“Sensitive or sick: will the real Eminem please stand up? A new album takes us on a wild trip with the rap world’s brightest and bawdiest talent.
‘God sent me to piss the world off,’ proclaimed Eminem on last year’s catchy hit single, “My Name Is.” And standing on a Manhattan street corner in a superhero suit with an MTV camera crew in tow, taunting a pair of dangerously irate construction workers through a megaphone, the rapper is definitely living up to his rep. Eminem, a.k.a. Slim Shady, refuses to break character; as the MTV folks back away, he relentlessly needles the hardhats from behind his two burly bodyguards. ‘He called me an asshole in front of 300 people,’ screams one victim, unaware that he’s just been pranked by the hottest rapper around. ‘I’ll stab that motherfucker in his fucking back.’ Take a number, dawg. After Eminem’s new album hits stores this week, you’ll have to line up behind Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Will Smith, ‘N Sync, Billboard magazine and Eminem’s own mother, all of whom come under heavy fire from the lyrical arsonist.
Out this week, ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ is Eminem’s follow-up to his triple-platinum, Grammy-winning ‘The Slim Shady LP.’ Accented by his cartoonish sound effects and sarcastic asides, and anchored by producer Dr. Dre’s keep-their-heads-ringin’ beats, it’s absorbing and appalling in equal measure. The 18 hair-raising tracks include the Columbine-inspired “Remember Me?” (“Two kids, sixteen, with M-16s and ten clips each… And Slim gets blamed in Bill Clinton’s speech?”) and the gleefully homicidal anthem “Kill You” (“Okay I’m ready to go play/I got the machete from O.J.”). But this isn’t just a twisted joke; the rapper’s sociopathic facade masks the lingering hurts of his Dickensian childhood. And by artfully filtering his rage through a barrage of intricate rhymes, Eminem has not only become the legitimate heir to Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., he’s arguably the most compelling figure in all of pop music.
Away from the daily grind of album promotion, the cocky, hyperkinetic Eminem is replaced by an introspective, highly self-aware Marshall Mathers (his real name, hence the M&M; moniker). Compulsively honest, he readily answers every question-except one. ‘People ask me, ‘Well, how do we know when you’re joking and when you’re serious?’ ‘ he said last week, stretched out on a couch in his Detroit studio. ‘ ‘Cause you say you don’t mean everything you say, but some things you say you mean.’ It’s like, you don’t. That’s the mystique about me.’ In the post-Littleton battle between the forces of irony and literalism, that’s probably way too much mystique for most parents. These folks are now up in arms over Marilyn Manson, goths and, in the case of Billboard editor Timothy White, Eminem. The fear is that if there’s a joke behind Eminem’s lyrics-profane, violent, misogynistic, homophobic, misanthropic, self-loathing and brilliant – their kids won’t get it. But today’s media-addled kids may be more savvy than that. Bay Area teen Randi Anderson explains that Eminem, by saying the unsayable, actually goes beyond merely venting aggression to capture the confusion of his generation. ‘When Eminem raps about the s-t that goes on in his head, I identify with it.’
All irony aside, Eminem has lived a difficult life. Born in Missouri to a single mother (he’s never met his father), he bounced back and forth with his mom between Missouri and Michigan. By changing schools every three months, Eminem became an easy mark for bullies, one of whom pounded him into a five-day coma. He and his mother finally settled in a virtually all-black Detroit housing project when he was 12, and hip-hop became his salvation: he went from lip-syncing N.W.A. songs at home to battling other MCs on open-mike nights. Loud boos greeted the skinny white rapper-until he opened his mouth. ‘I heard him in a battle with 50 other MCs,’ says Paul (Bunyan) Rosenberg, Eminem’s 28-year-old manager and attorney. ‘He took them all by himself.’
In 1997, stuck in a series of dead-end jobs, Eminem completed a demo called ‘The Slim Shady EP’ that finally captured his snarky persona: the class clown with the head-of-the-class lyrics. But he and his girlfriend Kim were also struggling to make ends meet while raising their infant daughter, Hailie Jade (her name is tattooed on his right arm), all of which he recounted in unflinching detail on the track “Rock Bottom.” ‘I couldn’t afford to buy my daughter diapers and shit,’ he says. ‘My girl had to strip to make money.’ Things got so bad that he even tried to kill himself by swallowing pills.
Fortunately, his prince came, in the form of veteran producer/gangsta rapper Dr. Dre. ‘When [Interscope Records chief] Jimmy Iovine gave me the tape on him – I was like ‘Wow’,’ says Dre. ‘He had crazy flow and some funny shit to say.’ The first track they put down was “My Name Is,” the singsongy crossover smash that had some people saying he’d be a novelty act like Vanilla Ice. But Dre gave him the credibility he needed for rap fans to pay attention to his prodigious skills. And Eminem had secured the approval of the hip-hop community-everyone from Missy Elliott to Jay-Z-because of his years in the trenches. Says Los Angeles radio DJ Sway: ‘He was no stranger to getting on mikes and getting into battles, and that’s like paying your dues.’
Offstage, it’s been a roller-coaster year for the mad rapper. On the positive side, Eminem married Kim, who he fantasized about killing on the supremely controversial ” ’97 Bonnie and Clyde.” ‘Right now, I feel like I’m on top of the world,’ he says of their reconciliation. ‘I did right for my daughter.’ Yet on his new album, there’s a prequel to ” ’97 Bonnie and Clyde” titled “Kim,” recreating the argument that led him to (lyrically) murder her. ‘It’s really weird for me to listen to that song,’ which he recorded while they were apart. ‘The pain that I felt at that time was so real that I really actually wanted to do that. That’s why I just don’t listen to the song anymore.’ He adds: ‘[Kim] doesn’t like the fact that it went on the album, but I’m like this – music is a form of expression.’
Eminem was a little too expressive for his mother; angered by his statements in interviews that she was a drug user who failed to provide for him, she sued him last September for $10 million (the lawsuit is still pending). Rather than tone down his rhetoric on his new album, Eminem repeats his charges and proceeds to get, well, Oedipal on her in two separate songs. He’s still seething: ‘If my mother is fucking cruel enough, knowing she didn’t help me get where I’m at, try to take food out of my mouth and out of my daughter’s mouth, try to take me for everything that I have, then I’m not holding back on this album,’ he says. His mother’s attorney, Fred Gibson, told NEWSWEEK that her problem was with Eminem’s interviews, not his lyrics. ‘She asked him to lay off, stop ridiculing her, to stop demeaning her and stop defaming her on numerous occasions,’ says Gibson. ‘This was the last action she had available to her to make him stop.’
If Eminem was just a wounded child lashing out at the world around him, he’d be worth one listen at best. But he picks on himself almost as much as he does the people on his enemies list, a defense mechanism that he developed as a child. ‘When I started using the whole Slim Shady name, it gave me the chance to take what was wrong with my life and turn it back on [others],’ he explains. By flipping his razor-sharp lyrics on himself, Eminem subverts the smirking superiority that plagues mainstream rap, a wily underdog move that lets him get away with more than he could otherwise.
And as the underdogs of their own reality, teens are looking for a few good icons. When alternative rock’s no-sellout fear of success led to the downsizing of the rock star, millions of white kids turned to rap superstars like Tupac and Biggie. But after both were gunned down, the hip-hop-dominated music scene was left without a galvanizing figure. Thankfully, Eminem has come along to save hard-core hip-hop from the flossy tales of Cristal-popping, Glock-toting thugs that play in an endless loop. Blessed with Biggie’s witty wordplay and Tupac’s soul-baring courage, Eminem is limited only by his ambition-and he’s already setting his sights high. “Tupac was good at making you feel his pain,” Eminem says. ‘I want to be able to make people cry, to make people feel.’ And Interscope’s Iovine is certain that today’s youth will eat it up. ‘There’s one of these [hip-hop] kids in every household.’ In other words, the chickens have come home to rap.”
