lashback: It is the year 2000, and public America's Cultural Enemy No 1 is a
rapper named Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers III), who has ascended from the
country's closest approximation of hell (aka his hometown, Detroit). His
abundant use of the words "bitch" and "faggot" has
aroused the full spectrum of PC police, left and right. The violence in his
songs is echoed by headlines of his own arrest on gun charges in two
consecutive public brawls. And since he is white, he can't be ghettoised:
his music is saturating the suburbs at a faster rate than that of black
hip-hop artists. Congress, inflamed by the Columbine shootings and looking
for scapegoats, rounds up the usual suspects for hearings.
Two years later, on a muggy late summer evening, Eminem is performing before
his fans in the Detroit suburbs, the last stop of his 2002 Anger Management
tour. A high point of the show is a song in which he exults in his role as a
universally despised spokesman for alienated Middle American youth. "White
America! I could be one of your kids!" goes its hectoring refrain,
insistently gaining in malevolence as if a furious mob were gearing up for a
rampage. At its climax he vows to urinate on the White House lawn and hurls
expletives at Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore. But the roaring throng of 16,000
at the Palace of Auburn Hills is not angry.
There is barely a whiff of pot in the air, let alone violence. It's a happy
crowd, mixed in race and sex, that might just as well have congregated at a
church or a mall. Even some babyboomers are on hand (me among them), as well
as a few smiling kids perched on their dad's shoulders. "It's kind of
strange," Eminem would tell me when I asked if he was noticing any
difference in his audience of late. "It used to range from ten years
old to 25. Now it seems to be from five years old to 55." Could it be
that in just two years the scourge of bourgeois values is now entering the
mainstream?
Now Eminem has made his debut as a movie star in 8 Mile, which is
loosely based on his life. The film (which opens in the UK in January) took
$51 million on its opening weekend in America -the second-best takings for
an "R" certificate ever recorded. Unlike, say, Prince's Purple
Rain, which always put the musical needs of its star's fan base first,
this is a big-studio effort to tap into the American national jugular, and
it's produced by Brian Grazer, of last year's glossily heart-tugging Oscar
winner, A Beautiful Mind. Grazer is convinced that his movie will
confirm that Eminem, far from being a public peril, has now "crossed
over to the larger demographic".
Should Eminem make that leap, he will not be the first pop rebel to do so.
When you are the number one act in music, no matter how provocative your
songs or how ugly your rap sheet, the culture industry has a vested
interest, not merely in protecting the franchise, but also in expanding it.
Moralists can condemn each new rock phenomenon as loudly as they like -as
they have been doing since the Fifties -but the music is just too contagious
and the money too dizzying for anyone in authority to counter the power of a
roaring market. Thus has Mick Jagger, once the Antichrist, become both a
knight and an establishment corporate franchise, celebrated as a chief
executive on the cover of Fortune. Ozzy Osbourne is a lovable TV star.
Yesterday's "Revolution" can always be tomorrow's Nike commercial.
If there's a particular template for Eminem's career at this early point, it's
that of the young Elvis (a comparison that Eminem hates). Both men took a
musical form invented by African-Americans and gave it a popular white face.
But Eminem has advantages Elvis did not. He writes his own idiosyncratic
material. His mentor isn't a white Machiavelli like Colonel Tom Parker, but
the legendary hip-hop producer Dr Dre, whose endorsement gave him instant
credibility with black and white audiences alike and shields him from
accusations of cultural theft. ("I am the worst thing since Elvis
Presley, to do black music so selfishly and use it to get myself wealthy"
goes one of the many Eminem lyrics in which he pre-empts any such criticism.)
That Eminem is also showing Elvis-esque potential to bust out of the youth
market is not entirely a surprise. Any listener with open ears and some
affinity for the musical vocabulary of hip-hop can easily become hooked on
his music. Violence is merely one of the many notes he sounds in a range
that stretches from schoolyard slapstick to pathos, and the mayhem is so
calculatedly over the top that it seems no more or less offensive than
typical multiplex Grand Guignol.
In his most ambitious songs, his voice as a writer reaches well beyond idle
provocation anyway. He comes at you with a torrent of language that sucks up
and spits out the detritus of pop culture (from comic books to Versace)
while marrying it to the rage, hurt and, occasionally, love that are at the
core of his favourite subject -his own life. Somehow, just when you think he
is going to spin out of control, all the rhymes land on their (and the
music's) feet, leaving the listener at the end of the precisely observed
story he has to tell: the disturbing epistolary chronicle of a deranged fan,
the domestic battlefields of both his childhood and his own divorce and,
most recently (and sometimes petulantly), the price of fame. In a country in
which broken homes, absentee parents and latchkey kids are endemic to every
social class, he can touch some of the hottest emotional buttons. He can be
puerile too, but what else is new in pop music?
Yet we all know what happened when Elvis, the swivel-hipped menace to American
youth, started to broaden his base to the entire country. The Ed Sullivan
Show may be gone now, but could Eminem find himself yukking it up on Jay
Leno's couch? Is there a Blue Hawaii in his future?
Certainly some sort of transition is under way for Eminem, who turned 30 last
month. Though in White America he brags about being "in trouble with
the government", neither the song nor the video has aroused any new
protests from Washington. "It's something that we've blatantly noticed,"
said Mathers, who is known to his associates as either Marshall or Em, when
asked about this unexpected truce. We were meeting on the afternoon of the
MTV Video Music Awards, in a Midtown hotel under semi-siege by fans.
Brian Grazer had told me that when they met, Mathers initially threw him off
guard by sitting in glowering silence for minutes on end. The Mathers I met
was straightforward, earnest almost to a fault, always in direct eye contact
and glad to answer any question without hesitation (or any handlers in the
room). He did not seem particularly driven to promote his movie and did not
offer a single canned anecdote of the type stars tend to recycle in repeated
interviews.
I asked him to square the present Mathers with the shady Eminem who barely
escaped jail for his gun-toting misbehaviour of two years ago. "Fame
hit me like a ton of bricks," he said. "I was just being pulled in
every direction, doing everything under the sun, two shows a day, touring
constantly, non-stop radio interviews, and I just got caught up in the
drinking and the drugs and fighting and just wilding out and doing dumb
things I shouldn't have been doing. But I came out of them and I conquered
it. Something really bad could have happened to me. I could be in jail. I
could have been shot. I could have been killed. And I'm proud of myself now
for not only my accomplishments but for pulling through all that -my
criminal cases, my divorce. If I was still on drugs and still living the
life that I lived three years ago, I would be a failure."
Mathers looks like someone on a gym regimen. His current drug of choice seems
to be work, including producing songs by other hip-hop artists for his own
new label, Shady Records. When he occasionally gets into trouble now, it's
of a traditional show-business strain -the star boorishness that is our
era's version of Frank Sinatra's crude public scuffles. But if the
congenitally wary Mathers is still quick to lash back at any person he feels
may be dissing him, the blows are all verbal, and most reports of his
behaviour are glowing. This summer People Magazine celebrated him as an
ideal joint-custody father to his daughter, Hailie, six, who is the one
angelic female subject (and occasional vocal participant) in his canon, and
as a model neighbour who attends community meetings, no less, in his gated
community in the northern Detroit suburbs.
"My daughter is growing up, and I'm trying to set an example for her,"
Mathers said, warming to the only subject besides hip-hop that lightens him
up. "She has a fairly normal life. I love her so much. And she's a
character, man. She's like me to the tenth power, she's got such a
personality. She runs around the house and she makes up little sayings and
little phrases."
The new film, 8 Mile, which not only has a blue-chip producer in
Grazer but also an A-list director in Curtis Hanson (of LA Confidential and
Wonder Boys), hardly presents Eminem as a family man, but it does
burnish his image. The movie describes a week in the life of Jimmy Smith Jr
-a fictional character living in Detroit in 1995 who, despite protestations
from the star and everyone else associated with the film, is closer in
biographical outline to Marshall Mathers III than not. Jimmy is a
white-trash high-school dropout trapped in menial labour and living in
desolate trailer-park circumstances around Eight Mile Road.
"It's the borderline of what separates suburb from city," Mathers
explains. "It's the colour line. I grew up on both sides of it and saw
everything. I had the friends who had racist redneck fathers and
stepfathers. I had black friends. It's just American culture."
Like Mathers, Jimmy was abandoned at birth by his father. To his chagrin, he
still lives with his mother (played by Kim Basinger), an irresponsible
alcoholic who vaguely resembles the real-life mother depicted in Eminem
songs and videos (and who sued him twice for defamation, netting only
$1,600). Though Jimmy has a love interest (Brittany Murphy), the real love
of his life is a much younger kid sister who in age and adorability could be
a stand in for the real-life Hailie. Jimmy's only other burning passion is
his music. Like his black pals, he dreams of somehow recording a demo,
getting a deal, hooking up with a star producer like Dr Dre and going
platinum. By the movie's end, you sense he's on his way -a white underdog
likely to make good.
Grazer concedes that one reason he fictionalised his protagonist was the harsh
criticism he received for taking liberties with the biography of John Nash,
the subject of A Beautiful Mind. Of course, fiction provides other
benefits as well. If A Beautiful Mind was criticised for
eliminating some homosexual incidents in John Nash's life, 8 Mile goes out
of its way to neutralise Eminem's reputation, deserved or not, for
homophobia.
At this point not all that much more repair work may be needed. Gay
organisations have lowered their voices since the 2001 Grammys, at which
Elton John came out of the closet as an Eminem fan and performed a duet with
him on camera. Nonetheless, it's a telling digression in 8 Mile when its
hero rushes to the rescue of a fellow metal-plant worker who has been mocked
for being gay. Jimmy's intervention takes the form of a hilarious rap
pointedly denigrating the bigoted bully, rather than the ridiculed gay man,
as a "faggot." The sequence is shrewdly designed to buttress
Mathers's argument that when "faggot" appears in his songs it is
either: a) spoken in the voice of Eminem's nasty fictional hip-hop alter
ego, Slim Shady, who does not literally represent the views of his creator;
or b) being used, as it is by many kids, as an all-purpose insult "not
meant to be literal". Mathers says now that he has never been a
homophobe: "It's really none of my business. I don't give a f*** what
your sexual preferences are. As long as you're cool with me, I'm cool with
you."
But the most fascinating image enhancement in 8 Mile is the ease with which it
fits a character as rough and ostensibly subversive as Eminem into a smooth
and reassuring show-business fable as old as The Jazz Singer. The
movie's plot hinges on Jimmy's ability to overcome his paralysing shyness
and compete in freestyle rapping battles -open-mike contests in which rival
aspiring hip-hop artists try to top one another with artfully rhymed
invective, the winner determined by audience cheers. As Jimmy at first
prepares for and ultimately triumphs in his battles, he could be John
Travolta's Tony Manero dancing his way to the top in Saturday Night
Fever or Diana Ross escaping the ghetto in Mahogany, or even
Barbra Streisand's Fanny Brice rising from her ethnic urban ghetto to
showbiz triumph in Funny Girl.
This is not unintentional. When talking about cinematic archetypes for 8
Mile, Paul Rosenberg, the burly, low-key 31-year-old lawyer who manages
Mathers, says that the movie hopes to tap into "the same sort of
cultural phenomenon as Saturday Night Fever". Unlike Elvis,
who usually parachuted into mechanical Hollywood vehicles that were built
around his songs, Mathers and Rosenberg helped develop 8 Mile. "Marshall's
biggest fear - mine as well -was that it would look phoney," Brian
Grazer says.
Hanson put Mathers through six weeks of rehearsals, in essence an acting
class, before starting to shoot. (A more typical rehearsal period, Grazer
says, is two days to two weeks.) The star did not pretend to enjoy the
experience, which he likened to boot camp: "It was anywhere between 13
and 16 hours a day, six days a week. It literally gave me enough time to go
to sleep, get up and come back and do the movie." But however
ambivalent he may be about the medium, he obsesses over the quality of the
result just as he does over his music. I asked him if he was happy with 8
Mile. "I'm getting happier every time I see a new cut of it,"
he allowed.
For his part, Hanson says he didn't take on the assignment until he was
satisfied Mathers was serious. "Was he making this movie simply because
he could? I didn't know if he would apply his attention to this or be a
dilettante about it," he says. "And he was assessing me, too; he
asked a lot of questions about the mechanics. We had ups and downs, but he
gave me everything a director could want. He gave me a commitment and a kind
of respect."
Mathers also developed a respect for those who take acting as seriously as he
takes his music. "Kim Basinger normally doesn't rehearse," Hanson
says, "and in her first scene, when she came out full-bore, Marshall
was knocked back on his heels. He said, 'I kind of like this acting thing.'"
Mathers delivered an intense screen presence, but he isn't looking for a
movie career and mainly hopes the film will explain his missionary zeal for
hip-hop to the uninitiated. Music was the refuge, he feels, from a childhood
defined by domestic chaos and ostracisation by his peers. "I wanted to
make a movie that every kid who went through anything similar to this can
relate to," he says. "This was my whole life. If I lost a battle
at the hip-hop shop when I was coming up, it literally tore me apart inside."
If the older audience that thinks rap is merely vulgar noise shows up for 8
Mile -a big if -it will find that the movie makes a credible case for
hip-hop as a positive social good. After all, the rap battles that form the
crux of the film, reminiscent of boxing matches and given full Raging Bull
treatment by Hanson, make the legitimate point that it is a rapper's
imagination that counts most in hip-hop success. When Jimmy squares off with
his rival in a battle, its substance has more in common with a
no-holds-barred debating competition than an urban brawl; it is screen
violence in which language substitutes for fists. "It's brain versus
brain," says Mathers. "It's about who can outsmart who." What
better role model could any parent ask for?
Whatever the fate of 8 Mile, it is certain that the culture wars
about hip-hop in general and Eminem in particular are nearly kaput. "Bin
Laden stopped that," says Jimmy Iovine of Interscope Records, Eminem's
label. "9/11 showed that Joe Lieberman should have been managing the
FBI and the CIA instead of trying to manage my company."
But that's not the whole story. Hip-hop has become so big that it is now by
definition the cultural norm, not the rebellious exception. "People are
accepting Eminem because he's a superstar," Grazer says. "They
don't even question things from his past." Iovine notes that "at
first, hip-hop freaked out Hollywood because it wasn't rock'n'roll".
But no one any longer argues with its success. Music this popular has the
power to move all kinds of markets. Product placement in hip-hop songs can
be a bonanza, as witnessed by Pass the Courvoisier Part II, by Busta Rhymes,
which increased the brandy's sale by 4.5 per cent in the first quarter of
this year. Sean John Combs, aka P. Diddy, emerged from acquittal in his
trial in a 1999 Manhattan nightclub shooting incident to become a menswear
fashion arbiter. This autumn's surprise feel-good hit in America, drawing
white moviegoers as well as black, was the hip-hop-flecked Barbershop,
starring Ice Cube.
Mathers prides himself on sticking to his own artistic impulses, no matter how
the scene changes around him. "I'm always going to be me no matter what,"
he insists. "There's always going to be a part of me that's as raw as
when I first came out. There's always going to be that part that I can
revert to if I want to go back and be that battle MC and say those funny
punchlines and stuff to make people laugh or make people angry. But as I
grow as a person and as I get older I've got to mature. If you think that
the only way I can make a record is by cussing, then I'll make a different
record to outsmart you and prove you wrong. But every song that I make has
to be better than the last one that I just made. Otherwise it gets scrapped.
Because if you're not doing that, you're stagnant."
Iovine, whose career began as an engineer on Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run,
says he thinks Mathers has "the chops to make the transition" to a
long-term artistic career. "I've been fortunate to be at the turning
points of Lennon, Springsteen, Bono," he says. "I've watched them
all go through massive changes of direction. When you have an artist this
great, you have to move forward. You'll lose people here and there, but
those there in the beginning will always be there for him."
In my conversation with Mathers, he didn't seem remotely caught up in whether
he remained Public Enemy No 1 or in his own commercial fate -or in that of 8
Mile. He was instead preoccupied in his finicky way with the job at
hand, much like his alter ego in the movie, who is often found meticulously
perfecting the lyrics he prints in a tiny hand on scrap paper with a
ballpoint pen. He had been up until 5am the night before, tweaking the music
on the movie's soundtrack, which had followed rehearsals for the MTV show.
He disdained the idea of ever leaving Detroit to "get a $10 million
home in New York or Hollywood and just be extravagant". He says he
watches his money closely and is always thinking about his daughter's
financial future. His own future? "Eventually I want to branch off into
being a producer and be able to one day sit back like Dre and kind of be
behind the scenes and not always have to be the front man."
For now, though, he seems more in demand as a star than ever. Even the
American government has joined the Eminem bandwagon: this summer it started
broadcasting his songs in the Middle East as part of its propaganda campaign
to enhance America's image to young radio listeners in the Arab world.
