Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [26]
It was fitting that the LOX, arguably some of the game’s most underrated rappers, fell in with DMX, the New York lyricist who took the throné of hardcore rap after the fall of 2Pac and Biggie Smalls. DMX and his Ruff Ryders were the most popular and contrary rap acts to thrive in the face of bling-bling hip-hop. His ascent was ten years in the making, by which time DMX had mastered his craft, combining street credibility and commercially appealing songwriting so well that he remains the first artist to have his first four albums debut at number one, beginning with It’s Dark and Hell is Hot in 1998. DMX tapped into what Eminem would a year later: Rap and music fans didn’t want to hear artists keeping it real, they wanted to feel artists keeping it real. DMX brought an intense, confessional, no-frills individualism to rap, unearthing his life’s uneasy contradictions and conveying them in gritty detail. DMX was the new style, a composite rap persona, a thug without excess; tough enough to kill, but brave enough to cry. He and Eminem, in stylistically different forms, embodied a new rap paradigm that connected deeply with fans: real skills, real stories, complex emotional terrain, and no undue ceremony. DMX and Eminem made honest revelation respectable, paving the way for even Jay-Z to dive deeper on his 2001 stunner, The Blueprint, with tracks like the heartfelt “Song Cry.” DMX and Eminem proved that the pop music-consuming public would not subsist on fantastical tales alone. They wanted to hear tales like theirs—lives they might have lived, not those they’d never know.
In the ramp-up years to the millennium, while popular hip-hop checked its reflection in its diamonds, the synchronized dance of teen pop dominated popular music with a manufactured sunnyday reality. Members of *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, competing acts managed by talent agent Lou Pearlman, had cut their teeth on the Orlando, Florida, theme-park circuit and turned Disney cheer and adolescent longing into multimillion-selling albums mostly produced in Sweden, the pop mecca that birthed ABBA. Videos of rain-swept Backstreet Boys, some then close to thirty, dominated MTV. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, former costars on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club, similarly competed for fans as they once competed for solos. In the late nineties, marketing to teens became big money. Business studies identified teens and their disposable allowances as an untapped resource and refocused their products and marketing accordingly. Corporate America churned out teen-oriented films; launched magazines such as Teen People, Cosmo Girl, and Elle Girl in a sliding publishing market; and conducted frequent teen focus groups to track trends.
On MTV, sandwiched between the boy bands, Britney Spears’s sassy schoolgirl act, and microdiva Christina Aguilera’s active acrobatics, Eminem played a humorous hip-hop stereotype: the crazy white boy. In the “My Name Is” video, which begins with a television broadcasting “The Slim Shady Show,” starring Marshall Mathers, the rapper imitates Bill Clinton, a flasher, a puppet, a science-show host, and Marilyn Manson, and he plays himself as a patient on Dr. Dre’s analysis couch. The video’s irony is Eminem at his best. Playing a wacked-out nerd, he satisfies and mocks the expectations of a white rapper: that he must be insane for even trying, because white rappers, in a genre founded on street wisdom and style, are as smooth as a geek in plaid pants. As his life story became public, Eminem became less parody than reality. Compared to the pop songs of the day, “My Name Is” was dynamic, harnessing brattiness and self-destructive frivolity to a chipper point of view detached from the implications of it all. The emotional scope of Eminem’s music was as irregular as life itself, while in teen pop the pieces fit just right.
Eminem stuck out, as he says in “Role Model,” from The Slim Shady LP, like a green hat with an orange bill. In his first interviews with MTV, one of which caught the eye of Brian Grazer,