Eminem Blows Up from Rolling Stone Magazine, April
1999
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."
"I remember waking up and saying, 'I can spell elephant,'"
Em recalls with a laugh. "D'Angelo Bailey - I'll never forget that
kid."
Old D'Angelo won't forget you, either. "He was the one we
used to pick on," says Bailey, now married with kids and living in
Detroit. "There was a bunch of us that used to mess with him. You
know, bully-type things. We was having fun. Sometimes he'd fight back -
depended on what mood he'd be in." As for Eminem's recollection of
the event that put him in the hospital, Bailey boasts, "Yeah, we
flipped him right on his head at recess. When we didn't see him moving, we
took off running. We lied and said he slipped on the ice. He was a wild
kid, but back then we thought it was stupid. Hey, you have his phone
number?"
In the spring of 1997, Eminem recorded his eight song Slim
Shady EP - the demo that earned him his deal with Interscope. At the
time, he was scrounging more than ever. He and his girlfriend, Kim, had
been living with their baby in crack-infested neighborhoods. A stray
bullet flying through the kitchen window and lodging in the wall while Kim
was doing dishes wasn't the worst of it - they had been adopted by a
crackhead. "The neighborhoods we lived in fucking sucked," Kim
says. "I went through four TVs and five VCRs in two years."
After cleaning out the first of those TVs and VCRs, plus a clock radio,
the guy came back one night to make a sandwich. "He left the peanut
butter, jelly - all the shit - out and didn't steal nothing," Em
says. "Ain't this about a motherfucking bitch. But then he came back
again and took everything but the couches and beds. The pillows, clothes,
silverware - everything. We were fuckin' fucked."
The young parents moved in with Em's mother for a while, which
wasn't much better. "My mother did a lot of dope and shit - a lot of
pills - so she had mood swings," Em says. "She'd go to bed cool,
then wake up like, 'Motherfuckers, get out!'" Em's mom denies all of
the above. "I've never done drugs," she says. "Marshall was
raised in a drug and alcohol-free enviroment." He moved in with
friends, and Kim and the baby lived with her mother. "I didn't have a
job that whole summer," Em recalls. "Then we got evicted,
because my friends and me were paying rent to the guy on the lease, and he
screwed us over." The night before he headed to the Rap Olympics, an
annual nationwide MC battle in L.A., he came home to a locked door and an
eviction notice. "I had to break in," he says. "I didn't
have anywhere else to go. There was no heat, no water, no electricity. I
slept on the floor, woke up, went to L.A. I was so pissed."
"Oh, my God," recalls Paul "Bunyan"
Rosenberg, the beefy lawyer who manages Eminem. "There was this black
guy sitting next to me in the crowd at the Olympics. After the first
round, he yells, 'Just give it to the white boy. It's over. Give it to the
white boy.'"
They didn't, and Em was crushed. Not only couldhe have used the
first-place prize, 500 bucks and a Rolex, but he wasn't used to taking
second. "He really looked like he was going to cry," Rosenberg
says, nodding thoughtfully. Well, Eminem lost the battle, but he won the
war. A Shady EP given to a few Interscope staffers soon made it
into the hands of co-head Jimmy Iovine. While Em was in L.A., Iovine and
Dr. Dre took a listen. "In my entire career in the music
industry," Dre says, "I have never found anything from a demo
tape of a CD. When Jimmy played this, I said, 'Find him. Now.'"
Their first day in the studio, the pair knocked off "My Name
Is" in about an hour, and as much as that song proved that Em is a
brother from another planet, they were just warming up. "I wrote two
songs for the next album on ecstasy," Eminem says. "Shit about
bouncing off walls, going straight through 'em, falling down twenty
stories. Crazy. That's what we do when I'm in the studio with Dre."
Dr. Dre on E? "Ha, ha," Dre laughs. "He didn't say that!
It's true, though. We get in there, get bugged out, stay in the studio for
fuckin' two days. Then you're dead for three days. Then you wake up, pop
the tape in, like, 'Let me see what I've done.'"
"Hey, turn here," Eminem says to the driver of the big
white van currently crunching through the snow-covered streets of east
Detroit. "Stop. That was our house. My room was upstairs, in the
back." The small two-story homes on the gridlike streets are
identical - square patch of grass in the front, a short driveway on the
side - differentiable only by their brick face or shingles. The van turns
off 8 Mile, passing Em's high school, then the field next to the Bel-Air
Shopping Center, where Em lost his boombox and nearly his life. Em is
looking out of the window like a kid at Disneyland, pointing, recalling
happy and heartbreaking memories with equal excitement. "I like
living in Detroit, making it my home," he says as the van heads
toward the highway. "I like working out in L.A., but I wouldn't want
to live there. My little girl is here."
The van pulls up to Gilbert's Lodge, the every-food family
restaurant in suburban St. Clair Shores where Em worked on and off for
three years. Inside there are antler chandeliers, a couple of
appetite-suppressing mounted moose heads and a "trophy room,"
containing the jerseys of various local teams. The restaurant's staff
scurries about, unaware of Em, who has virtually walked into the kitchen
without being greeted. "Yo, Pete, whassup?" Em calls to a
mustached man checking on orders. "Hi, Marshall," answers his
former manager, Pete Karagiaouris. "Coming in to buy the place?"
A few heads turn, and apron-clad folks say quick hellos.
"Hi, Marshall," says a forties-ish waitress with a
sticky-sweet voice and a Midwestern accent. "You know, I watch MTV
and I never see you."
"Oh, yeah?" he replies coolly.
Em takes a table towards the back. After a very silent twenty
minutes, he stops a passing waitress: "Can we get some beers
here?"
"Yeah, but I need to see your ID," she says.
"I don't have my wallet with me, but I used to work here -
ask Pete. I'm over twenty-one."
Less than twenty-four hours ago, in Staten Island, security
guards had kept a frothing crowd from tearing Em to shreds while he earned
five grand for rapping four songs. In his own hometown, in the place he
spent forty to sixty hours a week for three years, he's a stranger, and
one without silverware, water or a menu. Either Gilbert's issued a memo
about keeping Em real or the staff is having trouble coming to terms with
Marshall's success. "Why did that bitch have to say that?" he
says about the MTV jab. "Fucking bitch. I never liked her." It's
a theme he returns to for the rest of the night. Em's shot of Bacardi
arrives; he slams it, gets another and goes off to talk to the Gilbert's
former co-workers. "Man, everything can be going so right,"
Rosenberg says, sipping his beer. "But a comment like that will stick
with him for days. This is his reality - he came from this, and after
everything is over, this is the reality he has to go back to."
The manager heads over, offering to make Eminem a special
garlic-chicken pizza. "He was a good worker," Karagiaouris
recalls. "But he'd be in the back rapping all the orders, and
sometimes I had to tell him to tone it down." Em demonstrates,
freestyling the ingredients of most of the appetizers in his herky-jerky
whine. "Music was always the most important thing to him,"
Karagiaouris says. "But I never knew if he was any good at it - I
listen to Greek music."
"You know what, Paulie?" Em says, smiling mischeviously.
"I want to do a clothing line. Fat Fuck Clothing, for the Big Pun in
you. What do you think?"
It's getting late, and Em's daughter is waiting for him. He has
four days here at home to spend with her and her mother.
The van winds back to Detroit, stopping at a modest home. Kim, a
pretty blonde, hops in holding Hailie, a groggy but smiley blue-eyed
beauty who immediately dives onto Em's lap and wraps her arms around his
neck. The van whisks off, Hailie falls back to sleep, and Em tells Kim
about the New York shows. Forty minutes later, the van turns into the
trailer park - more of a village, really - that Em calls home. "After
I got my record deal, my mother moved back to Kansas City," he says.
"I took over the payments on her trailer, but I'm never here."
Indeed, the eviction notice on the door is proof enough. "Don't
worry, we took care of that one," Rosenberg says as Em rips it off
and goes inside.
The double-wide mobile home houses Em's possessions, which, after
all the robberies and the moving around, have been acquired in the last
six months. An autographed glossy of Dre that reads, "Thanks for the
support, asshole" (mirroring Shady's autograph in "My Name
Is") is on the wall, as is the album art from the Shady EP.
Above the TV are two shots of Em and Dre from the video shoot, along with
pictures of Hailie. A small rack holds CDs by 2Pac, Mase, Babyface, Luther
Vandross, Esthero and Snoop Dogg. A baby couch for Hailie sits in front of
the TV. On a wall near the kitchen is a flyer titled "Commitments for
Parents," which lists directives like "I will give my child
space to grow, dream, succeed and sometimes fail."
Hailie settles down on the floor with a stuffed polar bear as Kim
prepares her for bed. The couple are happy to see each other tonight, but
songs like "'97 Bonnie and Clyde" make it clear that times are
not always this tranquil. Their relationship has been volatile - all the
more so since their daughter's birth. At one point two years ago, when
they were on the outs and dating other people, Kim, according to Eminem,
made it difficult for him to see his daughter and even threatenend to file
a restraining order. Em wrote "Just the Two of Us" on the Shady
EP, to tell the tale of a father killing his baby's mother and cleaning up
the mess with the help of his daughter: "Here, you wanna help Dada
tie a rope around this rock?/Then we'll tie it to her footsie, then we'll
roll her off the dock/Here we go, count of three. One, two, three,
wee!/There goes Mama, splashing in the water/No more fighting with Dad, no
more restraining order."
The original had a slightly different beat and a less monied
production that "'97 Bonnie and Clyde," the version on the
Interscope album, but on the Shady LP, Hailie chillingly plays
herself (she is also on the album cover and liner notes). "I lied to
Kim and told her I was taking her to Chuck E. Cheese that day," Em
recalls. "But I took her to the studio. When she found out I used our
daughter to write a song about killer her, she fucking blew. We had just
got back together for a couple of weeks. Then I played her the song, and
she bugged the fuck out."
Kim declines to comment on that song or any of the others about
her, including a track slated for Em's next album called "Kim."
The song is the prelude to "'97 Bonnie and Clyde," with Em
acting out the screaming fight that ends in murder. Em has played it for
her already and claims that now she is truly convinced that he is insane.
"If I was her, I would have ran when I heard that shit," Dre
says. "It's over the top - the whole song is him screaming. It's
good, though. Kim gives him a concept."
Em's friend Proof has been around the couple from the beginning.
"This is what I love about Em," he says. "One time we came
home and Kim had thrown all his clothes on the lawn - which was, like, two
pairs of pants and some gym shoes. So we stayed at my grandmother's, and
Em's like 'I'm leaving her; I'm never going back.' Next day, he's back
with her. The love they got is so genuine, it's ridiculous. He gonna end
up marrying her. But there's always gonna be conflict there."
Em says Hailie has heard his record and loves it, but he knows
she's too young still to get much more than the beats. "When she gets
old enough, I'm going to explain it to her," Em says. "I'll let
her know that Mommy and Daddy weren't getting along at the time. None of
it was to be taken literally." He shakes his head ruefully.
"Although at the time, I wanted to fucking do it." Em is the
first to admit that he's got a bad temper, which he has harnessed into a
career. "My thoughts are so fucking evil when I'm writing shit,"
he says. "If I'm mad at my girl, I'm gonna sit down and write the
most misogynistic fucking rhyme in the world. It's not how I feel in
general, it's how I feel at that moment. Like say today, earlier, I might
think something like, 'Coming through the airport sluggish, walking on
crutches, hit a pregnant bitch in the stomach with luggage.'"
Slim Shady is Marshall Mathers' way of taking revenge on the
world, and he's also a defense mechanism. On the one hand, a lot of Slim
Shady's cartoonish fantasies are offensive; on the other, they're better
than Mathers re-creating the kind of abuse the world heaped upon him
growing up. "I dealt with a lot of shit coming up, a lot of
shit," he says. "When it's like that, you learn to live day by
day. When all this happened, I took a deep breath, just like, "I did
it.'" The magnitude of what he's done in such a short time doesn't
seem to have sunk in. Em hasn't sipped the bubbly or smelled the roses -
and if he allots time for that in the next few months, it will have to be
at the drive-through. As for the future, he won't even wager a guess.
"If he remains the same person that walked into the studio
with me that first day, he will be fucking larger than Michael
Jackson," says a confident Dre. "There are a lot of ifs and
buts, but my man, he's dope and very humble." As Em closes the door,
with Hailie's blanket in his hands, he looks humble, a little tired and
pretty happy. For now.
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