Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [106]
Debbie Mathers-Briggs raised her son, Marshall, in some of the worst years Detroit has seen. She moved frequently, either around the city or back to her family in St. Joseph, Missouri, requiring Eminem to change schools more than once a year, on average. By his mom’s estimate, Marshall attended between fifteen and twenty schools before finally dropping out of Lincoln High School, located north of 8 Mile Road in Warren County, in 1989. In the years between 1995 and 1998, when Eminem tried to move out of his mother’s house, sometimes with girlfriend Kim, he could only (and just barely) afford to rent a house off 8 Mile Road, in the city limits. At the time, Detroit’s unemployment rate was about 4.5 percent, meaning roughly 100,000 people were out of work. There was an average of 450 reported murders and about 20,000 burglaries annually during those years. “There’s nothing to do, so motherfuckers get bored,” Eminem recalled in 2000. “All they got to do is shoot each other and rob. I was coming back from St. Andrew’s club one time a few years back with my boy Denuan—Kon Artis, who’s in D12. This must have been 1997, I think. We were in a White Castle parking lot at the drive-through right across from a gas station, and we saw this motherfucker get popped. He dropped right in the middle of the station. We didn’t even see where the bullet came from.”
Whatever Eminem has made of his family history, now mythologized in song lyrics and captured for perpetuity in court documents, it couldn’t have been easy. The years he lived in Detroit were tough ones in his home and in the city around him. Before his daughter was born in 1995, the low wages available to him made it tough to afford rent; afterward, the added expenses made it nearly impossible. He lived, like so many young Americans, from paycheck to paycheck, trying to make ends meet in the kind of urban environment that is becoming the American norm.
“I grew up on the East Side of Detroit, but I don’t like to give people a sob story,” Eminem says. “I had a hard life, blah blah blah. A lot of people did and a lot of people do. I didn’t have the greatest upbringing, that’s why I turned to hip-hop and that’s why I love it so much.”
Detroit has served Eminem in the twofold, bisected way in which it exists, a place where division imparts an understanding in a fashion that is alien to outsiders, but becoming less so today. It is a place with very real, very visible racial and class lines and no misconceptions about what those factors mean in American society. The city itself is a constant reminder. In Detroit, abandoned neighborhoods and the ruins of its past industry are everywhere, as easy to eyeball as the relative wealth of a suburb’s residents. Where more financially well-off American cities pave over, redevelop, or preserve their past, turning former factories into loft space and landmarks into museums, so, too, are the politics of race and class often given new costumes. But as more American cities have encountered hard times and economic stagnation, they’re beginning to look a lot like Detroit. There is no denial in Detroit, only an honesty that demands the same, honed over years of economic hardship and fed by the hardiness, hope, and realism of its people. “8 Mile for me was such an affirmation,” Dave Marsh says. “It all goes back to the race thing, and the R&B influence in the past. Times have changed, but it was everything that I thought about the place. Everybody had gotten poorer, but the essence of Detroit, the essence of how people continued to relate to one another didn’t change. What you find out is that it isn’t about ethnic authenticity, but emotional authenticity. It is the gospel message and to some extent