The Dark Story of Eminem (35 page)

In the general surprise at
8 Mile
‘s success, there was even talk of an Eminem Oscar. He downplayed his prospects to MTV Asia. “It could or it couldn’t. Steely Dan beat me out one year for a Grammy so, you know … Whatever comes I’ll take, but I’m not looking for that. I just wanted to make an authentic movie about the place where I grew up.”

But as his movie’s triumph became apparent, the shocked exhaustion at shoot’s end which had made him dread ever making another seemed to fall away. “Now that I’ve had a taste of the movie business, I want some more,” he decided. “I want to do something completely different. I would love to play a comedy character or something. People wouldn’t expect that of me.” His family were, as always, free with their advice. Said grandmother Kresin: “I was one of the first in line to see
8 Mile
. Now I would love to see him finish what he started, by making a sequel, showing how he cut his first CD.” With the spectre of Elvis the movie star now looming (an early, relatively good Presley film,
Loving You
(1957) had been very much in the raw, semi-biopic style of
8 Mile
, which hadn’t stopped the sewage that followed), Eminem’s cautious advisers seemed to feel the same way.

There was one more strangely resonant piece of bad news for the rapper, as
8 Mile
‘s takings roared in. It was revealed that on November 7 Kresin’s one-time home in Warren, Eminem and his mother’s bolthole on so many occasions through their lives, had been sold by Debbie’s brother, Todd Nelson (who had previously fronted a cheap video about his nephew,
Eminem – Behind The Mask
, in which he had claimed to be his rapping mentor). “This is a very emotional thing for me, because this house has been in our family for over 50 years,” Nelson told the
Detroit Free Press
. He couldn’t be accused of exploiting his relative on this occasion. Short of money, he sold up for $45,000, in an area with an average house price of $90,000. The buyers, St. Clair Shores lawyer Sebastian Lucida and real estate developer Roland Fraschetti, then coolly put their new property up for auction, with a minimum bid of $120,000. By the start of December, the house Eminem had built a replica of to reveal his “white trash” background as he toured the world, situated close to the 8 Mile colour line he’d made notorious, the place where he’d crayoned pictures for his vanished father, and the nearest thing he’d had in his unhappy, unsettled life to visible roots, had a bid for $12 million considered. Nelson observed that Eminem was upset. It was just one more garish sign that he really could never go home again now.

Instead, he found himself standing at another crossroads. His influence was at its zenith, his powers seemingly at their peak, everything he touched in every medium a dazzling success. He was the biggest and best pop star in the world. His home life was the happiest it had ever been. And yet, the details of that real life became rarer and duller, as his fame continued to grow. The touchstones of all his work, as Eminem, Slim, or Jimmy – the beatings, depression, poverty, arrests, savage maternal and marital scraps – were buried in the past. They had been strip-mined and alchemised and turned into fiction. But they might stay the hot core of a cooling life. “That’s my worst fear,” he confirmed to
Rolling Stone
, “that I’ll wake up tomorrow and won’t be able to write. That if there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be wack and boring.” As he had in ‘Lose Yourself’, he could imagine the day it all ended. “I’ve felt since my first day of rapping that my time is ticking. That’s how I’ve based my whole career – that this might never happen again. Fans are so fickle and so quick to turn on you. Suddenly, you’re not cool no more, even if at first you’re the greatest thing since sliced cunt.”

The collaborations of Hollywood could yet soften him into spineless-ness, too, Elvis all over again. And yet, the inexhaustible resource and radicalism of his work in 2002 suggested a happier comparison. Openly battling his nation’s rulers in a time of scared consensus, picking at the sores of sex, gender, race, class and violence, spilling astonishing words as easily as breathing, he was like the great, late poet Allen Ginsberg. Both men are big enough to write about America every time they write about themselves, and themselves when they write about America. Neither subject has an end.

There was one more thing that may save Eminem from falling. The hurts of his past didn’t only survive in his songs. His struggling, despairing years as Marshall were also a warning of where he might return, and the doubters and bullies he’d meet there. “Vengeance is my motivation,” he’s said. And that work is never done.

“It’s kinda like that thing where you struggle all your life to get it,” he told
The Source
, “but it’s just as hard to maintain as it is to get there. I have to keep working if I’m gonna keep being able to laugh at them people who said I wouldn’t be shit. I do feel like, ‘Look what I’ve accomplished, ha-ha.’ At the same time, there’s the feeling that: ‘How do I know that I got the last laugh?’ “

The next year saw no new Eminem album, and no conclusive answer to how his music would survive contentment. Instead, he slipped behind the scenes, signing and producing some of 2003’s biggest stars, as if rehearsing for his oft-mooted retirement from rapping. By the year’s end, the dramas of his past would stake their claim on him anyway. His whiteness, which he had worked so hard to downplay, would once more cast poisonous doubt on everything he did.

Such thoughts were far from his mind that March, as the Oscars neared. Wild rumours of a Best Actor nomination for his
8 Mile
performance had sensibly come to nothing. One of the favourites to win that award did, though, have a sliver of Shady in his soul. Daniel Day-Lewis’ ferociously intense turn as the demonic Victorian villain Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s
Gangs Of New York
had been inspired by an unusual piece of Method preparation. He blasted out Eminem’s ‘The Way I Am’ in his trailer each morning, using its snarling, trapped rage as fuel for Bill’s lupine savagery.

Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ was meanwhile nominated for Best Song, against competition from the likes of Paul Simon and U2. Strangely, though, he chose the most prestigious awards ceremony of his life to break his habit of attending them all. Rumours circulated that he had refused to tone down his performance of ‘Lose Yourself’ for the organisers – unlikely, in such a career-minded man. At any rate, when his song was announced as the winner by Barbra Streisand – with a gasp signalling either shock, or an approving welcome into her conservative, Old Hollywood world – keyboardist and co-writer Luis Resto stepped up to accept the award. “It means a lot to him, believe me,” Resto claimed backstage. “I just don’t think he expected it.”

The success of ‘Lose Yourself’ and Eminem’s rumoured boycott of the awards on a petty point were anyway insignificant in the night’s wider context. Headlines were grabbed by documentarist Michael Moore, who used accepting his Oscar for
Bowling For Columbine
to deliver a raging protest against the just-launched invasion of Iraq by the US and Britain. Forcing anti-war sentiment onto American networks otherwise bellicosely uniform in their patriotism, provoking boos, cheers and frozenly inscrutable smiles from the assembled stars, daring even to attack the President – who he called “fictitious” – in time of war, it was an incandescent moment. Eminem’s disinterest in even attending such a forum at such a time did him no favours. Instead, he saw his music used for the war. The brooding aggression of ‘Lose Yourself’ themed BBC radio’s coverage of the conflict’s first night, as if George Bush and Saddam Hussein were competing rap champions. And Eminem was one of the most requested artists on British and US forces’ radio, joining The Clash’s ‘Rock The Casbah’, another record to have its oppositional intent turned inside out.

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.