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By Root 613 0

boasting the backing of Russell Simmons and Def Jam, were the well-educated New York City kids of wealthy upper-middle-class families whose debut album was nothing but bad behavior draped in hip-hop’s gold chains. The rapper Everlast of House of Pain, whose “Jump Around” hit large in 1992, was born on Long Island but grew up in the San Fernando Valley of L.A.—not exactly cushy, but not exactly Compton. He was signed to Warner Brothers on the basis of his association with Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate, a loose group of L.A. rappers. Everlast’s debut, Forever Everlasting, was a flop. It took the funk of Cypress Hill’s DJ Muggs’s produced single “Jump Around” to get House of Pain to the top of the charts once—and never again. One-hit wonder Vanilla Ice grew up comfortably in Miami Lakes, Florida, a history he recast when his debut album To the Extreme sold seven million copies and stayed at number one in the nation for sixteen weeks. Eventually, the gangster past he fabricated was exposed for the fraud it was, and by the time Vanilla Ice’s film, Cool as Ice, was released just a year later, he had become such a joke that the film’s soundtrack remained among the Billboard’s Top 200 best-selling albums chart for fewer weeks than To the Extreme remained at number one.

The moment his debut single commanded the airwaves and his bottle-blond visage dominated the small screen, Eminem walked into this novelty legacy. But he was none of what the others had been—he was white trash who had lived poor. He had lived and breathed hip-hop since hearing his first rap song at age nine, and started break-dancing at eleven. If he hadn’t had street cred from the start, he’d have never even made it out of Detroit. As it was, getting out was a feat in itself. “We talked to everybody, every label,” Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, says about landing Eminem a record deal. “I mean, at the point that he did get signed by Dre, we just wanted a deal. Everybody passed on him. To them, it was a risk. Most people don’t officially pass on an act; they sort of string you along because if something happens they don’t want to be sitting there looking like a dickhead. So that’s how they handled it. They didn’t know what they had, but, honestly, neither did we.”

At the start of Eminem’s career, the music press across the board spent most of their words on what set him apart: how he boldly went where no rappers had gone before, turning his anger and spiked tongue on himself. The album includes at least fifteen references to self-mutilation of one kind or another on The Slim Shady LP. Eminem was seen as credible and joyously improper, an heir to the antics of the Beastie Boys circa Licensed to Ill, with a twisted and shocking background story that explained the misbehavior and rendered it harder to swallow.

I don’t care what you say, unless it is about me: Eminem scares his chronic critic Moby at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, August 29, 2002.

There was one negative exception in the hip-hop world: XXL magazine called Eminem a “culture stealer” years before The Source waved that banner in 2002, by which time XXL had rescinded their comments from four years before and made an ally of Shady Records. Initially, though, XXL mirrored the doubt that had met Eminem for years at rap conferences from Miami to L.A. and at more MC competitions than he can count: How can a white MC truly be a part of hip-hop culture? Years later, when The Source copped the same line, running a caricature of Eminem as Elvis and launching a months-long dialogue about the white theft of hip-hop culture, the predicament was more complex. Citing Eminem’s landmark year as a performer, one unparalleled by a rap act in terms of projects, profits, and press, the magazine saw Eminem as a greater evil, a threat to the black identity that is hip-hop. Befitting a complicated topic, The Source’s stance vacillated between insulting Eminem for the advantages his race afforded him in connecting to a wider white audience (insinuating that his dysfunctional family shtick was a greater asset than his rhyme skills)