The Dark Story of Eminem (38 page)

It showed us Marshall at 16, the year after he met his black future partner Proof, and the year he was booed off by black audiences at Detroit’s Rhythm Kitchen. But this Marshall had white rapping partners, too. This Marshall lived in Warren’s white suburb, the side of his life he had always blurred. There, from 1988 to 1993, he was a member of Bassmint Productions, with another MC, Chaos Kid, and two producing brothers, DJ Buttafingaz and Manix. Photos of them in 1991 showed four goofy, badly dressed white kids, clowning for the camera. The scrawny, satirically intense Chaos Kid looked like the contender. Marshall, with his finger up his nose, had not yet met Shady.

“
8 Mile
was not a documentary of his life,” the adult Chaos Kid told
The Source
. “Hollywood would have liked to portray him as a white kid in the ghetto – the
only
white kid, struggling to come up, with no other white people around him when he first started recording. But we were all white. Eminem didn’t even start working with black producers until ‘95.”

A picture of Chaos Kid shows him looking at the camera with hungry, nervous eyes, writing on pages filled with words. Not an MC now, back then he too must have had Marshall’s dreams. “For a while, I did influence him,” he remembered. “But I was about Public Enemy and he was Naughty By Nature.”

Bassmint Productions performed locally and recorded hundreds of freestyles in, naturally, a basement. “It belonged to the only dude in the neighbourhood who had a turntable and a fucking microphone,” Eminem remembered to
XXL
. “We would skip school, go to his house, make tapes, do songs. The whole recording process then was to sit down and make goofy-ass songs. None of this was wrote – it was all fuckin’ freestyle. We made a million fuckin’ songs.” As to racism, Chaos Kid remembered opting out of a spoof “Racist Rap Hour”. “I know it’s kind of hard for a black person to understand why white people that are in rap music would do this, but it was a joke. It was never meant to be released to the public.”

In a letter to
The Source
after the publication of the piece, which he felt misrepresented him and had been written with “ulterior motives”, Chaos Kid further clarified that those tapes were “suckering rhymes”, meant to be as “goofy/stupid/ignorant/wack as possible. Marshall never used derogatory remarks about African-Americans in conversation – in fact, we both had real songs denouncing racism. Marshall Mathers is not a racist. Although the songs were in bad taste, they were not intended to be taken seriously or even heard.”

Others were not so conciliatory – like Champtown, who claimed Bassmint “were rolling with [my] Straight Jacket Records from ‘91 to ‘95. Eminem was stiff with it at first. I definitely was responsible for his humour. I gave him the confidence to be funny. I used to be a jokerman back in the days. When I see Eminem, that was a part of me.” From most of these people Marshall once knew, there was the same tone of hurt confusion. Head, Eminem’s DJ for years, whose productions were retooled by Dre on
The Slim Shady LP
, and was then cast aside, was simply bitter. It seemed likely
The Source
‘s tape originated with him. Manix had meanwhile angrily played Champtown the
“moon crickets”
recording, and the two men had hundreds more tapes stashed, their intentions for them unclear. Others cursed Eminem for not signing them, for hurting Detroit, not helping it; for leaving them behind.

They were like vengeful ghosts from Eminem’s past clawing at his feet, as a closet he’d thought locked suddenly yawned wide. But it was too late for them. Marshall had been the one with the strength to succeed. And as Eminem, his responsibilities were not to the past. At the 54 Sound Studio, still in the heart of his old home, he was making a new album. The future was waiting.

Eminem fully re-entered the fray in 2004, momentum building month by month. First, he fulfilled his responsibilities to D12, whose second album
D12 World
was released on April 27. His more mainstream fans still reluctantly tolerated the group as their star’s indulgence. But the perception that D12 were just his lucky lackeys was addressed head-on with the album’s first single, ‘My Band’, a daring dramatisation of everyone’s worst suspicions of the group’s true relationship behind backstage doors.

The amusing video showed Eminem being pampered, pawed by groupies, massaged (naked, he let it be known, if you froze the frame and looked really closely) and stealing the spotlight on stage, while the others gripe helplessly behind his back, in their cramped dressing room.
“I think everybody’s all jealous and shit, because I’m the lead singer of the band,”
Em egotistically confides.
“This rock star shit – it’s the life for me, and all the other guys, they just despise me.”
When the others try to summon the nerve to confront their meal-ticket about their shoddy treatment, a very white, bratty Eminem asking,
“You got something to SAY?”
from stage-left shuts them up. Real simmering slights are also confronted, from D12’s steep drop in popularity when, as usually happens, they tour without their star attraction (
“they say the lead singer’s rock, and the group is not”
), to interviewers’ disinterest in anything except Em (
“fuck Marshall, ask us the questions!”
). ‘My Band’ ends with lardy scatological supremo Bizarre revealing he’s the real talent and going solo (actually, an appetising prospect).

The enduring contradictions of D12’s existence were brought out more seriously in interviews. “We get asked about Eminem a lot,” Kon Artis complained to
Hip-Hop Connection
with unfaked hurt. “I understand that. I mean, we’re on his label after all, but sometimes they ask 10 questions and nine are about Eminem. I’m like, ‘So why are you even interviewing me then?’ “

The answer was obvious, if unflattering. D12 were like a girlfriend only Eminem knew why he loved, but who others had to tolerate to get to him. Kuniva had no illusions about the relationship’s imbalance. But he also knew it was co-dependent, in a way outsiders missed. “There’s a million things Em could be doing besides doin’ an album with D12,” he admitted to
Rolling Stone
. “But we’re the only real friends he has. We grew up together, lived together, flipped burgers together. There’s a bond between us that nobody can break. And there’s a whole thing with him feelin’ like he owes it to us. He knows without D12 there wouldn’t be a Slim Shady.”