Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [43]
“There were a few other underground rappers coming up when Eminem did who stood out as innovative lyricists,” says Sway Calloway, MTV News correspondent and longtime cohost of the influential L.A. hip-hop radio show The Wake Up Show. “Eminem found a way to do things better. And Eminem stayed on the grind. He just continued to come by our show and drop freestyles. I got so much stuff that he did. He was doing his footwork. And the thing about him I noticed each time I saw him back then—and it’s still going on—is that he keeps getting better and better. He came to our studio to record ‘Get You Mad’ [on Sway and King Tech’s 1999 album, This or That], and that’s when I first started noticing, damn, this dude keeps getting better. His metaphors are ridiculous. I could just tell he wasn’t going to run out of things to say or how to say them after one album. So many rappers do when they lose touch with the reality that got them there in the first place.”
Regardless, the critics were coming. Eminem’s first high-profile detractor was Timothy White, the deceased Billboard editor in chief. White devoted his page-long column the week The Slim Shady LP came out to a benefit album for Respond, an organization for battered women, as part of his denouncement of the misogyny in Eminem’s music, which he felt perpetuated cycles of violence against women and made “money off the world’s misery.” Eminem made White insult fodder in “Bitch Please II,” from The Marshall Mathers LP, and speculated on the validity of White’s assertions in “Criminal” and other songs.
“He’s a fucking asshole,” Eminem said about White the week the Billboard issue hit newsstands. “Fucker. He took everything I said so fucking literally it disgusts me. He should be able to tell when I’m serious and when I’m not—it’s not fucking rocket science. He didn’t even realize that ‘Guilty Conscience’ was a concept song. It’s about the way people are in the fucking world and how evil always seems to outweigh good, whether it’s in your conscience or in the world and in America especially. In the song, we’re talking about the devil half of you and the angel half of you. Nine times out of ten, the devil’s gonna win.”
In the hip-hop press, Eminem was received cynically until he had proven his abilities. The Source put Eminem in their “Unsigned Hype” column before he was pursued by Dr. Dre, a pedigree Eminem shares with DMX and the Notorious B.I.G.
That column anointed Eminem in 1998 as “an MC in need of some nurturing from a record company … this rapper of the Caucasian persuasion’s got skills.… Point blank, this ain’t your average cat. This Motor City kid is a one-of-a-kind talent and he’s about to blow past the competition, leaving many melted microphones in the dust.”
The hip-hop press dissected the power of Eminem’s rhyme skills as much as they heralded the twisted terrain of his content: The Source called “Just the Two of Us,” the precursor to “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” a “guaranteed rewinder.” The hip-hop press already knew what even many of the (white) men and women who made their living critiquing music overlooked: black rappers have spit rhymes as gory as Eminem’s for years, full of misogyny, homophobia, and street violence, traditions entrenched in the machismo of the gangsta pose, however close it may or may not be to the rapper’s reality. On the microphone in every hip-hop style, exaggeration rules supreme, an extension of the tradition of hyperbole that began on wax in 1979, in the second verse of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” but with roots far older. At the same time, Eminem’s upbringing, among poor blacks and whites, was closer to the black and minority experience reflected in rap, lending Eminem the added credibility of similarity. Eminem, without a doubt, is the first white rapper with true street cred to cross over. The Beastie Boys, though they did right musically,