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Last Updated: Friday 18-May-2001 16:54
EM BLOWS UP INTERVIEW
Eminem Blows Up from Rolling Stone Magazine, April 1999
The blue-eyed MC is dealing
with the instant fame and simultaneous criticism well enough -- much better,
actually, than he is dealing with the fifth of Bicardi he downed an hour
ago. On a chilly Friday night in New York, he emerges bleary-eyed from
the bathroom in his manager's office. "I just threw up everything
I had," he says in his slow-roll drawl, which is a bit slower at
the moment. "All I ate today was that slice of pizza. Feel good now,
though." His manager exhales slowly
with relief. Eminem has three club gigs tonight, and the first one starts
in less than an hour. The crew (nine, including DJ Stretch Armstrong and
Dennis the security guard) ambles toward the elevator. Downstairs awaits
Eminem's partner in rap, Royce the 5'9, who looks to be about that and
has seven people of his own in tow. Em hops into a gigantic ant white
limo as fellow honky Armstrong cops a rhyme from Eric Clapton's Cream.
"In the white room, with white people and white rappers," he
bellows. A minute later there's a knock on the window and one of Royce's
posse gives Em the first of the three hits of ecstasy he will consume
over the course of the night. Down it goes in a swallow of ginger ale
as the car zooms off towards Staten Island. Out on New Dorp Lane, there
is a crowd of kids, a mere fraction of the number already inside the Lane
Theater. The all-ages show is packed, and Eminem is the evening's main
course. The mob is being controlled by the club's security, but when the
rapper moves inside, the burly dudes are no match for the crush of shouting
teens. "You look good!" one girl shouts. "Oh, my God, he
looks even better in person," shrieks another. Everywhere, kids have
tiny glow sticks in their mouths, which, here in the dark, look like neon
braces. At the back of the club, up a ladder, is the minute-dressing room,
where the very proud owner of the club is waiting. "Hey, nice to
meet ya," he says. "My daughter told me to get Eminem, so I
got Eminem. It's her fourteenth birthday. Hey, say hi to her and her friends."
Eminem soon grabs four bottles
of water and heads to the stage. He owns this audience. These predominantly
white kids know every word, every nuance, and can't get enough. If Slim
Shady's rhymes about sex with underage girls ("Yo look at her bush,
does it got hair?/Fuck this bitch right on the spot bare/Till she passes
out and she forgot how she got there") bother them any, they don't
show it. In fact, the filthier the material, the louder the cheers. On The Slim Shady LP, Eminem
says "God sent me to piss the world off." Interscope Records
is Em's label - a perfect fit for a company that's home to controversial
artists like the late Tupac Shakur and Marilyn Manson. Eminem has been
condemned as a misogynist, a nihilist and an advocate of domestic violence,
principally in an editorial by Billboard editor in chief Timothy White,
who attacked The Slim Shady LP as "making money by exploiting the
world's misery." "My album isn't for younger kids to hear,"
Eminem says. "It has an advisory sticker, and you must be eighteen
to get it. That doesn't mean younger kids won't get it, but I'm not responsible
for every kid out there. I'm not a role model, and I don't claim to be."
On the album, his alias, Slim Shady, hangs himself from a tree by his
penis, dumps the girlfriend he's murdered in a lake with the help of their
baby daughter, takes every drug at once, rips "Pamela Lee's tits
off" and heads out into the night yelling, "Too all the people
I've offended, yeah fuck you too!" This hard-core attitude has
won him acceptance not just from teenagers taken with his video but also
from the hip hop community. Later on, at Manhattan's Sound Factory, Em
will win over a mostly black audience. He will be greeted with indifferent
stares that will melt into smiles, then rump-shaking abandon by the end
of his four-song set. The rapper will top of the evening - well, the morning
by that point - entertaining doelike women and spiky-haired guys at the
trendy mecca called Life, where a table of model types will be evicted
so that Em and his friends may kick back. Right about now, though,
a roomful of Staten Islanders is going berserk. In the silence between
songs, a young girl in the front row who's wearing a white baby T screams,
"I love you!" Eminem walks over. "I love you, too,"
he says and bends down to give her a hug. Big mistake. The girl lays a
kiss on his lips and sets off the girl next to her, who tears Eminem's
head away and kisses him full on the mouth. "Oh shit," he laughs.
"I'm going to jail tonight!" He launches into "Scary Movies,"
the B side to the independently released "Bad Meets Evil" single,
and the audience raps right along. When he sits at the front of the stage,
his pants are pulled at and his crotch is grabbed. "I touched his
dick!" on girl boasts to her friend. Eminem empties a water bottle on the heads of the audience, drops his pants, waves his middle finger around, and the show is over. He is whisked into a waiting car through a back alley. The police have been called to keep things orderly as the limo moves of into the night. At the curb, a girl who looks no more that fourteen shouts, "I want to fuck you," tugging suggestively at the top of her shirt and revealing her pierced tongue. "I want to fuck you, too," Eminem says aloud to himself. "But I won't." Eminem is a white boy in
a black medium. He has been booed on the mic and told repeatedly by black
hip-hoppers that he should stop rapping and go into rock & roll. "It's
some very awkward shit," says Em's mentor, Dr. Dre, about the race
card. "It's like seeing a black guy doing country & western,
know what I'm saying?" Even Dre's judgement was suspect when he signed
Em to his Interscope imprint, Aftermath. "I got a couple of questions
from people around me," he says. "You know, 'He's got blue eyes,
he's a white kid.' But I don't give a fuck if you're purple: If you can
kick it, I'm working with you." Indeed, talent will overcome, and
Em is having the last laugh. "A lot of the people who disrespected
me are coming out of the woodwork now for collaborations," he says.
"But I like doing my own shit. If there were too many other voices,
the stories wouldn't go right." True enough - slipping a verse into
a song about a New Wave blonde babe nurse's aide who overdoses on mushrooms
and relieves her father's sexual abuse, all over a party-hearty tempo,
isn't exactly the same as freestyling on the "Money, Cash, Hoes"
remix. For anyone expecting more
of the naughty pop-culture-obsessed blonde kid in the clean version of
"My Name Is", proffered on MTV, The Slim Shady LP is some bad-trip
nether world. But that world is exactly why the hip-hop underground loves
Em. His off-the-beat flow, way off-the-beat lyrics and loony-tunes presentation
place him in a class by himself. Em isn't trying to be Jay-Z, DMX, or
Tupac; he's trying to be the Roadrunner, turning his enemies' anvils back
on themselves with split-second trickery. He's also probably the only
MC in 1999 who boasts low self-esteem. His rhymes are jaw-droppingly perverse,
bespeaking a minimum-wage life devoid of hope, flushed with rage and weaned
on sci-fi slasher flicks. "I couldn't even got
into a motherfucking club just being Eminem, before the video," Mathers
says, walking through Newark Airport the day after his New York club shows.
"Last night they had people clearing tables for me. It's fucking
bananas. Scary shit too, 'cause you can fall just as quick as you went
to the top." He is a smallish guy who walks with a subdued swagger.
Em is like a class clown with a lot on his mind: When he's on, nothing
escapes the cross hairs of his snottiness, but when he's off, no one is
included in his thoughts. He keeps the world at bay with humor and an
ever-growing list of character voices, including a roguish Scotsman, a
Middle Eastern cab driver, and a sleazy lech. He slips into these voices
constantly, even in the midst of heart-wrenching stories about his childhood.
Today he is chipper and apparently no worse for wear after just two hours
of sleep and no breakfast. He is bound for his home-town of Detroit for
three days off before heading to Mexico to perform on MTV's Spring Break
'99, then on to Chicago for more album promotion. The rapper is no stranger
to moving around. He and his mother shuttled between Missouri and Michigan,
rarely staying in one house for more than a year or two, and finally settled
down when Marshall was eleven. It was the start of a life full of enough
screaming fights and sordid dramas that, at the tender age of 24, Eminem
is ready for his own Behind The Music. But what happened depends on whom
you ask. To hear him tell it, his life up until now has been non-stop
hard knocks, beatings from bullies, and brawls with his pill-popping,
lawsuit-happy mom. His mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, on the other hand,
denies both of these characterizations, claiming that her unending love
and financial support got Eminem through the dog days. It's a story that
would make Jerry Spring salivate, but let's just stick to the facts: (1)
Eminem has never met his father; (2) he spent his formative years living
in a largely black lower-middle-class Detroit neighborhood; (3) he dropped
out of high school in the ninth grade; (4) he and his baby's mother have
been breaking up and making up for the past eight years, and; (5) he loves
their three-year-old daughter Hailie Jade, more than anybody else in the
world. Eminem's parents were married,
his mother says, when she was fifteen and his father was twenty-two. Marshall
III was born two years later. His parents were in a band called Daddy
Warbucks, playing Ramada Inns along the Dakota-Montana border. But their
relationship when sour. The couple split up, and Debbie and her son lived
with family members for a few years before settling on the east side of
Detroit. Marshall's father moved to California. As a teen, the future
Eminem sent his dad a few letters, all of which, his mother claims, came
back "return to sender". "I heard he's trying to get in
touch with me now," the rapper says. "Fuck that motherfucker,
man. Fuck him." The single mother and her
sons (Em's younger half-brother, Nathan, was born in 1986) were one of
three white households on their block. "I'm colorblind - it wasn't
an issue," Em's mom says. "But the younger people in the area
gave us trouble. Marshall got jumped a lot." When he was sixteen,
his ass was kicked fiercely. "I was walking home from my boy's house,
through the Bel-Air Shopping Center," he recalls. "All these
black dudes rode by in a car, flippin' me off. I flipped them off back,
they drove away, and I didn't think nothin' of it." Evidently they
parked the car. "One dude came up, hit me in the face and knocked
me down. Then he pulled out a gun. I ran right out my shoes, dog. I thought
that's what they wanted." But they didn't - when Mathers returned
the next day, his shoes were still stuck in the mud. "That's how
I knew it was racial." Em was saved by a white guy who pulled over,
took out a gun and drove him home. "He came in wearing just his socks
and underwear," his mother says woefully. "They had taken his
jogging suit off him, taken his boombox. They would have taken him out,
too." Eminem heard his first rap
song when he was nine years old. It was "Reckless" a track featuring
Ice-T on the Breakin' soundtrack, which his Uncle Ronnie had given him.
Ten years later, when Ronnie committed suicide, Eminem was devasted. "I
didn't talk for days," he says. "I couldn't even go to the funeral."
He dropped out of high school
after failing the ninth grade for the third time. "As soon as I turned
fifteen," he says, "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, half the time right after she took most of my paycheck."
His mom says none of this is true: "A friend told me, 'Debbie, he's
saying this stuff for publicity.' He was always well provided for."
Either way, his salvation was rap and the rhymes he had begun to write.
"As soon as my mom would leave to go play bingo, I would blast the
stereo," he says. Soon enough he was ready to test his skills by
sneaking into neighboring Osborne High School with his friend and fellow
MC Proof, for lunchroom rap throw-downs. "It was like White Men Can't
Jump," says Proof, now an account executive for hip hop clothier
Maurice Malone. "Everybody thought he'd be easy to beat, and they
got smoked every time." On Saturdays the two friends
went to open-mic contests at the Hip-Hop Shop, on West 7 Mile, ground
zero for the Detroit scene. "As soon as I'd grab the mic, I'd get
booed," Eminem recalls. "Once motherfuckers heard me rhyme,
though, they'd shut up." With four other rappers, Em and Proof formed
a crew called the Dirty Dozen before Em released his own album, Infinite,
on a local label in 1996 - an effort devoid of Shady's wacked out humor
and pent-up rage. "It was right before my daughter was born, so having
a future for her was all I talked about," he says. "It was way
hip-hopped out, like Nas or AZ - that rhyme style was real in at the time.
I've always been a smartass comedian, and that's why it wasn't a good
album." This downward spiral ended
one day on the john when Em met Slim Shady. "Boom, the name hit me,
and right away I thought of all these words to rhyme with it," he
says. "So I wiped my ass, got up off the pot and, ah, went and called
everybody I knew." Shady became Em's vengeful
gremlin, his knight in smarmy armor, and Inspector Gadget Incredible Hulk
with a taste for a bit of the ultra-violence. It was high time for Em
to write some of the wrongs in his life, and Slim Shady was just the cat
to right them. At the top of the shit list was his grade-school nemesis,
D'Angelo Bailey. Yes, the bully who gets it with a broomstick in "Brain
Damage" was entirely real. "Motherfucker used to beat the shit
out of me," Eminem says. "I was in fourth grade and he was in
sixth. Everything in the song is true: One day he came in the bathroom,
I was pissing, and he beat the shit out of me. Pissed all over myself.
But that's not how I got really fucked up." During recess one winter,
Em taunted a smallish friend of Bailey's. "D'Angelo Bailey - no one
called him D'Angelo - came running from across the yard and hit me so
hard into this snowbank that I blacked out." Em was sent hom, his
ear started bleeding, and he was taken to the hospital. "He had cerebral
hemorrhage and was in and out of consciousness for five days," his
mother reports. "The doctors had given up on him, but I wouldn't
give up on my son." "I remember waking up
and saying, 'I can spell elephant,'" Em recalls with a laugh. "D'Angelo
Bailey - I'll never forget that kid." Old D'Angelo won't forget
you, either. "He was the one we used to pick on," says Bailey,
now married with kids and living in Detroit. "There was a bunch of
us that used to mess with him. You know, bully-type things. We was having
fun. Sometimes he'd fight back - depended on what mood he'd be in."
As for Eminem's recollection of the event that put him in the hospital,
Bailey boasts, "Yeah, we flipped him right on his head at recess.
When we didn't see him moving, we took off running. We lied and said he
slipped on the ice. He was a wild kid, but back then we thought it was
stupid. Hey, you have his phone number?" In the spring of 1997, Eminem
recorded his eight song Slim Shady EP - the demo that earned him his deal
with Interscope. At the time, he was scrounging more than ever. He and
his girlfriend, Kim, had been living with their baby in crack-infested
neighborhoods. A stray bullet flying through the kitchen window and lodging
in the wall while Kim was doing dishes wasn't the worst of it - they had
been adopted by a crackhead. "The neighborhoods we lived in fucking
sucked," Kim says. "I went through four TVs and five VCRs in
two years." After cleaning out the first of those TVs and VCRs, plus
a clock radio, the guy came back one night to make a sandwich. "He
left the peanut butter, jelly - all the shit - out and didn't steal nothing,"
Em says. "Ain't this about a motherfucking bitch. But then he came
back again and took everything but the couches and beds. The pillows,
clothes, silverware - everything. We were fuckin' fucked." The young parents moved in
with Em's mother for a while, which wasn't much better. "My mother
did a lot of dope and shit - a lot of pills - so she had mood swings,"
Em says. "She'd go to bed cool, then wake up like, 'Motherfuckers,
get out!'" Em's mom denies all of the above. "I've never done
drugs," she says. "Marshall was raised in a drug and alcohol-free
enviroment." He moved in with friends, and Kim and the baby lived
with her mother. "I didn't have a job that whole summer," Em
recalls. "Then we got evicted, because my friends and me were paying
rent to the guy on the lease, and he screwed us over." The night
before he headed to the Rap Olympics, an annual nationwide MC battle in
L.A., he came home to a locked door and an eviction notice. "I had
to break in," he says. "I didn't have anywhere else to go. There
was no heat, no water, no electricity. I slept on the floor, woke up,
went to L.A. I was so pissed." "Oh, my God," recalls
Paul "Bunyan" Rosenberg, the beefy lawyer who manages Eminem.
"There was this black guy sitting next to me in the crowd at the
Olympics. After the first round, he yells, 'Just give it to the white
boy. It's over. Give it to the white boy.'" They didn't, and Em was crushed.
Not only couldhe have used the first-place prize, 500 bucks and a Rolex,
but he wasn't used to taking second. "He really looked like he was
going to cry," Rosenberg says, nodding thoughtfully. Well, Eminem
lost the battle, but he won the war. A Shady EP given to a few Interscope
staffers soon made it into the hands of co-head Jimmy Iovine. While Em
was in L.A., Iovine and Dr. Dre took a listen. "In my entire career
in the music industry," Dre says, "I have never found anything
from a demo tape of a CD. When Jimmy played this, I said, 'Find him. Now.'"
Their first day in the studio,
the pair knocked off "My Name Is" in about an hour, and as much
as that song proved that Em is a brother from another planet, they were
just warming up. "I wrote two songs for the next album on ecstasy,"
Eminem says. "Shit about bouncing off walls, going straight through
'em, falling down twenty stories. Crazy. That's what we do when I'm in
the studio with Dre." Dr. Dre on E? "Ha, ha," Dre laughs.
"He didn't say that! It's true, though. We get in there, get bugged
out, stay in the studio for fuckin' two days. Then you're dead for three
days. Then you wake up, pop the tape in, like, 'Let me see what I've done.'"
"Hey, turn here,"
Eminem says to the driver of the big white van currently crunching through
the snow-covered streets of east Detroit. "Stop. That was our house.
My room was upstairs, in the back." The small two-story homes on
the gridlike streets are identical - square patch of grass in the front,
a short driveway on the side - differentiable only by their brick face
or shingles. The van turns off 8 Mile, passing Em's high school, then
the field next to the Bel-Air Shopping Center, where Em lost his boombox
and nearly his life. Em is looking out of the window like a kid at Disneyland,
pointing, recalling happy and heartbreaking memories with equal excitement.
"I like living in Detroit, making it my home," he says as the
van heads toward the highway. "I like working out in L.A., but I
wouldn't want to live there. My little girl is here." The van pulls up to Gilbert's
Lodge, the every-food family restaurant in suburban St. Clair Shores where
Em worked on and off for three years. Inside there are antler chandeliers,
a couple of appetite-suppressing mounted moose heads and a "trophy
room," containing the jerseys of various local teams. The restaurant's
staff scurries about, unaware of Em, who has virtually walked into the
kitchen without being greeted. "Yo, Pete, whassup?" Em calls
to a mustached man checking on orders. "Hi, Marshall," answers
his former manager, Pete Karagiaouris. "Coming in to buy the place?"
A few heads turn, and apron-clad folks say quick hellos. "Hi, Marshall,"
says a forties-ish waitress with a sticky-sweet voice and a Midwestern
accent. "You know, I watch MTV and I never see you." "Oh, yeah?" he
replies coolly. Em takes a table towards
the back. After a very silent twenty minutes, he stops a passing waitress:
"Can we get some beers here?" "Yeah, but I need to
see your ID," she says. "I don't have my wallet
with me, but I used to work here - ask Pete. I'm over twenty-one."
Less than twenty-four hours
ago, in Staten Island, security guards had kept a frothing crowd from
tearing Em to shreds while he earned five grand for rapping four songs.
In his own hometown, in the place he spent forty to sixty hours a week
for three years, he's a stranger, and one without silverware, water or
a menu. Either Gilbert's issued a memo about keeping Em real or the staff
is having trouble coming to terms with Marshall's success. "Why did
that bitch have to say that?" he says about the MTV jab. "Fucking
bitch. I never liked her." It's a theme he returns to for the rest
of the night. Em's shot of Bacardi arrives; he slams it, gets another
and goes off to talk to the Gilbert's former co-workers. "Man, everything
can be going so right," Rosenberg says, sipping his beer. "But
a comment like that will stick with him for days. This is his reality
- he came from this, and after everything is over, this is the reality
he has to go back to." The manager heads over, offering
to make Eminem a special garlic-chicken pizza. "He was a good worker,"
Karagiaouris recalls. "But he'd be in the back rapping all the orders,
and sometimes I had to tell him to tone it down." Em demonstrates,
freestyling the ingredients of most of the appetizers in his herky-jerky
whine. "Music was always the most important thing to him," Karagiaouris
says. "But I never knew if he was any good at it - I listen to Greek
music." "You know what, Paulie?"
Em says, smiling mischeviously. "I want to do a clothing line. Fat
Fuck Clothing, for the Big Pun in you. What do you think?" The van winds back to Detroit,
stopping at a modest home. Kim, a pretty blonde, hops in holding Hailie,
a groggy but smiley blue-eyed beauty who immediately dives onto Em's lap
and wraps her arms around his neck. The van whisks off, Hailie falls back
to sleep, and Em tells Kim about the New York shows. Forty minutes later,
the van turns into the trailer park - more of a village, really - that
Em calls home. "After I got my record deal, my mother moved back
to Kansas City," he says. "I took over the payments on her trailer,
but I'm never here." Indeed, the eviction notice on the door is proof
enough. "Don't worry, we took care of that one," Rosenberg says
as Em rips it off and goes inside. The double-wide mobile home
houses Em's possessions, which, after all the robberies and the moving
around, have been acquired in the last six months. An autographed glossy
of Dre that reads, "Thanks for the support, asshole" (mirroring
Shady's autograph in "My Name Is") is on the wall, as is the
album art from the Shady EP. Above the TV are two shots of Em and Dre
from the video shoot, along with pictures of Hailie. A small rack holds
CDs by 2Pac, Mase, Babyface, Luther Vandross, Esthero and Snoop Dogg.
A baby couch for Hailie sits in front of the TV. On a wall near the kitchen
is a flyer titled "Commitments for Parents," which lists directives
like "I will give my child space to grow, dream, succeed and sometimes
fail." The original had a slightly
different beat and a less monied production that "'97 Bonnie and
Clyde," the version on the Interscope album, but on the Shady LP,
Hailie chillingly plays herself (she is also on the album cover and liner
notes). "I lied to Kim and told her I was taking her to Chuck E.
Cheese that day," Em recalls. "But I took her to the studio.
When she found out I used our daughter to write a song about killer her,
she fucking blew. We had just got back together for a couple of weeks.
Then I played her the song, and she bugged the fuck out." Kim declines to comment on
that song or any of the others about her, including a track slated for
Em's next album called "Kim." The song is the prelude to "'97
Bonnie and Clyde," with Em acting out the screaming fight that ends
in murder. Em has played it for her already and claims that now she is
truly convinced that he is insane. "If I was her, I would have ran
when I heard that shit," Dre says. "It's over the top - the
whole song is him screaming. It's good, though. Kim gives him a concept."
Em's friend Proof has been
around the couple from the beginning. "This is what I love about
Em," he says. "One time we came home and Kim had thrown all
his clothes on the lawn - which was, like, two pairs of pants and some
gym shoes. So we stayed at my grandmother's, and Em's like 'I'm leaving
her; I'm never going back.' Next day, he's back with her. The love they
got is so genuine, it's ridiculous. He gonna end up marrying her. But
there's always gonna be conflict there." Em says Hailie has heard
his record and loves it, but he knows she's too young still to get much
more than the beats. "When she gets old enough, I'm going to explain
it to her," Em says. "I'll let her know that Mommy and Daddy
weren't getting along at the time. None of it was to be taken literally."
He shakes his head ruefully. "Although at the time, I wanted to fucking
do it." Em is the first to admit that he's got a bad temper, which
he has harnessed into a career. "My thoughts are so fucking evil
when I'm writing shit," he says. "If I'm mad at my girl, I'm
gonna sit down and write the most misogynistic fucking rhyme in the world.
It's not how I feel in general, it's how I feel at that moment. Like say
today, earlier, I might think something like, 'Coming through the airport
sluggish, walking on crutches, hit a pregnant bitch in the stomach with
luggage.'" Slim Shady is Marshall Mathers'
way of taking revenge on the world, and he's also a defense mechanism.
On the one hand, a lot of Slim Shady's cartoonish fantasies are offensive;
on the other, they're better than Mathers re-creating the kind of abuse
the world heaped upon him growing up. "I dealt with a lot of shit
coming up, a lot of shit," he says. "When it's like that, you
learn to live day by day. When all this happened, I took a deep breath,
just like, "I did it.'" The magnitude of what he's done in such
a short time doesn't seem to have sunk in. Em hasn't sipped the bubbly
or smelled the roses - and if he allots time for that in the next few
months, it will have to be at the drive-through. As for the future, he
won't even wager a guess.
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