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By Root 619 0

and biggest sellers in 2002, Eminem, Shady Records, and his manager, Paul Rosenberg, were not cited, despite selling 7.5 million copies of The Eminem Show, the year’s top-selling album in any genre. They had also sold 3.5 million copies of the 8 Mile soundtrack, a film that took in more than 100 million at the box office. Eminem’s yearly gross in 2002 was about $300 million, while Shady Records’ 50 Cent debuted with Get Rich or Die Tryin’, which sold more than 800,000 copies in less than a week and three million in about a month. In the same issue, 50 Cent was listed as one of the acts to watch in the coming year. Yet in the “Power 30,” Eminem and Shady Records were passed over in preference to Réné McLean, CEO of McLean Entertainment Group, a marketing consultant firm who worked on 8 Mile, and Flavor Unit, Queen Latifah’s management firm and record label whose cofounder, Shakim, admitted that first-week record sales of five thousand copies was good enough for Flavor Unit’s artists.

Believe it or not, his lyrics say that if he weren’t rapping, he’d be raping in a Jason mask: Eminem flips off Sydney, Australia, on July 27, 2001.

The hate between Eminem and The Source grew, blurring the border between journalism, cultural community, favoritism, and racial prejudice for the worse. MP3s of co-owner Benzino’s anti-Eminem tracks were posted on the magazine’s website as he churned them out, and they were sent to journalists from a Source editor’s e-mail address. At the same time, Kim Osorio, the magazine’s executive editor issued an official statement in defense of Benzino against Eminem online, on TV, and on the radio, proclaiming that the magazine’s involvement with Benzino was separate from their objective role as critics of hip-hop.

This drama was months away from our Townsend Hotel interview, but The Source was already under Eminem’s skin when we met. He had idolized the magazine and felt that if any media outlet would represent him properly, The Source would. It was, in fact, an old gripe all over again. On the song “If I Had,” from The Slim Shady LP, Eminem derided Detroit hip-hop station WJLB, an operation with the motto “where hip-hop lives” that only played 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. and never local artists, especially Eminem.

“I know that plenty of artists, not just rappers, who sell a lot of records are looked up to and sometimes it’s deserving and sometimes not,” Eminem says. “A lot of people could be saying that I don’t deserve it. You know, failure has always been the scariest and biggest motivation for me, just the fear of losing and somebody getting the last laugh on me. In the back of my mind my worst fear is that I wake up tomorrow and I won’t be able to write nothing. That’s why this is good. If people stop writing about me tomorrow I might not have shit to write about. If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, and all that shit, my songs would be really wack. They’d just be boring.”

IN 1996, WHEN EMINEM’S FIRST ALBUM, Infinite, was released, it was one of many independent rap releases. Zero newspapers, even in Detroit, reviewed it. In 2002, Eminem and The Eminem Show were discussed in one column or another of the New York Times alone 153 times, up from 20 in 1999, 78 in 2,000 and 96 in 2001. In 2002, Eminem was the New York Times’s mirror, angled to reflect aging critics who donned ill-fitting zeal (Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich), a critic who saw commercialistic shtick defeat innovation in Eminem’s new music (Jon Pareles), another critic’s love-hate-love relationship with him (Neil Strauss), and an infamously unmerciful editor’s summary of post-9/11 art (Michiko Kakutani).

In November 2002, as the 8 Mile buzz inebriated the nation, newspapers that had printed uninformed, anti-Eminem articles at the height of anti-Eminemism circa February 2001, featured columns by nearsighted fuddy-duddyies who, somewhere between then and now, had come to terms with Eminem’s misogyny, gotten over his corrosive influence on the youth of America, and decided that fag was an acceptable term (probably because he