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By Root 654 0

essential to my process, particularly Joseph Patel, Tanya Selvaratnam, Jon Caramanica, and Matt Diehl—thank you many times for your insight and empathy. I thank Lindsay Goldenberg for her tireless support, research assistance, observations, patience, love, and for believing in me. To my mother and stepfather for the pep talks and advice, respectively, and for collectively keeping me in touch with the tastes of “the aged.” Unbeknownst to my editor, my father and stepmother provided several necessary work breaks; I thank you, she doesn’t. Thanks to the J. Baker family, nuclear and extended, of Minneapolis, for their prayers and votes of confidence. They are an invaluable asset to that fine city. I would like to thank Eli 5Stone for transforming my stream-of-consciousness ramblings on the polarity of good and evil, shadow and light, and Eminem and Marshall Mathers into the arresting (no pun intended) illustration on the opposite page. I also thank André from OutKast for music as intelligent as his opinions, Dave Marsh for being as cool as I’d hoped he’d be, and everyone interviewed in these pages, artist, critic, or other. I am indebted to Eminem for sharing his passion, conviction, and vision and to he and Paul Rosenberg for the preference they’ve shown me over the years, a proximity without which this book would not be possible. Thank you, too, to Jann Wenner for founding Rolling Stone and to former managing editor Bob Love for promoting me—two undeniable stepping-stones in the creation of this work.

Introduction

i’d like to welcome y’all to the eminem show

I saw 8 Mile the day it came out on November 11, 2002, among a crowd of my fellow New Yorkers, all of us dropping our ten bucks into a pot that by Monday added up to nearly $55 million, the second biggest opening weekend for an R-rated film in history (the title-holder in that category, for now, remains Hannibal, a film that played in more theaters than 8 mile). The audience that evening was a true cross section of New York City: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, young, and middle-aged. Some were heavy into hip-hop; some were hooked on pop and MTV; some were drawn by the media buzz; and others—two Goths, a group of metal heads, and a gray-haired couple with a whiff of academia to them—just looked curious. There was a tangible anticipation in the air. I felt as if I were not on line to see a Hollywood feature, but among the cultish generation-spanning devotees of Kiss, Neil Diamond, Tom Jones, or James Brown, waiting at a convention or outside of a record store, hoping to get an autograph.

I like to show up early for a film, but even arriving an hour ahead of schedule I was far back in the line. Whether it was to get a jump on Monday’s water-cooler talk, to decide if the controversial rapper deserved the Oscar nod the press had speculated, to see what hipsters called the best hip-hop movie since Wild Style, or to find the key that would decipher fact from fiction in the canon of Marshall Mathers, we had all lined up to see what we’d see. I had my own ideas, too. I saw the film as an evolution, not so much for Eminem as it was for the cult of celebrity. To me, the film wasn’t an indication that he was trying to launch a J. Lo–like “all-media” career (music, film, plain old fame), contrary to a claim I’d hear from people who really hadn’t looked that closely, and I was sure that, no matter how great Eminem was in 8 Mile and how many scripts were stuffed in his mailbox at the moment, this might be his only acting credit. What occupied my mind that day was whether or not he knew how he had turned America on its ass, whether he realized how he had our culture—the parts he liked and the parts he didn’t—by the balls, and whether he let himself, when he was alone, with no one to see, be happy about it. I wondered if it scared him that everything he rapped about came true.

I took my place behind three girls who looked like they’d take home the prize in any Sex in the City trivia contest. I wasn’t surprised that they’d see 8 Mile, but I was surprised that they’d brave the