Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [15]
Many didn’t agree with him. Throughout 2000 and 2001, Eminem’s concerts were regularly picketed by women’s rights and gay groups, culminating in a protest outside the forty-third annual Grammy Awards, at which, to illustrate the fiction and reality axis in his music, Eminem performed with openly gay singer Elton John and took home three statues to match the two he won for his work on The Slim Shady LP.
Though Eminem was reduced to the sum of his controversies in most of the newsprint around the country in 2001, the publicity brought record sales and exposure that eventually landed his name in Congress, delivered to a committee on the tongue of Lynne Cheney, the vice president’s wife, who led a hearing on unsuitable violence in music. Despite and to some degree because of an older generation’s reaction to Eminem, he became a unanimous hero to the teenage music-buying public, even those who enjoyed the teen pop acts that Eminem routinely lampooned. His singles were played on classic-rock stations, alternative-rock stations, as well as Top 40 and hip-hop stations. His disaffected stance appealed to rebels of all stripes. To mainstream teens The Marshall Mathers LP was to boy bands what Nirvana’s Nevermind was to Guns n’ Roses in 1991, when hair-metal bands held the top of the charts even as the Seattle trio turned rock upside down.
A Mr. Shady to see you: Eminem, 2001.
Eminem spoke of situations many of his fans shared—broken homes, dead-end jobs, drug overindulgence—while exploring taboo emotions many couldn’t face—parental hate, gender hate, self-loathing. Eminem was the antihero who had ambushed the pop show.
By the end of 2001, Eminem had five Grammys in his trophy case and millions of albums sold worldwide. His fans were so diverse that he could carry a festival with rap-rock bands like Papa Roach on the Anger Management Tour as easily as roll with the hip-hop elite if they had organized a festival that year. He had the attention of the country—between his weapons-possession arrests, his foul-mouthed agitation, and his runaway success, even the unimpressed were watching.
Between 2000 and 2002, Eminem had lived a reality-TV life, his every move broadcast, his rhymed confessionals recorded. He touched his audience with music that is the equivalent of a cinematic, panoramic Survivor, Big Brother, and Making of the Band all in one—you could call it “The Rapper.” From the first line of his first single “My Name Is,” Eminem had provided a running commentary on his world, expanding the breadth of the subject matter to suit the steady increase in “viewers.” Unlike other reality shows, The Rapper’s star makes all the creative decisions, crafting the plot of his show in the editing room without an audience vote. As usual, Eminem’s elocution of the times was impeccable: America’s hunger for reality TV in 2002 and 2003 was insatiable. The Roman Coliseum of bad taste mediated by Jerry Springer in the late nineties evolved into a more stylized desire to be concerned and improperly involved in the lives of strangers for amusement. Shows like Married by America, The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, The Family, American Idol, and the ironically titled (considering the B-level talent) I’m a Celebrity—Get Me Out of Here! filled a voyeuristic void in America and established a societal addiction (or affliction) fully entrenched in England and Europe.
Always evolving his sound, Eminem characterized The Eminem Show as being inspired by the seventies rock he’d grown up with, particularly among his relatives in Kansas City, Missouri, and in the white Detroit suburb of Warren. The beats on the album are generally not syncopated or complex;