Eminem is a word technician. He makes words work for him, and he’s never lazy. Most rappers can be branded: We play Snoop for that down-and-dirty feeling; when you want to nod your head and pop your collar, there’s Dr. Dre; Nelly will give you the songs of home; Mos Def makes you want to start a revolution; and Busta Rhymes is purely for freaking to. But Eminem, like Tupac before him, does a little of all these things.
He won’t do endorsements or wear diamonds. He even censors records for his 6-year-old daughter. But The Eminem Show is quadruple platinum, and he makes his Hollywood debut in 8 Mile this month. Zadie Smith peeks into Eminem’s frantic world and meditates on why he remains rap’s ultimate paradox.
As Chris Rock had it, something sure has changed in America when the best golfer is black and the best rapper, white. Rock’s choice of words is remarkable: not richest, not most famous, but best. Because there can be no doubt about it anymore, and it’s getting sort of churlish to deny it.
You may dislike the language, the philosophy (and it is philosophy), or the hair dye. You may say Eminem can’t last, and, unusual for a rapper, he’ll agree with you. “I’m gonna do the music as long as I feel it, but if I’m sitting in the studio all tapped out, I just won’t do it,” he says. “The truth is that I can’t rap forever.”
But let’s settle on the bald facts: Eminem has secured his place in the rap pantheon. Tupac, Biggie, and Pun are gone, and right now there just isn’t anyone else but Eminem who can rhyme 14 syllables a line, enrage the U.S. Senate, play the dozens, spin a tale, write a speech, push his voice into every register, toy with rhythm, subvert a whole goddamn genre, get metaphorical, allegorical, political, comical, and deeply, deeply personal- all in one groove of vinyl.
Eminem is a word technician. He makes words work for him, and he’s never lazy. Most rappers can be branded: We play Snoop for that down-and-dirty feeling; when you want to nod your head and pop your collar, there’s Dr. Dre; Nelly will give you the songs of home; Mos Def makes you want to start a revolution; and Busta Rhymes is purely for freaking to.
But Eminem, like Tupac before him, does a little of all these things. Like ’Pac, he does them with the integrity of an artist. This doesn’t mean he’s above the vulgar business of entertainment. It’s just that elements of these two rappers are, in the second terminology of hip hop, kept real. Tupac sold himself only so far. As unlikely as it seemed when we fist met Eminem on The Slim Shady LP, he has demonstrated a similar attitude. Words matter to him, “The truth of the matter.” This is his favorite phrase when he speaks.
During an interview (in which he’s oddly stilted and lost for words, the opposite of his persona on records), he says it nine times in an hour. His music shares Tupac’s obsession with truthfully representing a group of disenfranchised people. “I love that Tupac cared about his people, from his background, his generation,” Eminem says. “He cared what they thought, and anybody else who didn’t understand him could go to hell.”
That role, being the truth-telling prophet to a generation, is troublesome. Some truths are hard and self-destructive. Some are conflicting to the point of schizophrenia. Tupac wrote the feminist elegy “Brenda’s Got a Baby” and the abusive “Wonda Why They Call U Bitch”; Eminem wrote the desperate “Rock Bottom” and the mischievous “Just Don’t Give a Fuck.” These boys are both “mad at cha” and not mad. They “Just Don’t Give a Fuck,” and they do. And they’re not in the business of committing crimes. They’re rappers.
“The fact that a man picks up a microphone…that’s it, you see?” says Eminem. “That’s what makes him a rapper. It’s not a gun. It’s a microphone.” This is something that the antirap contingent of the Senate has never understood. Eminem’s show on the Anger Management Tour (he’s on the same bill with Ludacris and Papa Roach) opens with a video montage of real American politicians condemning the dangerous social phenomenon that is Eminem. Reality check: The FBI reports that there were 90,186 rapes and 15,517 murders reported in America in 2000. Eminem committed none of them.
In the face of this kind of misplaced hysteria, good rappers don’t back down. They defend the right to use words in the same way any novelist or filmmaker is free to do. They tell their personal truths. Sometimes they connect with millions of American teenagers. Then the question becomes one of incitement, of what happens when the music stops? The question of whose words make which people do what things:
How many retards’ll listen to me? / And run up in the school shooting when they’re pissed at a teach/ er, her, him, is it you, is it them? / ‘Wasn’t me—Slim Shady said to do it again!’/ Damn! How much damage can you do with a pen?
Oh, plenty, but primarily to himself. Keeping it real is a dangerous game. How real is real? Real in the lyrics, real in an interview? Real on the streets, real in the ‘hood? The rap survivors, Dr. Dre and Master P, have determinedly drawn a line between the “realness” of their past lives and their right to live like any other music mogul: money and a big house on the hill far from the ghetto.
For Tupac, keeping it real was more perilous; it dogged his life and contributed to his death. With Eminem, the question came to a head two years ago as he became increasingly embroiled in the justice system. But meeting him now, it’s clear that he will not be going the tragic Behind the Music route. He’s still talking it—“Don’t think I won’t go there / Go to Beirut and do a show there!”—but, it seems, no longer living it. “I had a wake-up call with my almost going to jail and shit, like, slow down,” he says. “It wasn’t me trying to portray a certain image or live up to anything. That was me letting my anger get the best of me, which I’ve done many times. No more.”
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