Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [35]
“It really bugs me out that Eminem has this conception of himself that he thinks his older music was silly and his real music is this incredibly grimacing method acting shit he does,” says Village Voice critic Frere-Jones. “I thought that early music was a little bit happy and maybe him being a little bit silly, but none of it is exactly happy; it’s a strange hybrid of happy and twisted.”
Hip-hop in 2003 has become a similarly strange hybrid of itself. Popular rap is at once more thuggish, hardcore, and hedonistic, with an even greater premium placed on a basis in reality—when that reality is thuggish, all the better, it seems. At the same time, the juxtaposition and celebration of the sacred and profane so central to DMX’s oeuvre is the hip-hop rule. What would be considered “conscious,” positive rap must come swathed in thug imagery, and a greater degree of confessional expression is to be found in rap of all stripes. Talib Kweli, Mos Def’s collaborator in Black Star, is the epitome of the thinking tough man on his second solo album, Quality. Nas, in “Made You Look” on God’s Son, advises ladies to look for men who are intelligent thugs, “like a real thoroughbred is.”
The king of hip-hop in 2003 is a real thug, 50 Cent, a former drug dealer who has been shot nine times and suits up each day in a bullet-proof vest. The Queens rapper has a long enough list of enemies, professional and criminal, that after Columbia Records released him from his record deal, following his shooting, no record label would sign him. Eminem sought him out, and his interest sparked a bidding war, which ended when 50 Cent accepted $1 million—less money than others offered—to sign with Eminem’s Shady Records and Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records. Upon the release of Get Rich or Die Tryin’, 50 Cent broke the sales record for a debut album, selling almost 900,000 copies in just five days. Eminem’s zeal for 50 Cent as well as his verses on the album taunt his newfound audience with threats more real than the parody of “Criminal” from The Marshall Mathers LP. In a verse that begins with Eminem’s saying that he’s got to be what fans see on TV, he says he’s bullied his way into the rap game and he’ll take on any challenger. But 50 Cent is a far cry from Eminem’s benevolent on-screen pals in 8 Mile. So, too, is Shady/Aftermath Records’ continuing beef with Ja Rule’s Murder Inc. family more potentially dangerous than a street fight with the Free World, Eminem’s 8 Mile enemies. This is yet another reinvention for Eminem, from potty-mouth comedian to strung-out delinquent to sobered thinking man; his next incarnation looks to be gangsta mogul.
“His persona, to me, has changed almost entirely for the worst,” says Sasha Frere-Jones. “But to be sympathetic to him, instead of just looking at the text of all the shit that happened to him in the last two years, with him hitting people you could see him completely mythologizing himself. He got famous really quickly, seized up, thinking everyone’s looking at him and thinking he has to act tough, doing all this stupid shit because he’s in this tornado of people looking at him all the time and asking him for things. That’s also just what happens to people. We should all be glad he’s not dead, because it wouldn’t have been very surprising.”
“I don’t know if you’re going to see Slim Shady more on the next album,” says Eminem’s publicist Dennis Dennehy. “With the stuff going on around him, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but he’s had a lot less fun. It has nothing to do with his probation, he’s just working his ass off. He’ll hang out with his friends and have a good time, but he doesn’t take a break. He is always working and thinking about music. Everything that happened to him in the past year and a half was a lot more serious than what came before that. The music that’s going to come out of a time like that is definitely going to be more serious. If you look at it as Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers, he hasn’t had a lot of room for Slim Shady in his life lately.”
chapter 3
damn! how much damage