Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [37]
I watch Eminem pick through the rest of his food, and I listen to him talk about the calm he enjoys in Detroit. His speech has changed, too. The stretched vowels of his hip-hop patois are now a clean Midwestern dialect for the most part. He is still quick to respond when he’s passionate about a topic, but now he takes his time to structure the answer. When my tape recorder is rolling, Eminem is forthcoming, but the situation is more of an interview than it has ever been.
This makes my job easier, but it makes me want to finish quickly, too. We break up the questions with the kind of banter that editors cut and only musicians and fans care about, discussing in nontechnical terms (i.e., “I like old keyboards because you can get those, like, music-box kind of sounds.”) the science of mixing and mastering, the uncelebrated genius of the Pharcyde’s first album, Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde, and the side effects of overanalyzation (paralysis, paranoia) brought on by too many interviews or too much psychotherapy, which are more or less one and the same. We skip tangentially over the past two years of his life and the album and film that capture and encapsulate it, and I feel like he’s practicing, testing out subjects and answers for future meetings with writers he doesn’t know. In the months to follow, I see some of those same answers in print in other magazines, said better than today, with the afterthoughts born of repetition.
Eminem sits hip-hop style in a lounger: leaned way back, legs akimbo, one arm hanging over the armrest, a pose at once stately and disheveled. We’re talking about the pains he’s taken to be clear in his lyrics on The Eminem Show, about how he’s tired of being misinterpreted, about how the controversy in the past few years took attention away from the music. We’re talking about the mainstream press, the mainstream listener, the casual MTV viewer tuning in to Eminem for the first or second time and whether they’ll see “Without Me,” the first single from The Eminem Show, for its high-speed irony. I ask him if he thinks fans and critics who have followed him from the beginning will appreciate a thematically heavier Eminem. His eyes widen and he stares straight ahead at the horizon, along the top of his right Nike Air Max where it rests on the coffee table. He’s seized by a thought. I’ve seen him this way before. We were on a plane and Eminem was talking about his mother, he was telling me a story about food poisoning and hot dogs and about being arrested on his birthday. He froze like he did now in the retelling, picked up a pad covered with his small, crooked scrawl, and proceeded to scribble rhymes with his left hand, keeping time with his right. He doesn’t do that now; this Eminem has probably already made a lyric of this feeling.
“I have to tell it like it is,” Eminem says, not looking up from his shoe. “What I sit around and talk about, you know, I have to go say to the world, otherwise what would I be? If I’ve got any balls at all, I’ll come out and say it, which is what I do. That latest Source article—I’m just not happy about it. I felt like there could have been more said and it could have been said in a different way. Whatever.”
When Eminem is angry, he’ll say he’s not and then dissect the object of his irritation until it lies in pieces. The May 2002 issue of The Source featured an Eminem cover story for The Eminem Show. The self-proclaimed “Bible