The Dark Story of Eminem
Read The Dark Story of Eminem Online
Authors: Nick Hasted
Copyright © 2011 Omnibus Press
This edition © 2011 Omnibus Press
(A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)
EISBN: 978-0-85712-716-7
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For Stacey Shelley,
the bravest person I know,
who helped me write it.
With love.
FEVER
FEBRUARY 8, 2001. The storm clouds of anger and outrage have been building for weeks, from politicians and students, gay rights campaigners and women’s groups, reporters for homophobic tabloids and liberal broadsheets. As Eminem sleeps in the private jet ferrying him from Paris to the opening Manchester engagement of his UK tour, the British are reviling, dissecting and supporting him with an intensity reserved only for the most terrible folk devils, and startling pop stars.
He is being pursued from America by accusations of real violence and hurt: his own mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, wants $10 million for the distress he has caused her; his wife Kim is considering divorce, and has recently slashed her wrists over his raps’ insensitive insults; they say he pistol-whipped a man for kissing her, and waved a gun at another, all in one night. But it’s the raps on his last record,
The Marshall Mathers LP
, the thoughts in his mind, that disturb and distress Britain most. He claims to have slaughtered O.J. Simpson’s wife, to have armed the Columbine killers. He taunts women, and homosexuals. He wants to kill his father, and his mother, and his wife.
That’s why 100 gay rights protesters gather outside the Manchester Evening News Arena in the hours before he takes the stage, why his hockey-masked, chainsaw-wielding image is on the cover of every newspaper the next morning, why the police will barge into his dressing room after the show, only to find him vanished, slipped away in the night.
It’s hysteria whipped to a frenzy rarely seen since The Sex Pistols, sucking in commentators and members of the public with no normal interest in pop, and, like a fever, with those people it passes quickly. But, as I take the train to attend that Manchester show, I know Eminem has provoked deeper discussion.
The Marshall Mathers LP
, and in particular its recent number one single ‘Stan’ – the schizoid, self-reflective story of an Eminem fan’s mad love for his idol – has stopped all my friends cold. One female friend semi-seriously offers sex for any spare ticket I might find. Another friend who only likes classical music plays ‘Stan’ over and over at a party, fascinated. And whenever Eminem’s name is mentioned, it’s impossible to talk about him for less than an hour, and then someone new will start the conversation again. Is it all right to laugh at him? Is it okay to adore him?
He is simply too arresting, too ambiguously, coherently furious to ignore. On
The Marshall Mathers LP
, he has danced with glee on every embarrassing social fault-line in America, embraced every disgraceful and awkwardly hateful side of his country, from bullying misogynist machismo to homophobia. And his excuse, advanced during this tour? “Pardon the cliché, but I’m just a product of my environment. America made me.”
He grew up, it’s been revealed, on the wrong side of the tracks, a white boy in the black half of Detroit’s poorest district, the son of an impoverished single mother. He was beaten almost to death and shot at by his black neighbours for his skin colour. And yet, the heroes of this racially abused white were black rappers; and now he walks among them, wildest of them all, like some twisted photo-negative of a Civil Rights dream.
American politicians and pressure groups shake nervous fingers at his unnatural pre-eminence. But Eminem’s music skips around its earnest accusers, because he is more sophisticated than them, in a way as important as his racial transgressions. As a child fan of gangsta-rap’s fantasies who grew up in the real (if, for him, wrong) ghetto, he understands perfectly the difference between exaggerated art and grim reality. This has freed him to explore extreme emotional places that his country – so much happier censoring rappers than addressing real racially divided ghettos, poverty and gunplay – would rather think didn’t exist.
All these things run through my mind as I enter the Evening News Arena minutes before this lightning rod figure takes the stage. The protesters have melted away long ago. Only the 28-year-old Marshall Mathers himself is left, to face the expectations of 16,000 young fans, and the fascination of the rest of Britain, waiting to hear what the monster really looked like, and the awful things he did.
But the man I watch for the next 90 minutes is the very opposite of a monster. Instead, when the horror movie hockey mask in which he enters is removed, his charisma fades like the Wizard of Oz. He looks short and slight, gym-work not obscuring the vulnerable, pasty, playground victim he once was. An expensive set and a cartoon intermission, and the sharing of rapping duties with his band of adolescent Detroit friends, D12, all seem designed to distract attention from the most infamous, supposedly fearless pop star in the world.
He doesn’t look likely to pistol-whip anyone, or to rape his mother. Instead, he concentrates on gently talking to the mostly teen or under crowd, making sure these children are in on the joke; trusting them not to do as his lyrics suggest. He ludicrously makes them all claim they’re drug addicts, to bring these people who like him closer, and push his credulous, adult critics away. The great misogynist even brings a teenage girl fan on stage, and treats her with such deference she could be his own daughter. He seems desperate to destroy the hysteria he’s provoked, to return to being an entertainer. In the flesh, his extremist art and timid reality seem separated by chasms. His rage only resurfaces at the end, when, rounding on his critics, he barks the chorus of another of his infamous hits:
“I am whatever you say I am.”
In truth, he’s so much more, and less. The real story of who he is begins 28 years before, and 4,000 miles away. It takes us back to the eerie industrial ruins of Detroit, USA.
GROUND ZERO
FLASHBACK. In Detroit, you can never go back far enough. People who talk glibly of the Death of the American Dream do so only because they’ve never been to this place, and seen the corroded, crudely hacked up corpse of a century of false hopes for themselves. Read the history books before you arrive, and you realise the city in which Eminem had to make his way is the end of every kind of American line.
Its rise was swift and promising enough. At the 19th century’s start, it was little more than a break in the Midwestern wilderness, a settlement known only to trappers from the French Canada it nearly touched. “De troit” was French for the straits, the narrow riverway down which they rowed, as they slipped between nations. But by 1805, the state of Michigan’s first governor, Judge Augustus Woodward, was already planning to transform it into “the Paris of the West”, a perfect new city of rationally designed parks and boulevards. This was the first dream Detroit dashed.
Still, in 1825, when the Erie Canal linked Canada’s Great Lakes to New York, it was chosen as the staging post for the settlement of America’s Northwest. In 1884, a railroad linking Detroit and Chicago added to its importance in the growing nation; although typically, this was one of the last such routes to be built. By the 20th century’s dawn, its downtown district was bustling and thriving in the style of grand American cities like New York, factories, bars, civic buildings and homes clustering together. But Detroit’s would be the last such urban area to be attempted in America, as a new, suburban life beckoned; and it would suffer the most sickening decline.
Such a fall would have seemed unimaginable when Henry Ford, born in nearby Dearborn, watched the millionth Model T roll from his factory in 1915, in a Detroit he had turned into the boomtown centre for the automobile industry he had started and ruled. His high factory wages sucked in families from as far as Palestine, Eastern Europe and the American Deep South. They rioted outside his gates in the clamour for those jobs, and by 1921 Detroit’s population had quadrupled, to a million. War work in the Forties brought a fresh surge, many of them Southern blacks, seeking opportunities away from their oppressive homes. Detroit was named “the arsenal of democracy” then, or simply Motor Town. It had the highest-paid blue-collar workers in America, its factories spread for miles, their machines turned incessantly, growth seemed the city’s permanent condition. But the segregated, devastated wasteland called “Amityville” by Eminem, or simply Shitville, was already being built, behind that veneer.
The segregation of its black and white citizens now defines Detroit as much as the Model T did. It was in the boom decade of the Forties that this time-bomb was set, as the city’s black population doubled, but the streets they were allowed to live in barely moved. Real estate covenants forbidding black occupation, white hostility and government collusion kept them hemmed into decaying districts like downtown’s Lower East Side, otherwise known as “rat alley”, for the rodent bites its cramped residents suffered, in homes absentee white landlords let fall apart as rents rocketed, in a ghetto stuffed to bursting point. Family life was strained, residents became transient, crime and squalor rose. Whites had their preconceptions confirmed. So when, in the Forties, the auto industry Detroit had birthed began to abandon its factories, following capitalism’s logic into cheaper suburban sites, white citizens fled with it. As civil rights legislation also challenged racial covenants in the city, whites entered new suburbs, which spread almost endlessly into barren hinterland. Past Detroit’s northern city limit, the long highway 8 Mile Road, these townships were not physically separate from Detroit. But legally, their vast grids of new bungalows, carved into “city” limits and school catchment borders, could not be penetrated. Protected by subtler real estate racism, and neighbourhood associations who harassed and attacked black “invaders”, as they had previously in the city, these new suburbs became a white world.