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By Root 652 0

time I saw Eminem rap,” says Sway Calloway, MTV News correspondent and host of the influential L.A. radio show, The Wake Up Show. “I noticed how he really assumed this identity when he started to rap. He looked kind of weird in the face, kind of crazy, and that was his thing. He was this little white guy, who when he rapped, looked kind of like a jerking mannequin. Every punch line he would jerk and bob his head really hard and he was saying the craziest shit, just the most extreme, outlandish, and really humorous metaphors. Before he showed up at our show the first time and I saw him do his thing, I remember we had a copy of his tape, I think it was just the Slim Shady EP on cassette. We were the first people in L.A., on commercial radio at least, to play ‘Just Don’t Give a Fuck.’ At the time, that was very extreme; nobody would dare to touch that lyrical content. But we banged it right off the cassette because this guy was just so extreme and crazy as shit, sayin’ ‘Fuck the world, like Tupac,’ and telling you ‘put my tape back on the rack.’ That’s funny shit.”

When Eminem debuted, many hip-hop heads had spent the past two years cheering on the all too real Slim Shady: Ol’ Dirty Bastard of New York’s Wu-Tang Clang. This rapper spent 1999 celebrating the success of his second album, Nigga Please, with a string of bizarre arrests ranging from failing to pay a year’s worth of child support (about $35,000) for three of his thirteen children, to making “terrorist threats” (i.e., threatening to shoot up the House of Blues nightclub in L.A. after he was kicked out for drunken behavior during a concert by R&B singer Des’ree). He was also arrested—and this list is by no means complete—for lounging in the nude on the balcony of a Berlin hotel, driving repeatedly without a license, and shoplifting a pair of $50 sneakers that he wore out of a store in Virginia Beach. Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s antics made as much sense as his often incoherent, hilarious lyrics and frequently unrhymed, off-the-beat ramblings that put the scat in scatological. While other rappers flashed their cash, Ol’ Dirty Bastard demanded—via a dance groove—his girl’s money after accusing her of lying about being pregnant with his child. Though his free-associative leaps and cracked warbling are disturbingly entertaining, hip-hop heads didn’t come to Ol’ Dirty Bastard for lyrics, they came for the show, to hear the only lunatic in the mainstream. But with a character who was this erratic, the fun couldn’t last. Whether it was the crack and alcohol abuse that landed Ol’ Dirty Bastard in a court-ordered rehab program (which he violated) for six months, or genuine mental instability, the same behavior that made Ol’ Dirty Bastard hip-hop’s beloved loco also earned him a two- to four-year jail sentence that began in April 2001. ODB was a mere mortal version of the God of Mischief: He could get himself into trouble, but he couldn’t get out. Slim Shady, the crazy out-of-place white boy, fed the same desire for a freakish hip-hop joker. In “Cum on Everybody,” a deliberate “dance song” caricature of the jiggy hip-hop singles of the late nineties, Eminem gets down getting down on himself. He claims that his best chance with the ladies in East Detroit is pretending to be a Beastie Boy, admits that he’s one tablet short of a full medicine cabinet, and says he wants to murder every rich rapper who makes him jealous.

The attention that heavy MTV rotation brought Eminem soon changed him. “When you don’t watch MTV much and the few times you do turn it on, you see yourself there somewhere, it’s weird,” Eminem told me in the middle of 1999. “Whenever I see it now, I’m talking or it’s a video, or MTV News or something. If I’m up there and I mention something, anything that I might do, it might be an MTV News thing later on.” Eminem was plucked from the hypothetical visions of success in his underground freestyles and, after years of rejections from record labels, given the opportunity to live up to it. In a four-year span, he’s created three albums, one film, one soundtrack; he has toured