The Dark Story of Eminem Read online

  “As soon as I turned 15,” he told Rolling Stone, “my mother was like, ‘Get a fucking job and help me with these bills or your ass is out. Then she would fucking kick me out anyway.” His mother denied it to the magazine. “A friend told me, ‘Debbie, he’s saying this stuff for publicity.’ He was always well-provided for.” But he stuck to his story, adding angry details to Rap Pages. “I would end up getting kicked out like every fucking day, literally just for nothing. Sometimes it was for coming in late, hanging out on the streets with my friends. My mother felt like I was too young to be running the streets. That would be her excuses.”

  His description of her own daily life was withering. “It was a complicated thing, ‘cos my mother was taking a lot of drugs, so she would be in and out of different mood swings. My mother would take three or four naps a day and just get up and start running around the house stomping – ‘This house is a goddamned mess’ – and start throwing shit, breaking dishes and stuff, ‘You get out, motherfucker, you get out and never …’ blah, blah, blah. I would end up sleeping over a friend’s house for a while and shit like that.”

  When his mother sued him over these comments and others, he became more specific, admitting that the drugs he meant were the prescription anti-depressants Valium and Vicatin. She gave her own version of her usage in the Mail On Sunday. “Marshall has accused me of being addicted to prescription pills,” she declared. “Well, back in 1990 I was run over by a drunk driver. I had to eat baby food as I couldn’t swallow, and during that time I was on medication. It wasn’t pill-popping and, whatever he says, I brought Marshall up in an alcohol, drug and smoke-free zone.” Still, her regular use of anti-depressants was not disputed in court; whatever she was doing to her son, her own life still seems to have been unhappy and shapeless. As to his evictions, his grandmother confirmed that he regularly appeared at her door in Warren at night, sighing, “Grandma, she kicked me out again.” Kresin added that sometimes her daughter would abuse her, too. “She would get mad at me, and punish me by keeping him away from me and my son, Marshall’s Uncle Ronnie. They were best friends and really close, and she would keep them from each other.”

  To Rap Pages, Marshall added tired details of his situation: “I had one factory job sweeping floors a mile from home. Doing good. My mother used to keep all of my cheques and give me like 40 bucks outta each cheque, and I made over 140 bucks. My mother would keep the hundred and pay the phone bill or the light bill. That’s how I was able to stay. I ended up getting kicked out and staying at my boy’s house, three miles away, so I ended up losing that job.”

  It was to NME, though, that he revealed the full scale of his resentment and hurt at this latest round of changing backdrops to his life, and the screaming matches soundtracking them. “I had to stay with friends for two months at a time,” he complained. “I would bounce from house to house. It was shitty. I had a lot of friends who I would stay with and their parents were always cooler than my mother. I would tape my mother throwing me out and play them to my friends’ parents just to show them how crazy she is. I’d stay at Proof’s house and his mother did not care what we did as long as we were safe. My friends’ parents liked me!” he suddenly pleaded, like he needed witnesses to prove he wasn’t worthless. “They liked me! I was a likeable person, it was just me and my mother did not get along.” He shook his head to himself. “It was not my fault. It was not my fault.”

  In this mood of introspection, he considered the whole nature of his teenage life. “You only realise how bad it was later. I look back now, dog, and I lived a crazy-assed life. I mean, getting kicked out all the time, having no money, getting jumped all the time. I failed ninth grade three times and then left school. I was a fuck-up.” Then he reconsidered his earlier excusing of himself, with the diffidence and wish for fairness he would never quite bury, even at his most outrageous: “But it wasn’t entirely my fault.”

  In the midst of all this turmoil, in a place where many teenagers would go wildly astray, Marshall was spoken to by Detroit’s police only twice. The first time was for standing up for his mother, another clue that things were not always poisonous between them, but sometimes loyal and loving. In his early teens a woman on their block was threatening Mathers-Briggs, and jabbing her finger in her face. Marshall jumped between them, shouting, “You’re not hurting my Mom !” The woman’s husband then attacked him with a baseball bat, which Marshall took off him as they wrestled to the ground. That was when the police arrived to drag Marshall away. But enough neighbours had witnessed the scuffle for his innocence to be proved.

  Two more crucial incidents, though, combined at the end of his adolescence to ruin it further, and to cripple his love for his mother for good. In 1991, when he was 19, his Uncle Ronnie – son of Kresin, and brother of Mathers-Briggs – killed himself after a girl rejected him. The apparent trigger for his death cannot have helped Marshall’s increasingly defensive, hostile attitude to women, as they ruled and warred in his home. But Ronnie dying at all was the worst.

  “The two were just six weeks apart and were more like brothers,” Mathers-Briggs told the Mail On Sunday. “They did everything together. But when they were about 16, Marshall got into rap, and Ronnie liked Bon Jovi. They fell out and didn’t speak for two years. When Ronnie killed himself, Marshall was devastated.”

  “I don’t know whether it takes balls or a fucking coward to kill themselves,” Marshall, who would later toy with suicide himself, as would his wife, wondered to Rolling Stone. “I ain’t figured it all out yet. With my uncle, I just wish I could have talked to him before he did it to find out what the fuck was really on his mind.” At the time, he was simply wrecked. “I didn’t talk for days,” he told Q. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral.” His uncle’s name was one of the tattoos of key people in his life with which he would later ink his body.

  Ronnie’s suicide then burst to the surface again, during another fierce row between his sister and nephew. “I wish it was you who died,” Mathers-Briggs screamed, “and Ronnie was still here!” It’s not an unknown thing for a mother to wish on an adolescent son when at snapping point; she needn’t mean it for more than the second she says it, and we don’t know the provocation. Her own upset at her brother’s death should also be remembered. But for Marshall, emotionally fragile and already resentful, something broke with those words. “It got quiet,” he remembered to The Source. “I could see in my friends’ faces. Even they kinda looked at me like, ‘Damn, that’s fucked up.’” He focused on his mother’s furious sentence with the same intensity as he had that Lincoln teacher’s dismissal of his hopes. He would not forget, or forgive. “She said that,” he said this year, then paused. “So I’m gonna be as dead to her as I can get.”

  No one has said when this happened. But, with friends round, and after he and Ronnie were 19, it cannot have been far from the night of his twentieth birthday. He had his second brush with the law then, and it was very different from his first. His mother called the police to accuse him of assault and battery. The once-puny Marshall had been lifting weights since he was 17, after coming so close to violent death the year before. In photos of him with his mother as an adult, he towers above her, with muscular arms. The thought of him attacking her is not pleasant. But perhaps, like her savage words to him, it just shows how oppressive their life together had become. Both had now been driven to lash out without restraint. Their future lives would move towards open battle.

  Ronnie had done one more pivotal thing for his nephew, while he was still alive. Mathers-Briggs might remember their musical differences. All Marshall knew was that his uncle left him the gift which let him hang on to sanity, without which his life would have shaken apart. Age 11, Ronnie played him his first rap record.

  3

  THE WHITE NEGRO

  “The first hip-hop shit I ever heard was that song ‘Reckless’ from the Breakin’ soundtrack,” Marshall told Spin in 1999. “My cousin played me the tape when I was, like, 9. Then there was this mixe
d school I went to in fifth grade, one with lots of Asian and black kids, and everybody was into breakdancing. They always had the latest rap tapes – the Fat Boys, L.L. Cool J’s Radio. I thought it was the most incredible shit I’d ever heard.”

  The element of calculation in Marshall’s first public appearances as Eminem is underscored in that statement’s inaccuracies. He certainly could have been nine when the early hip-hop exploitation movie Breakin’ (Breakdance in the UK) came out in 1984, if he’d been born in 1974. As we know, though, he was born two years earlier. The mental readjustment of each key event of his life into different parts of his youth every time a question was asked in his hundreds of early interviews, so that the odd deception would hold, must have done strange things to his mind. All the time he was Eminem to the world, he had to think as if he really was two years younger. Calling Uncle Ronnie his cousin shows how mutable his floating, fractious family unit could become in his head, too, thanks to such initial, contradictory recountings.

  At any rate, Marshall was not a precocious little boy when hip-hop first seized him, but nearing adolescence, with its extra dose of frustrated anger. The music’s almost mystical answering of every need in his insecure young life was remembered in one of his most nakedly autobiographical verses, in D12’s 2000 rap, ‘Revelation’. After dismissing his mother for failing to raise him, he spits: “Full of crazy rage, an angry teenager/ nothing could change me back/ gangsta-rap had me acting like a maniac/ I was boostin’, so influenced by rap, I used it/ as an excuse to do shit/ no one could tell me nothin’/ hip-hop overwhelmed me, to the point where it had me in a whole ‘nother realm/ it was like isolatin’ myself was healthy/ it felt like we was on welfare but wealthy/ compelled me to excel in school and failed me, expelled me …” The sense that he had been transformed by rap, changed into a more furious, powerful, criminal (boostin’) boy than he had ever been before, flows through the verse. Probably there’s an element of play, too, with credulous critics’ belief that rap fans dumbly do whatever rap records say. But the idea that it was “an excuse to do shit”, to act positively for himself at last, is no joke. And the feeling of being “overwhelmed … in a whole ‘nother realm … on welfare but wealthy”, rapped in a tone of fervent transport, suggests gospel transcendence: that gangsta-rap’s gritty street tales lifted him out of his poverty-stricken, unhappy existence, into something better.

  He remembered that sensation again when Newsweek suggested his own raps were harmful. “I don’t think music can make you kill or rape someone, any more than a movie is going to make you do something you know is wrong,” he said, “but music can give you strength. It can make a 15-year-old kid, who is being picked on by everyone and made to feel worthless, throw his middle finger up and say, ‘Fuck you, you don’t know who I am.’ It can help make them respect their individuality, which is what music did for me. If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible, as long as you keep workin’ at it and don’t back down. I didn’t have nothin’ going for me … school, home … until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.”

  Of course, rap didn’t strike him like that all at once. After the first rush of Ice-T’s ‘Reckless’, and with Uncle Ronnie continuing to be his musical mentor, it was the fearless, taunting, street-wise raps of Queens’ L.L. Cool J which convinced him the music was for him. The attitude alone must have been a wistful fantasy, for a skinny boy preyed on so often by bullies he loathed, but couldn’t beat. “When L.L. first came out with ‘I’m Bad’, I wanted to do it, to rhyme,” he remembered. “Standing in front of the mirror, I wanted to be like L.L.” He would wear shades, too, lost in his superhero secret identity. And, in pursuit of this dream life, he became studious, in a way he never managed at school. “When my son first got into rap as a teenager,” his mother remembered to the Mail On Sunday with a sigh, “he would wake me at 5 am to ask me what words rhymed with what. I bought him a dictionary, and it all went downhill from there.” The capacious vocabulary this high school drop-out would go on to flex on records shows how deeply he absorbed that gift. His life with his mother was part of the reason. “We were so fuckin’ poor,” he told Kerrang. “My mother used to do so much fucked-up shit to me, I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out of that house and just … do something. Even my mother used to laugh at me about this rap shit. She’d hear me upstairs, I’d have two radios set up – one playing the beat, and the other one recording me rapping over it. She’d be going, ‘I don’t know why you’re wasting your time with that – you can’t rap.’ Thanks, ma!” “It was like isolatin’ myself was healthy,” as he rapped on ‘Revelation’; he was reading, listening and recording round the clock, abstracting himself from the futile, bored adolescent life he could have had. Instead of fading away on a street corner once his pressure cooker home flung him outside, becoming a petty criminal in a city with nothing for the young, rap had shown him a route out.

  The records he heard as he moved through his teens replaced the education he’d abandoned at Lincoln. LA’s N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude) and Miami’s 2 Live Crew were among his favourites in the late Eighties. While the latter specialised in obscene, juvenile, sexist sex songs, without balance or apology – handy training for Eminem’s misogyny – they became best known for police and government attempts to censor them. These culminated in the 1987 arrest of a female shop assistant for selling one of their records, a 1990 Federal court ruling that their single ‘As Nasty As We Wanna Be’ was illegally obscene, and a contrasting jury trial finding 2 Live Crew themselves innocent of obscenity.

  N.W.A. meanwhile provided a more skilful and complex lesson in what rap could say, and how easily it could appal figures of power and authority. Guided by ambitious producer Andre Young (aka Dr. Dre), and including main rappers O-Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) and Eric Wright (Easy-E, who also financed the group, initially with money from drug-dealing), N.W.A. pushed rap’s rebel appeal to the limit. On their début album Straight Outta Compton (1988), they replaced the more literary, distanced super-pimp persona of original West Coast gangsta-rapper and Marshall inspiration Ice-T with more lurid, exaggerated evocations of LA’s violent street life. Brightened by Dre’s bouncing, Seventies P-Funk sampling beats, they ranged between the poles of their first hit ‘Express Yourself ‘, Cube’s ode to rap’s inspiring of individualism, and the infamous anti-LAPD rebel song ‘Fuck Tha Police’. It was the latter which made the FBI fire off a threat to N.W.A.’s Ruthless Records, and police departments across America loathe them. Though their “gangsta” image was mostly a contrivance, intended to sell records to Compton’s thousands of real Bloods and Crips (whom Dre especially had studiously avoided in real life), the American Establishment easily confused art and reality, and overreacted accordingly.

  Eminem would exploit, and suffer from, exactly that vein of lazy thinking. He would also, to his humble amazement, find that Dre, ten years after his teenage hero-worship, wanted to be his producer. Most important of all, perhaps, was N.W.A.’s tapping of an eager white audience for their gritty fantasias of black life, until suburban white kids became gangsta-rap’s main market, and the music’s gunplay and misogyny grew still more cartoonish, to reflect these outsiders’ expectations.

  Marshall experienced this shift from a uniquely clear-eyed perspective: as a white boy partly from the suburbs, and partly from black ghetto streets like the ones N.W.A. eulogised. He was hearing a powerful fantasy and his grinding, inescapable reality, all at once. But what he responded to most was simple. In a home, neighbourhood and hormone-addled body that made him feel cramped and trapped, N.W.A. showed him how to scream with rage: fuck tha police, and everything else. Analysing his own audience later, he described the sensation. “My attitude attracts a lot of kids, especially white kids from the suburbs,” he told NME. “When someone comes along and goes against the grain and just truly doesn’t give a fuck, they wanna be that person. ‘Cos I know when I was younger and the Beastie Boys ca
me out they seemed like they didn’t give a fuck, and when N.W.A. came out they really didn’t give a fuck. The whole attitude attracts people.” The Eminem anthem ‘The Real Slim Shady’ would imagine, and try to inspire, an army of such listeners. But he did so with such feeling because in 1988, aged 15, he was one of them himself, “putting on the sunglasses and looking in the mirror and lip-synching,” as he remembered, “wanting to be Dr. Dre, to be Ice Cube”.

  Marshall would follow Dre and Cube out of N.W.A., into their solo work of the early Nineties. Dre’s The Chronic (1992), and his production on Doggystyle (1993) by Snoop Doggy Dogg, his first protégé, finessed Marshall’s favoured gangsta-rap into still more fantastic scenarios of super-pimp wealth, sex and violence, with complicating, residual touches of ghetto reality. Cube, meanwhile, a more talented rapper, kept a closer connection to the melting social situation on his home Compton streets, one of the few locations to make Detroit look good. But on his masterpiece, The Predator (1992), he, too, demonstrated that great rappers could turn themselves into fictional creatures on record, superheroic aliases with which to do their dirty work. In his private life, Cube was an essentially law-abiding musician. But as the Predator, he took on all the anger, paranoia and violence of South Central LA’s black population, slipping inside Rodney King’s body as the batons came down, then reappearing to gun down racist cops, till he literally exploded, laying waste whole city blocks when cornered, a lyrical thermonuclear device. This was the lineage from which Slim Shady emerged.