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By Root 544 0

about Eminem’s dedication to the film, his public image turned from bad boy to hardworking single father. To look at the coverage, Eminem’s music career became secondary in the eyes of a public that was eager to fill out his celebrity profile with gossip of who he was dating and the life story they would have already known had they listened to any of his albums. Baby Boomer critics began to herald him as the icon of a generation, just a year after they’d declared him a blight on American values. “Unravel Eminem’s pop DNA and you’ll detect strands of Elvis Presley, John Lennon, and Bob Dylan. Heresy? Maybe, but so were initial appraisals of Madonna, another forebear to consider as Eminem’s stock and stature rise” (Edna Gunderson, USA Today).

The Boomer comparisons to the rock idols of yore is a game played whenever an artist captures the ear of the country. Eminem is not the new Bob Dylan, the new Beatles, or the new Elvis Presley—these are unrealistic comparisons. The effect those artists had on pop music and culture is incalculable because of the times in which they lived. Elvis threw open the doors on American values and ushered into the national consciousness the age of the teenager as a cultural force in America—an age now fully institutionalized. Bob Dylan rewrote folk and rock into literature. And the Beatles in seven years took the history of pop music and turned it upside down and inside out. It is hard to measure anyone against artists who lived and innovated at such a fertile time of what we know as contemporary culture. If Eminem is like any Boomer pop icons, it is David Bowie or John Lennon. Bowie was an adept thespian who changed with his times, but in every incarnation used a well-integrated facade, mystery, and shock to communicate the depths of his message. John Lennon as a solo artist was raw, honest, macho, and vulnerable, and made beautiful confessional art of his personal life.

When Frank Rich weighed in on Eminem in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, the end of the media conversation had been reached. The feature, like many others about Eminem in 2002, was uninformative outside of a writer’s discovery of something he’d missed in the broader culture. Though the underlying feeling was that of a critic jumping aboard the Eminem train, it duly reflected the national Eminem meter. Later in that same month, November, Eminem was rumored to be in the running for Barbara Walters’s “Person of the Year” accolade. It was an unprecedented degree of attention for someone with such a dirty mouth. All the Detroit newspapers ran stories featuring interviews of Eminem’s neighbors in the plush gated community that he now calls home. They told reporters about Eminem’s contribution to the neighborhood—sleigh rides for the children at Christmas. They chronicled his trick-or-treating with Hailie, dressed in a hooded sweatshirt and hockey mask as Jason from the Friday the 13th films, the same mask Eminem wore each night at the start of his show on the Anger Management Tour. “Marshall is a very good father and a very nice person—very down-to-earth,” his forty-five-year-old neighbor Cathy Roberts told the Detroit News. The same paper interviewed another neighbor, fifty-seven-year-old Dave Crorey, who met Mariah Carey when Eminem brought her over to meet the Croreys during the pair’s brief romance. “He seems a little timid,” Crorey said of Eminem. “He’s nothing like he’s portrayed—a wild kid and all that. Seems a little on the shy side.” There were Eminem cover stories gleaned from what seemed like twenty-minute interviews and endless articles about the concentric circles of his life, necessitated since at the time the man himself was not doing press. At the height of it all, three different houses in Detroit that were reported to have once housed Eminem went up for sale on eBay. The bidding price of the home pictured on the back cover of The Marshall Mathers LP, which had been appraised at $120,000, headed north of $10 million. It wasn’t exactly a slow year for celebrity culture, but the excitement, curiosity, and