Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [122]
“Now people have begun to see what they couldn’t see before, which is a complicated character,” Dave Marsh says. “How he pulled that one off is the measure of what a great artist he is, and he truly is a great artist. He was able to take himself from a position where he was totally despised by everybody and flipped it, hard. To me, it’s just, ‘wow.’ I don’t know what it does to him. Obviously he has some of the issues worked out better in the script than he has in real life.”
As I began to speak to people about this book, casually and during the interviews, I heard an array of opinions on every level, from the microscopic view of the psychological issues and rhythmic meter at play in the music, to the macrofocus of Eminem’s effect on the near future, when a new generation grows into young adults. Whatever the opinion, there always was one; no one I spoke with was indifferent to Eminem. Neither were any of the strangers I eavesdropped upon. Everywhere I went at the end of 2002, I found it was only a matter of time before I heard someone discussing him.
For my own part, I found myself thinking, writing, and talking more about American society than I was Eminem, and the thematic segues were natural. He was a symbol to that representative American cross section that was holding him so high in 2003; but he was a mirror, too, one I wasn’t sure all of his new fans had peered into.
“There’s a certain sophistication involved with Eminem, because he is literary in a certain way,” Shelby Steele says. “Even his imagery is, in this self-report, the openness of his life with him as a character, there is vulnerability. There’s self-examination, and boy that has a lot more power than the tough-guy thing. He has the bravery of the real artist to put himself out there. That’s the secret that’s distinguished him from the others.”
America likes a hero, and in 8 Mile, Eminem fit the bill. It mattered as little that he was playing a character in the film as it did when he offended so many playing a character on his records—fiction and reality, entertainment and real life, it seems, are almost interchangeable. When I told Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, about the kind of book I intended to write, he said that he expected someone to do so now that Eminem’s public image had changed and his fan base had expanded. The time was certainly now, for the reason of new mass Eminem awareness, as much as the issues Eminem brings to light.
“The thing about Eminem, whether it’s real or not, that people have bought into is his life,” says writer Soren Baker. “I think a lot of people, especially the under-thirty crowd, can identify with not getting along with their mom or being in a single-parent home and trying drugs, maybe not selling them but trying them. And having a problem with their girlfriend or mother of their child but feeling like they love their daughter—everybody can identify, especially the younger people, the people under thirty. That’s something that he’s done that really no other rapper that is as popular as he is has done. He’s made his life the entertainment like the title The Eminem Show would suggest, but he’s also made his life matter to people.”
Eminem embodies the mind-set of our current America in so many ways, from the nearly invisible boundary between his art and his life to the nuances of his character to the elements of our culture that he brings together as much as those he drives apart. Eminem is an artist of contradiction: doting father, gun-toting probationer, innovative performer, anti-celebrity celebrity, potty-mouthed rapper, conscientious producer-CEO in the