The Dark Story of Eminem Read online

  Encore itself arrived on November 12, three days earlier than planned, to counter the usual internet leaks. Eminem’s nemesis on his fifth album had seemed likely to be the maturity which had pacified his private life. Encore defeated expectations by both embracing that maturity, and being his most adolescently outrageous, gut-bustingly funny effort since The Slim Shady LP.

  ‘Mosh’ was part of an opening salvo addressing entries in his diary since last we met: the racist lyrics, his beef with The Source, and Kim’s coke busts. As he rapped in reference to The Eminem Show‘s supposed finale, “the curtain just don’t close for me”. But for this latest Act, he shocked with a new kind of daring: admitting that he had grown up, and no longer lived by rap’s adolescent rules. Having offended liberals and censors with six years of homophobia, misogyny and murder, he went out on the only limb left, rap’s own macho code, and leapt off.

  ‘Like Toy Soldiers’ began the heresy. Sampling forgotten Eighties star Martika’s ‘Toy Soldiers’, a number one hit about teen heroin addiction, in a chorus which speeded her into helium self-harmony, the song exhaustively detailed the tangled beefs between 50, Ja Rule, Eminem and The Source. Drained by the futile exchanges, fearful of a Tupac-style fatality, Eminem then unilaterally disarmed: “Don’t get it twisted/ It’s not a plea that I’m coppin’/ I’m just willing to be the bigger man … ‘cause frankly I’m sick of talkin’/ I’m not gonna let someone else’s coffin rest on my conscience.” Suddenly, Eminem was a high-minded parent, not a kid in the playground. Instead of rucking, he was walking away. For a form partly based on the swapped street-insults of “the dozens”, this was new terrain. Eminem now reserved battle-raps for the President.

  Next up for reassessment was his attitude to women. Where before positive thoughts had been tucked away in odd phrases or turns of tone, Encore‘s three Kim songs for the first time presented a rounded picture. ‘Puke’ saw him react to the turmoil her jail-time had put their family through, projectile-vomiting at the thought of her. But it was very far from the murderous vileness of ‘Kim’, admitting a residue of love: “If you only knew, how much I hated you/ For every motherfucking thing you’ve ever put us through/ Then I wouldn’t be standing here, crying over you.” He concluded softly: “But what else can I do?/ I haven’t got a clue/ Now I guess I’ll just move on/ I have no choice but to.” Even as the vomit flew, he sounded baffled by their romantic ruin.

  ‘Mockingbird’ and ‘Crazy In Love’ then opened fresh emotional vistas. In the former, as the tune of the nursery rhyme ‘Daddy’s Gonna Buy You A Mockingbird’ was picked out by Luis Resto’s piano, he tried to explain to his children why Kim had gone away. Flexing his functional singing voice, he reminisced about her good points as a mum back when they were struggling together – pretending some of her presents for Hailie were from him when he couldn’t afford any, and sitting crying when the $1,000 she’d scrimped for Hailie’s college fund was stolen. He had never rapped so affectionately about a woman before, not even on the callow Infinite. Seemingly responding to Hailie’s hurt eyes with each word, he evenly apportioned blame for their divorce: “Papa was a rolling stone and Mama developed a habit/ And it all happened too fast for either one of us to grab it.” Surely thinking of his own dad’s disappearance, he promised secure love for his daughter and niece: “Daddy’s still here/ I like the sound of that, yeah/ It’s got a ring to it, don’t it/ Ssshhh, mama’s only gone for a moment …”

  It was partial atonement for Dad’s serial psychotic dissing of Mum as recently as ‘Puke’, a realisation at last that it did no good to their daughter. The apparent sentimentality of ‘Mockingbird’ might itself induce puking in some. But, for anyone who had followed Eminem’s rage-contorted route to it, its soft emotional exposure brought a tear.

  ‘Crazy In Love’ then flipped to love’s X-rated extremes, the sex and violence that kept Em and Kim coming back for more. The best example yet of his penchant for screamingly speeded soft rock samples, Heart’s Wilson sisters joined this disco-soul paean to rough love. Its prototype was ‘Love You More’, the bootlegged Straight From The Lab track (now out officially on Encore‘s Collector’s Edition). Written before coke and contempt split the couple again, that had been a murmured confessional, the only mature evidence of how he felt when inside their affair. It wasn’t for the faint-hearted, but then neither were they. “I punch you in the mouth,” he fondly reminisced, “fist-fights, we tear this mother out …” Their love and hate were wild bonds expressed equally in fighting and fucking. The Kinks’ Ray Davies, oddly, was among the few other pop writers to risk exposing this uncomfortable underside to passion (in later songs like ‘Animal’). Eminem, perhaps emboldened by the half-buried experiment of ‘Love You More’, now returned to the theme.

  ‘Crazy In Love’ was lightly fictionalised. “The song is technically about finding my dream girl that I could have this kind of relationship with but probably will never find,” he told Vanity Fair. “But I will say that me and Kim have been to that place before.” Eminem’s sexual and emotional ideal “let me beat the shit out of you before you beat the shit out of me”, a wild child (described as 24) tough enough to take him on, but also the yawning void in his ad hoc family: “the wife who never divorced me”. Though the violence seemed nearer the truth than ‘Kim’’s hysterical throat-slitting, and could be construed as disturbing, the fierce feeling behind it also burst to the surface. “You are the word that I’m looking for when I’m trying to describe how I feel inside,” he declared of this dream Kim “as crazy as I am”. If you could accept soulmates who beat each other black and blue, this troubling, reckless song unpeeled that sexual psyche. This was Slim’s bruised muse.

  Back in the real world, he listed his parental rules to Rolling Stone, including these: “Never lay a hand on them. Let them know it’s not right for a man to ever lay his hands on a female. Despite what people may think of me and what I say in my songs – you know, me and Kim have had our moments – I’m tryin’ to teach them and make them learn from my mistakes.”

  As to the trauma of Kim’s trials on their family, he told Vanity Fair it had been the “toughest year” of his life. “But with her bein’ on the run from the cops,” he added to Rolling Stone, “I really had no choice but to step up to the plate.” Explaining Kim’s absence to Hailie and Alaina had been “one of the hardest things I ever had to go through.” And as he started to talk about why he had gathered Alaina and Nate into his family, he let slip why he was so desperate to shield them from pain. “My little brother was taken away by the state when he was eight, nine,” he explained, shining a little more light into their life with Debbie. “I tried to apply for full custody when I was twenty [three years before the state intervened], but I didn’t have the means. They had come and got him out of school. He didn’t know what the fuck was goin’ on. The same thing that had happened in my life was happening in his. And then Kim’s niece was born. Watched her bounce around from house to house – just watchin’ the cycle of dsyfunction, it was like, ‘Man, if I get in position, I’m gonna stop all this shit.’” His pride in what he’d achieved peeped through for a moment. “And I got in position and did.”

  And what of Kim, he was asked in October. Were they together now? “No, not necessarily,” he answered Vanity Fair. “But because we share parenthood we have this mutual respect for each other [for Hailie’s sake].” Their relationship was “neutral at best”, he told Rolling Stone; romance seemed “pretty much out the window”. But in Vanity Fair, he still couldn’t move beyond her. “There’s things I went through with Kim that I could never experience or go through again,” he admitted. “From back in the early days, Kim had been there, fought with me, in fights, fought dudes, in fights. I’m kind of stuck between this place. I don’t think I could ever fall in love with her again. Or anyone, for that matter.”

  Fellow celebrities he’d dated had been “crazier than I am”. “Insecurity” stopped him believing anyone else loved him, not his fame. Memories
and fantasies – the stuff of Encore‘s love songs – were all he could trust.

  The album’s overall tone, though, was far less dark. Instead, for eight straight tracks, it welcomed back snickering Slim Shady, all but retired on the jail-haunted The Eminem Show. The standard was consistently high, sides conclusively split, even after six years’ familiarity with his schtick. He deliberately slurred and slid on seemingly freestyled words, mockingly questioning his talent then proving it, like a tightrope walker bouncing on one toe. Even if 2004 had been his “toughest” year, on a deeper level the stability of his mature existence seemed to have released something in him, allowing his talent free play. Michael Moore might applaud ‘Mosh’, but Encore‘s guiding spirit elsewhere seemed to be Barney the Simpsons barfly (imitated several times), or Beavis And Butthead Do America.

  Most of these Slim songs were the result of a late recording burst in Florida with Dre (who, surprisingly, had a bigger hand in Encore than any previous album). ‘Rain Man’ defined the record’s mix of growth and schoolyard regression, as Eminem tied himself into parodical politically correct knots over the appropriate attitude to gayness, with equal reference to The Bible and lesbian porn: “Who’s to say what’s fair to say, and what’s not to say – let’s ask Dr. Dre !” Em ploughed on to describe a macho gridiron player reaching between a fellow footballer’s legs for the ball and “accidentally” falling dick-first into his ass. “Is that gay?” he earnestly wondered. “I just need to clear things up. Till then, I’ll just walk around with a manly strut …”

  This followed on from his “confession” to fucking Dre on The Eminem Show, and his “beer goggles” play for the long-suffering Doc in the video for ‘Just Lose It’ (with its repeated muddling of “boys” and “girls” to dance with). In a virulently homophobic genre (where his pal 50 could still casually say in 2004, “I ain’t into faggots. I don’t like gay people around me”), the man who once rapped “hate fags? Yes” now seemed extremely comfortable with his sexuality.

  Such shifting attitudes were the best defence of the truly free speech he insisted on, but which had made him so many enemies. The 32-year-old Eminem had seen more of the world and its values than Detroit’s ghetto, and had pushed past his old prejudices. Increasingly, and in a simpler way than when he had shoved misogynist fury into the open where it had to be dealt with, he was a force for good. If you let someone pour their uncen-sored soul out long enough, perhaps this was the result.

  Encore ended with the sound of Eminem gunning down the audience to this latest “show”, before turning the pistol on himself. The CD showed the rapper with a gun in his mouth, and a suicide note. Taken with his promise in the concluding, title track that “I don’t ever wanna leave this game without at least saying goodbye”, and his disgusted laying down of his mic at the end of ‘Like Toy Soldiers’’ video, some eagerly speculated that Encore truly was his final bow.

  That time might come soon. But not yet. “I kind of want to finish my music thing first,” he told Rolling Stone in a telling phrase, when asked about his movie career (the latest rumours of which involved him playing a Marshall-like bullied stripling who becomes a supervillain, in an adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic Wanted). After the strain of his 8 Mile/Eminem Show multitasking, he continued, “I felt like I was really neglecting life at home. I want to remain in control of things, where I can stay in the city and go home at night to my kids.”

  Encore ensured his day-job was still secure. It sold 700,000 in the US in its first weekend, his appeal entirely undiminished. December then gave a clue to his post-rapping future, with the release of Loyal To The Game. The ninth posthumous album by his old hero Tupac, it was the first record entirely produced by Eminem.

  Liner notes by Tupac’s fiercely loyal mother Afeni Shakur revealed Eminem’s eagerness to contribute. “[Many] vow that they are ‘here for me’ and ‘here for Tupac’ or for whatever I may need,” she wrote. “Yet in the same conversation they ask if I have $150,000 to send their way, or if there is an unreleased Tupac verse for the single on their next album.” In contrast came “the gift of generosity given to me by a young man who not only asked for nothing in return for his services, but refused to accept anything I offered … I must personally thank Marshall Mathers.”

  A far more ambitious undertaking for Eminem than Tupac: Resurrection, the contrast between Encore and Tupac’s old raps was striking. Tupac was left mired in the romanticised criminality and macho feuds which had contributed to his early death. Eminem, given time to grow up, had left such stifling self-destruction behind. As he freely admitted when duetting with his dead hero on ‘Soldier Like Me’: “I don’t walk around like no G, ‘cause that ain’t me.”

  Whether he would make his mark as a producer wasn’t really answered on Loyal To The Game. Leaning on Luis Resto’s understated keyboards, his work was simply atmospheric, without the imaginative leaps of true studio auteurs like the Neptunes or Kanye West. He was at his best when sampling unlikely white musicians, like old pals Elton John (supplying a duet the sexually insecure ‘Pac might have baulked at), and Dido, seemingly only affecting when kidnapped by the man whose ‘Stan’ made her. These tracks added to Eminem’s story too, recalling almost forgotten cast members, distant relatives in his growing “family”.

  The insecure, angry boy raised by his real mother, Debbie, seemed almost gone now. He had been replaced by Mr. Mathers, the responsible adult his kids’ friends saw at school field trips or reading to the class, a man who had come through his life’s maelstrom cleansed. And yet, in the studio, Slim Shady still breathed.

  “There’s that fine line of walking where I have fans that I don’t want to let down,” he pondered to Vanity Fair. “I don’t ever want to become soft. I don’t want to compromise my music for my life at home. It’s almost like I do live a double life. When I get behind those gates and I go home, I’m Dad.”

  Slim’s final end might come when that double life tore. How would he choose, he was asked, between a happy family and fame’s needs?

  “If there ever comes a day where I would have to pick one or the other,” he said at once, “I already know what it would be. I would walk away from all of this if I had to.”

  16

  THE KILLING

  April 11, 2006, 8 Mile after dark. Proof had been out prowling and partying all night. He had been the same since he was a teenager, never wanting to let go of the wild times until the last bar closed. That Monday night had begun at the Coliseum strip club with his friends, Mudd, Horny Mack and Chop. “We at the titty bar chillin’,” Mudd said later. “Got the booth, drank a little, hollered at the DJ.” They moved on to a second strip bar, Club Rolex, four men in their early thirties exuberantly getting off on the heat of naked women and hip-hop.

  Finally, they walked into that last bar, the CCC Club (also known as the Triple C to locals). The doors closed behind them. At 4.30 am, Proof was laid out on the club’s floor, three bullets in him, the life gone from his eyes.

  The Triple C was a typical place for a Detroit night to end up, one way or the other. It was a squat red building with a steel door and no windows, on a desolate stretch of road; a tomb-like holding tank for those in no hurry to go home, where the risk of sudden violence is part of the bill for seeing what the next hour brings. “There was a barber shop next door, and a 7-Eleven type place. A pawnbrokers across the road. Very little else for miles,” the Independent‘s Guy Adams tells me of visiting the place in 2009 after it had been shut down. “It didn’t look like a fashionable joint. It looked like a retail unit that had been converted into a sort of bar, with blacked-out windows and a few pool tables. It’s on a reasonably busy road in a very deprived area. If you wanted to go for a drink, you’d be very short on options. So the dregs end up there.” Mudd admitted as much to XXL. “It was kind of a shady spot. Cats always had they pistols … because Detroit’s a gangsta-ass city, and there’s a lot of cats that want to play gangsta here. Certain cats get down, and the East Side ha
s the reputation for being the grimier side of town.”

  The first police version of how Eminem’s best friend Proof, given name Deshaun Holton, was shot dead there aged 32, reeks of bloody pointless-ness. Proof had been playing pool with a Desert Storm veteran, Keith Bender, Jr., 35. When a dispute between them became violent, Bender’s cousin, Triple C bouncer Mario Etheridge, 28, fired warning shots into the ceiling. According to witnesses quoted in the Detroit press, Proof then pistol-whipped Bender and shot him in the head. As Proof stood over his victim, threatening to shoot again, Etheridge shot Proof three times: twice in his chest, and once in his head. April 14’s New York Times reported a Detroit police statement that Proof had fired first, and Etheridge’s lawyer, Randall Upshaw, telling WXYZ-TV: “The understanding of every witness we’ve spoken to is that Proof pulled out a weapon. Proof shot Keith in the face, and Keith was unarmed.” On the morning, April 19, that Proof was buried, Bender also died of his injuries. On April 27, the police announced neither Proof nor Etheridge had entered the club armed. On September 20, Etheridge was convicted only of carrying a concealed weapon and discharging it, the bouncer having acted “in lawful defence of another” in killing Proof. During the trial, four witnesses claimed Proof had fought a man at the club before Bender.

  Less damning memories of Proof’s part in the shoot-out at the Triple C eventually emerged from the friends who had walked in there with him; three men at the tail-end of the sort of hedonistic trawl through Detroit’s shady clubland that was an almost nightly ritual for Proof. “Wild Woody’s on Wednesday, Tuesday was Northern Lights, Mondays we would hang at a titty bar called Jon-Jon’s, Saturday was the State Theater,” Mudd recalled fondly. “If I wanted to see him or find him, I would know where to go.” Devoted family man and promoter of Detroit hip-hop as he was, rich man as he must have been after D12’s great success, he still lived hungrily in his city’s heart.