The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [190]
There is no good answer.
I think he started a mess. America is the best country there is, the best country to live in. But he’s fuckin’ that up and could run our country into the ground. He jumped the gun, and he fucked up so bad he doesn’t know what to do right now. He’s in a tailspin, running around like a dog chasing its tail. And we got young people over there dyin’, kids in their teens, early twenties, who should have futures ahead of them. And for what? It seems like a Vietnam II. Bin Laden attacked us and we attacked Saddam. We ain’t heard from Saddam for ten years, but we go attack Saddam. Explain why that is. Give us some answers.
Are you voting?
I’m supposed to hand my absentee ballot in today. I’m going for Kerry, man. I got a chance to watch one of the debates and a piece of another one. He was making Bush look stupid, but anybody can make Bush look stupid. I’m not 100 million percent on Kerry. I don’t agree with everything he says, but I hope he’s true to his word, especially about his plan to pull the troops out. I hope we can get Bush out of there, and I hope Mosh wasn’t too little, too late. That can sway some of the voters or open people’s minds and eyes up to see this dude. I don’t wanna see my little brother get drafted. He just turned eighteen. I don’t want to see him get drafted and lose his life. People think their votes don’t count, but people need to get out and vote. Every motherfuckin’ vote counts.
There’s a song on ‘Encore’ called “Like Toy Soldiers” where you get into issues around the battles you’ve had recently. It made me think about how you’re a battle rapper who came up in an era where battling was pure, and now it’s like, “Damn, if I really go too hard, somebody might get shot.”
Someone might die.
It’s gotta be ill to not be able to just battle out like you want to. Battling has been such a great part of hip-hop history.
It’s sad. But I’m not gonna sit back and watch my people be hurt. It’s like a Bush thing: You’re just sending your troops off to war and you ain’t in it. You’re fuckin’ playing golf and you sent your soldiers over to get killed. As you get older, you start to think that if you’re just beefin’ to be beefin’ or tryin’ to sell records, that’s not the way to go. Because what usually ends up happening is somebody’s entourage gets hurt. And it’s not worth it. Battling always started out like a mind game: who could psych who out, who could look the scariest. Then it became people saying, “This is my life you’re fucking with. This is everything I stand for, this is my career. If my career is gone tomorrow, then my life is gone tomorrow.” That’s how people end up losing lives.
Last year, ‘The Source’ uncovered a tape that you made when you were sixteen where you said “nigger.” What was that about?
This is what we used to do. I’d go in my man’s basement and do goofy freestyles, and we’d call ’em sucker rhymes, and the whole point of the rap was to be as wack as possible and warm up before we actually did songs that we wrote. And that ended up just happening to be the topic that day. I just broke up with a black girl, and the rest of the story I address on the album. I’ve got a song called “Yellow Brick Road,” and it basically explains the whole story from beginning to end, how the tape derived.
When it came out, were you pissed?
I was angry at myself. I couldn’t believe that I said it. The tone that I’m using, you can almost tell that I’m joking, but the words are coming out of my mouth. If there was never no Eminem, it wouldn’t be so shocking, but given who I am and what I stand for today, then what else could be Eminem’s Achilles’ heel?
In our generation the word “nigga” is used by black and white kids as an expression of love, but even now you won’t say it.
Yeah, it’s just a word I don’t feel comfortable with. It wouldn’t sound right coming out of my mouth.
Do you see a similarity between “nigger”