Eminem blows up

 

In three short months, twenty-four year old Marshall Bruce Mathers III has gone from white trash to white hot.

The Michigan rapper who calls himself Eminem - and whose debut The Slim Shady LP, sold 480,000 copies in its first two weeks - was a $5.50-an-hour cook in a Detroit grill before his obscenity-strewn, gleefully violent, spastic, hilarious and demented rhymes landed him in the studio with rap honcho Dr. Dre.

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 is already a bona fide star, the type not-likely to play a club this small again. The only reason he is here at all is that this date was booked before his debut album entered the charts at Number Two. The demand for the record at stores around the country was so great the Interscope shipped more that 1 million copies - extraordinarily rare for a first record. Eminem has similarily conquered MTV: Since the January release of the wise-ass video for "My Name Is" he has been on the network more than Carson Daly. And now three months later, despite the fact that he's never headlined for any length of time, the rapper has been offered slots on every summer tour except CSNY's.

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.

And in the midst of the splatter is Marshall Mathers. Songs like "As The World Turns", in which Shady "fucks a divorced slut" to death with his "go-go-gadget dick," are adolescent fantasies that indicate how Em spells revenge. But songs like "If I Had" and "Rock Bottom" are where the cartoons fade away, the bravado drops and the frustrated kid of this not-too-distant past appears, fed up with life, dead-end jobs adn the poverty that has made him "mad enough to scream but sad enough to tear."

"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."

Detroit DJs and radio folks seemed to agree, leaving Infinite well enough alone. "After that record, every rhyme I wrote got angrier and agrier," Eminem says. "A lot of it was because of the feedback I got. Motherfuckers was like, "You're a white boy, what the fuck are you rapping for? Why don't you go into rock and roll? All that type of shit started pissing me off." It didn't help that days before his daughter's first birthday, Eminem got fired from his cooking job at Gilbert's Lodge. "That was the worst time ever, dog," he says. "It was like five days before Christmas, which is Hailie's birthday. I had, like, forty dollars to get her something. I wrote "Rock Bottom" write after that."

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."

 

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