shelved.

  For the next two years, with a like-minded posse, G Unit, he clawed his way back up from the underground, sneering at mainstream rap’s separation from the streets, and rashly starting a new feud, with Ja Rule. Irv Gotti, head of Ja’s label Murder Inc. – under FBI investigation for links to drug crime – was associated in 50’s mind and lyrics with his shooting. The subsequent second-party punching of Ja and stabbing of 50 seemed traceable to the conflict, too. This was the bloody background that Eminem bought into when he announced on New York radio he was a 50 Cent fan, then swiftly signed him to a $1 million deal on Shady/Aftermath. There, he would be produced by Eminem and Dre.

  It was Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, Shady’s self-styled “business side”, who pushed for the move. “I was blown away by [50’s potential],” he told Hip-Hop Connection. “I realised what a huge thing it could become. I kept trying to push Eminem to focus on 50 Cent but he was recording his record at the time and didn’t have any time to listen to it. Then when he was done with it and got into it, it was later in the game and there was already a bidding war going on. That probably cost us a few dollars. But in hindsight, it didn’t matter.”

  As Eminem’s first major protégé, 50 was guaranteed attention. But the overdose of ghetto reality in his life made him almost too good to be true for Interscope’s marketers. His album Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, released in February 2003, was shamelessly sold with a cover showing his topless, tattooed, breathtakingly sculpted body, with a chest looking tough enough to bounce bullets off. Booklet photos posed him in starkly lit, empty inner city streets, somewhere between a fashion shoot and a crime scene, with a baseball bat draped over his shoulders. Crisp dollar bills were shoved down his pants by a hand carefully turned to show its bullet wounds, while wide-eyed, set-lipped challenge burned from his face.

  To white eyes he gave off the frisson of Mike Tyson in his animalistic prime. The concentration on his physical condition and presence typed him as a brutal black man, even as he was objectified and sexualised as much as any female R&B star, or hip-hop video honey. In the inner city, though, his history and image sent a different message. On a British TV documentary, black and white youths from areas like 50’s own said his being shot made them admire him more. He knew what they were going through; his raps were real.

  For Eminem, his story’s new cast-member sent equally ambiguous signals. The demographic trade-off was similar but more risky than it had been with Dre. Next to 50 and his scars, Eminem could again seem like the skinny white dilettante he had once been scorned as. On the other hand, the more pictures of him that appeared with 50, Dre, and D12, the more black he might appear by association. No one white has yet been signed by Shady Records.

  The final awkward twist was that, as Eminem started to offer black acts the patronage Dre had once bestowed on him, the brief historical inversion that had made Dre and Timbaland (with his find Bubba Sparxxx) black Colonel Parkers with pet white Elvises could seem reversed. If Eminem’s unique popularity made him not just an honourable white novelty in hip-hop, but its king and king-maker, resentment was bound to follow; within the year, it would.

  Creatively and commercially, though, Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ was a triumph. ‘Wanksta’, on the massively successful 8 Mile soundtrack, was a carefully placed preview of 50’s qualities, as he wittily dismissed fake gangstas with his trademark taunting drawl. The album that followed was a full-scale attempt by Eminem and Dre to replicate their own successes with a fresh face. They contributed to almost all its tracks. The guinea pig-like nature of 50’s position was playfully admitted in the video to his first enormous hit, ‘In Da Club’, a return to
top visual form for Eminem, in which he and Dre were mad Frankensteins, assembling the monstrous 50. On ‘Patiently Waiting’, one of two Em guest-raps, he extended the idea: “Take some Big and some ‘Pac and you mix them up in a pot … and what the fuck do you got?/ You got the realest and illest killas, tied up in a knot.”

  Dre’s back-room role was strangely under-sold. Get Rich … was released on his Aftermath imprint as well as Shady, and he produced four tracks (including singles ‘In Da Club’ and ‘If I Can’t’). With his trusted LA keyboardist Mike Elizondo heavily involved, he used stabbing organs and strings to give 50 knockout pop punch. But Eminem was close behind, having his hand in almost everything Dre didn’t. A mixture of the glum and the epic, his developing string and synth-heavy style was darker and narrower than Dre’s, as if his early hopelessness had stayed in him.

  Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ was an instant phenomenon, selling nine million in a year, beating The Eminem Show‘s early sales. On Eminem’s July UK tour, it was 50’s support slot that attracted fevered press attention, not rap’s former demon king. Eminem seemed in danger of being outshone by his sky-rocketing, more obviously “authentic” protégé, even as it was the white star’s imprimatur that made this hardcore street material approachable for such unprecedented masses. It was an awkward ambiguity addressed on Get Rich‘s ‘Patiently Waiting’, where 50 loyally toasted Em as “my favourite white boy … I owe ya for this one”, before bemoaning “this white man’s world”. Eminem meanwhile tried to maintain his dangerous aura even alongside his bullet-riddled charge, by making his second outrageous verbal visit to the destroyed World Trade Center: “You put your life in this, nothing like surviving a shot/ You know about death threats, ‘cos I get a lot/ Shady Records was 80 seconds away from the Towers/ them cowards fucked with the wrong building, they meant to hit ours.”

  50, for one, had no doubt his boss was still relevant. “Em himself is nowhere near done,” he told Bang. “There was a point where he was really unexcited by hip-hop, he thought there was nothing going on. Em uses so much of himself that we know who Hailie is, we know who Kim is, we know his relationship with his mom. He’s using his life and as a person he’s gonna grow, he’s gonna feel new experiences, and you never lose something to rap about when you use yourself in your music.”

  The charge that Interscope and Eminem were exploiting 50’s really violent ghetto life was also rebuffed. 50’s next release, Beg For Mercy by his crew G Unit, was not on Shady but his own new G Unit Records, exactly replicating Eminem’s founding of Shady with D12’s album, after being on Dre’s Aftermath. It looked more like a chain of saved lives than one rapper’s enslavement by another. As 50 pointedly told Vibe, “I own G Unit Records. I own G Unit Clothing. These are my deals that I made happen with the people I put in place. Every situation I’ve been through has enhanced my character, and when I get past it all, I’ll become what God wants me to be.”

  Beg For Mercy gave no clue as to whether the intelligent, learning man who spoke those words would soon appear on record. It mostly coarsened the Bad Black stereotype of his solo CD, as if all 50 had to offer was his “authentic” past, with monotonously martial music and thoughtless themes of rough sex and violence. But its sales the week of its November release – 377,000 in the US alone – proved that Eminem’s name, reinforced by 50’s, now guaranteed rap gold. Though on 50’s label, and mostly the work of his Long Island producer Sha Money XL, the cover still credited “PRODUCTION BY EMINEM AND DR. DRE” (Em’s crucial contribution? “Additional Production” on two tracks). 50 was spreading the Shady empire, the production line of which now rumbled night and day.

  Luis Resto, now Eminem’s right-hand man at Detroit’s 54 Studios alongside guitarist-mixer Steve King, revealed their work rate, as the three men assembled music for new albums by Eminem, D12 and Obie Trice: “When Eminem’s in Detroit, we work together every day. A lot of times we’re writing for all three projects. You go in and you’re jamming, doing music, and it gets spread here and there. Some stuff goes to Eminem, some to Obie and some to other artists. We sit down and write and we parcel it out. Marshall takes home CDs and he listens to them, some things intrigue him, some things not so much - you keep backlogging the ideas, and see what comes of it.”

  Detroit’s Obie Trice barely bothered to hide his resentment at Shady’s over-stretching. “The reason why it took so long to get my album done,” he offered, “is because Eminem was into a lot of shit. We didn’t get a chance to really get into the studio like we wanted to. He dropped D12’s album, he dropped The Eminem Show, then he went off into the movie thing. So 8 Mile came about, the 8 Mile soundtrack came about, all the time he’s busy doing this, busy doing that. I can’t get into the studio with him, I can’t get into the studio. Then around the 8 Mile movie, 50 Cent was getting signed, he was coming to the table with an album damn near done. Then boom we dropped 50 Cent first. He had the momentum, this what you want to hear? He had the momentum, he had the buzz, he had all that shit from New York, he’s been shot nine times, yes, yes, you get what I’m saying? So, Obie Trice, now I’m here, that’s the thing. Why it took so long? We don’t want to know about that …”

  Obie Trice’s début, Cheers, was Eminem’s most sustained work since 8 Mile. He had a producing hand in almost every track, rapping on four. Obie, 23, with an adored five-year-old daughter, Kobie, made good company for doting dads 50 and Em. But he was a different proposition from 50, a natural joker and dirty ladies’ man. He raised a glass of Hennessy Cognac on Cheers’ cover, happy to party and, at an Eminemlike 5‘ 8”, wasn’t eager to fight. Raised on Rakim, he was a similarly clear, confident rapper, with a sensitive side. Though the album’s big hit was the comic ‘Got Some Teeth’ (with a hilarious video of Obie explaining disastrous, drunken one-night stands to Eminem’s TV interviewer, despite his minimum standards in a woman: “hopefully, she got some teef …”), its best track was ‘Don’t Come Down’. A shamed lament at his drug-dealing youth, when his mother disowned him, it countered Eminem’s mother-cursing career. Its dramatic orchestral soul sound, sped-up, sampled Seventies female vocals and Steve King’s shamelessly stretched guitar solo was Em’s most imaginative production on the record, too: a rap power ballad. It was a style he would return to.

  His guest-raps, meanwhile, though hardly full-blast, had intriguing touches. ‘Lady’ was a lighter variant on ‘Superman’, warning would-be lovers that if they did snare him, his insane jealousy would leave them the trapped ones, branded and shackled to the bed. ‘We All Die One Day’ imagined him as the al Qaeda shoe-bomber, while ‘Outro’ favourably compared him to his President: “I don’t send my soldiers to war if I ain’t in the middle of the shit with them.”

  Obie’s own essential good humour, though, was too often smothered in trite sexist and violent bragging. And Eminem’s production was not skilful or varied enough yet (over-fond as it was of repeating sounds, beats and even tunes from earlier successes) to save his second protégé from sounding half-baked, a potentially useful Joker in the Shady pack who had been misplayed. When I saw Obie’s UK début at the intimate London venue the Scala, it was enjoyable enough – at least until a shambolic sexy dancing competition between girls in the crowd for a Shady jacket, fun only for the harmlessly hot-blooded rapper. As he nervously clutched at his Detroit baseball cap, and the crowd went wild only at Eminem’s name, he hardly seemed ready for the big leagues, and Shady did not seem the new star-stuffed Motown. Cheers’ million US sales did, though, confirm Eminem’s Midas touch.

  His most creatively successful 2003 release, however, was for the soundtrack to the documentary Tupac: Resurrection, where he would produce the first musical meeting of rap’s rival martyrs, Biggie and Tupac. The scale of the honour was humbling to Eminem. To reporters, he recalled feeling as if he and the childhood-damaged Tupac were growing up together, and his unreal daze as he watched ‘Pac’s death on Gilbert’s Lodge’s TV. His ‘Runnin’ (Dying To Live)’ built on the lesson of Cheers’ ‘D
on’t Come Down’, again sampling and treating a soulful Seventies record. This time, it was Texan blues-rocker Edgar Winter’s forgotten, bleak cry – “Why am I dyin’ to live, if I’m just living to die?” Speeded to a girlish pitch, over surging strings, rolling brass, splashes of Luis Resto’s piano, clattering break-beats and excerpts of crackly interviews and defiant raps from Tupac and Biggie, and police radio news of Tupac’s death, Winter’s soaring vocal was powerfully redemptive, a resurrection prayer from the pit of his own despair. Winter himself wondered how Eminem had ever heard it, the old-school mark of sampling respect. In its complex arrangement and primal pop force, it showed significant progress, at last, in his producing. Eminem’s own guest-rap on Tupac’s ‘One Day At A Time’ meanwhile suggested they were both immortal originals. The presence of Eminem and 50 on Resurrection‘s two other unreleased tracks though prompted a more uneasy thought: that, thanks to sharing Tupac’s corporate home, Interscope, Eminem was expanding his empire to annex rap’s most potent myth.

  The only ripple in Eminem’s calm private life now was revealed in another recording. On Cheers’ ‘Lady’ he gallantly told a lover: “I’m a bachelor, bitch, and I ain’t in no fast hurry to run out and find another Mrs. Mathers, because technically, me and Kim ain’t back fully, but we still make booty calls occasionally, but be damned if I end up back in a pattern where we end up back in that tavern …”