Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [103]
It means “I love you” in southeastern Michigan: Eminem and Kid Rock at the opening of the Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington, June 23, 2000.
Detroit music’s innovations are both born of and transcend the race demarcations of the city and the surrounding counties of the southern Michigan industrial complex. In a city where black and white remain separate, a different kind of racial honesty exists, one that only natives truly understand, yet one that is coming into play among a greater number of young Americans. There is a sense of awareness among Detroiters about the role of race in the sociopolitical context of American society, because it is so very visibly central to their geography. In Detroit music, there is a similar honesty, informed by the belief that artistic passion crosses all borders. This innate self-assessment is how Eminem knew he was right to be in rap, because he knew that even if Detroit fans didn’t care for his subject matter, he had the skills, the honesty, and the heart to connect.
“I don’t think you can imagine a single white performer from Detroit—from the era of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers to today—who didn’t want to sound like they were making some kind of African-American music,” says legendary rock critic Dave Marsh. “I don’t mean that they wanted to be black, whatever that would mean. I’m talking about the deepest influence for everyone from Mitch Ryder to Johnnie Ray, to Bob Seger, to the Romantics, to Iggy Pop, to the MC5—you name it, it was black music. Rob Tyner of the MC5 once told me, ‘What all of us wanted was to sound like an R&B singer.’ If you talk to the new garage bands like the Detroit Cobras, whom I know, and the White Stripes, who I don’t, but I would imagine, as dangerous as it is to imagine, that they would agree.”
Marsh should know; he grew up in Pontiac, Michigan, in the fifties, an area due north of Detroit, dominated by the environmental pollution of the foundries in its midst. In a 1971 article, Marsh wrote that the foundry grit on his family’s windowsills is his earliest memory; no matter how quickly his mother would clean it off, it would reappear the next morning. Marsh refers to his part of Oakland County as “Klan country” and recalls that KKK members torched school buses to dissuade local government from busing in black students. “That’s what 8 Mile really means,” Marsh says. “But it means something different now. In one way, that division is much more extreme because the poverty in inner-city Detroit is so enormous. But on the other hand, from a race point of view, it means less, because there are towns like Oak Park, Southfield, and parts of Birmingham that are pretty middle class with very large black populations who fled the city, too.”
The history of hip-hop in Detroit is like an episode of Survivor—a study in isolation, competition, and community among peers. A small scene began in the late eighties, with local versions of popular hip-hop styles and little else, but by the midnineties there was a rich underground, as there was in many cities, of young artists brought up on hip-hop. Dominated by the shadows of the East and West coasts, most Detroit rappers reached for a style that blended the two, flowing East Coast gritty over elastic West Coast beats—a formula that Eminem turned to gold. “I take a piece from everywhere,” he said back in 1999. “A little from the east, a little from the west. The East Coast is mainly known for lyrics and style, while the West Coast is more known for beats and gangsta rap. I kinda blend it so east meets west halfway, which is the Midwest. To me, that’s what it should sound like because that’s where I am. I’m in the middle, so I’m getting shit from