February 23, 2003

George Bush called him “the most dangerous threat to American children since polio.” For the past few years, he has been the bete noire of the Right and the Left alike, a performer with a talent for provoking.

With his songs, he has earned the vilification of politicians, parents and teachers alike, while simultaneously becoming the most idolized figure in contemporary pop music. Right now, he is not just the biggest rapper in America, but the biggest pop star on the planet. He is Marshall Mathers III a.k.a Slim Shady a.k.a Eminem, and he is coming to a neighbourhood near you.

The film 8 mile, recently released, stars Eminem as Jimmy Smith Junior, a slight variation on his real self. Ironically, Eminem’s entry into the mainstream occurs right at the moment when rap music, his chosen form, is being censured in the UK for promoting what British Culture Minister Kim Howells last week called “a culture where killing is almost a fashion accessory.” Rappers, according to Howells, were “boasting macho idiots,” which, by extension, makes the world’s biggest rapper the most boastful macho idiot. Eminem would no doubt agree with all but the last part of that triple billing.

But hip-hop is also, despite Howells’s patronizing and potentially racist dismissal, an American art form, as potent as film or fiction, which currently communicates with a huge constituency way beyond the reach of most novels or all but the most successful movies. If that form has a poet laureate, it is Eminem. Revealingly, and some would say problematically, hip-hop’s biggest star is white. Like Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger before him, he has adopted — and adapted — a black form, earning, in the process, the kind of global celebrity — and infamy — his black contemporaries can only dream of. True to form, he has anticipated and deflected any colour-coded criticism in rhyme: “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/To do black music so selfishly/And use it to get myself wealthy.”

Ironically, as Kim Howells’s knee-jerk dismissal of rap made headlines, the British media were gearing up for the latest chapter in the continuing saga of the man formerly known as Marshall Mathers III, a name as stately and grandiose as his pseudonym — a play on his favourite brand of sweets — is catchy and disposable.

8 mile is a musical of sorts, an old-fashioned, redemptive narrative about a young man’s struggle to escape his grim blue-collar surroundings by making it as a rapper. Eminem is a young man who has found fame not by evoking the myth of the American Dream, but by describing, often in graphic detail, the reality of a relatively unarticulated American nightmare: the dark underbelly of the same poor, white, urban America that Michael Moore exposes on film. It is not overstating the case to say that Eminem is as reflective of his time as Bob Dylan was of his; and, in his own way, just as trenchant a social commentator.

And what antagonizes his critics most is the way in which he seems to revel in anger and hate. On the now infamous The Marshall Mathers LP, where he created his alter ego, Slim Shady to vent his murderous feelings, he fantasized about murdering his estranged wife and dumping her body in a lake with the help of his infant daughter whose actual voice, God help us, appeared on the gleeful chorus. This was as hardcore and, many argued, as wilfully irresponsible, as pop music gets.

That is a view shared not just by the Right but by many liberal parents who have found that Eminem’s music has a particular fascination for not just impressionable teenagers but youngsters more usually drawn to the harmless inanities of manufactured pop puppets. The hysteria around Eminem’s lyrics reached a climax of sorts with the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, when he managed to unite in disapproval the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (“the most blatantly offensive homophobic lyrics we have ever heard”), the Sun (“it promotes torture, incest, murder, rape and armed robbery”), and Christina Aguilera, who was targeted in typically offensive fashion in the line: “I’ll show the world how you gave me VD.” The Osmonds’ Family Christmas Album this wasn’t.

With producer Dr Dre at the helm, though, Eminem’s songs possess a pop sensibility that is currently second to none. It is there in the wonderful rhyme schemes, the taut melodies, and the flowing, often involved, lyrical wordplay that reached an apogee of sorts in Stan, a song delivered in the voice of an obsessive fan who ends up committing suicide when the object of his devotion does not return his affection. Having exposed the dark heart of American suburban society, Eminem cast a similarly cold eye, and keen intelligence, on celebrity culture.

Almost simultaneously, that same celebrity was wreaking havoc on his personal life. After being torn to shreds verbally throughout the Slim Shady album, his long-suffering mother sued him for ‘emotional distress’ to the tune of pounds sterling seven million. (She was awarded pounds sterling 1,000.) In one volatile week in 2000, he was arrested for waving a gun at a rival rap posse, and for pistol-whipping a man he thought had been kissing his now estranged wife, Kim, in the car park of a Detroit club.

In performance, he had taken to dragging a blow-up doll on stage and stabbing it repeatedly with a knife while singing the aforementioned Kim. Their turbulent on-off romance ended messily after she attempted suicide by slitting her wrists in July 2000 (Eminem is also believed to have twice attempted suicide). With each outrage, his ascendancy has continued apace, the ire he fuels in his detractors only shoring up his iconic status among his devoted audience.

Two years is a long time in pop music, though. Enough time for opinions to change, for yesterday’s anti-hero to metamorphose into tomorrow’s lovable role model. Ask Mick Jagger. Ask Ozzy Osbourne. And so it is that Eminem suddenly seems to be undergoing a rehabilitation of sorts in the same media that once called for his lyrics to be censored, his records and concerts to be banned.

Born to a 22-year-old father and a 15-year-old mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, he grew up in the deprived suburbs of east Detroit, a landscape that, in Curtis Hanson’s film, looks like the most forlorn place on earth. His early life was unsettled, his ill-matched parents playing in a band called the Daddy Warbucks which toured the cabaret circuit. When his father split to California, the pre-pubescent Marshall and his mother settled in a predominantly black neighbourhood in Detroit, and there his half-brother, Nathan, was born in 1986. Bullied at school and beaten up by local hoods for being white, the young Marshall ironically found solace of sorts in rap music played on the local black radio stations. Later, he would write Brain damage, a graphic recreation of a beating by a school bully that caused cerebral damage and put him in a coma for five days. While his mother attended bingo, he sat at home writing down rhymes which he then tested on the audience for the local rap contests at the nearby Osbourne High School. At the weekends, accompanied by his fellow rapper, who traded under the name Proof, he attended open mic contests at a local record store, the Hip-Hop Shop.

Some of the most evocative scenes in 8 mile draw on Eminem’s early grounding in these local Detroit hip-hop battles. The nearest analogy is the boxing ring, with words rather than punches being exchanged, and with all the same kind of ritualized male camaraderie, machismo, and latent homo-eroticism that attends the fight game on display in the rap arena. One of the most surprising elements of screenwriter Scott Silver’s hard-edged narrative is just how central he makes the issue of race. It resounds through the story louder even than the brutal beats that punctuate the tale. Each of the black rappers that Jimmy goes head-to-head with on the cramped stage of the Shelter club homes in on his colour, employing a whole host of coded epithets to disrespect him, including “wigger” (wannabe nigger) and Vanilla Ice (the pseudonym of another, altogether less talented white rapper whose rhymes were as asinine as his name). The one word they use more than any other, though, is “Elvis.”

In real life, none of this mattered to the man without whom Eminem would have almost certainly remained another angry loser who could have been a contender. He was discovered at one such rap contest by Dr Dre, the most influential producer in recent hip-hop history. Dre had already orchestrated the original gangsta rap sound of West Coast rap crew Niggaz With Attitude — their biggest hit was called “F the police” — and later, the often crude and puerile fantasies of Snoop Doggy Dogg, and thus was no stranger to controversy. When he first saw Eminem perform, he recalled later, it was “some very awkward stuff...like seeing a black guy doing country and western.” He nevertheless saw talent where others saw only front, adding: “I don’t care if you’re purple. If you can kick it, I’m working with you.” Eminem, as events have proven, could kick it with the best of them. The rest is history.

What really distinguishes him from his black peers and contemporaries is not his colour so much as his subject matter. No black rapper, however badass, however steeped in real-life gangster culture, however messed by his upbringing, would write a lyric disrespecting his own mother, would perform a song as driven by familial hatred as the recent hit Cleaning out my closet. It’s a song that is chilling in its vengeful conviction, disturbing in its attack on all we hold sacred about the ties that bind, about family and bloodlines, and the sanctity of filial relationships. (Though there is something vulnerable in his recent admission that he records separate ‘clean’ versions of his songs for his beloved daughter, Haile.) It is also an indictment of an American society that has let those ideals of family and belonging fall into such disrepair. And, whatever else it is, it’s real; it evinces real rage, real pain. As such, and no doubt to his disgust, Eminem has more in common with Kurt Cobain than Ice Cube. In a form that sets so much store by “being real” and, paradoxically, indulges in so much empty posturing, Eminem is an exception in more ways than one. It is not the whiteness of his skin that should concern us, though, but the black, bottomless depth of his rage.

It will be interesting to see if he can succeed where Presley and Jagger failed — where poor, doomed Cobain couldn’t bear to fail — and win the approval of the mainstream without losing his voice. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.

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