Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [10]
In 1997, Eminem and Kim Scott made their way through a few houses in drug-infested neighborhoods further into the city limits than either had ever lived. After stray bullets hit their house and chronic burglaries cleaned them out, Kim and Hailie moved in with her mother in the white suburb of Warren, while Eminem couchsurfed, eventually renting a room with a few friends in a house on 7 Mile Road. “We were paying this guy rent because his name was on the lease,” Eminem recalls, “but he was keeping all the money.” Everyone got evicted. “The night before I went to the Rap Olympics in L.A., I had to break into that fucking house and sleep on the floor because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. No heat, no electric, everything was shut off. I woke up the next day and went to L.A. I was so fucking pissed then. I had gotten fired from Gilbert’s for the second time, we got evicted, and that guy ran off—we still haven’t found that motherfucker.”
Paul Rosenberg, recently signed on as his manager, had been raising awareness of Eminem in New York, and met up with Wendy Day, CEO of the Rap Coalition, an influential artists’ advocacy group that co-sponsored a competition for up-and-coming MCs, dubbed the Rap Olympics. When Paul met Wendy, she already knew Eminem from one of the many rap conventions he attended in the midnineties. “Wendy had met him at some music seminar in Detroit,” Rosenberg recalls with a sly grin. “He used to walk around with, like, a stack of vinyl after he ran out of his tapes. He’d pressed his whole Infinite album onto one piece of vinyl. You’re not even supposed to press vinyl when you’re putting out an independent album on your own, but he did. He had this whole album on vinyl, that’s how he used to shop himself around. So he gave her one when he met her.” The Rap Olympics featured team competition and categories for the rappers to compete as individuals. Day wanted Eminem for her Rap Coalition team for the same reason Eminem had become a fixture in the Detroit freestyle pecking order: No one had ever seen anything quite like him before. “When he came to New York, he freestyled at one of Wendy’s workshops and she added him to the team,” Rosenberg says. “Our thing was great. He was going to do the team battle, but our focus was the individual battle. That battle ended up taking so long that he didn’t get to compete in the team battle. Actually, the individual battle took so long that they didn’t really get to finish the Rap Olympics.”
By the time he reached the Olympics, Eminem was at the end of his rope, financially and spiritually. He was hungry for a break. “Right before the battle in L.A., I took him to a bar,” Rosenberg says. “I said, ‘I know you want to win, but if you don’t, it’s okay. Do your best.’ My god, he was unbelievable. I was sitting in there next to this big black guy and after the first round he shouted, ‘Just give it to the white boy, it’s over. Just give it to the white boy.’”
“I went in there just shitting on everyone, man,” Eminem says of the competition. “I had nothing to lose. I took second place and I was very unused to that. Everyone said I looked like I was ready to cry. And I was so mad. Steaming, dog. I had nowhere to live back home. The winner of Rap Olympics got, like, five hundred dollars. I could have used that, man. Second place got nothing.”
By most reports, Eminem was defeated twice at national MC competitions in 1997 by the same man, J.U.I.C.E., a talented freestyle MC from Chicago, who took first prize away from Eminem at the Rap Olympics as well as Scribble Jam in Cincinnati, Ohio. Many who witnessed both called it a victory for Eminem or a tie that Eminem lost to his competitor’s loyal fanbase or a color bias. Many others don’t even remember