Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [54]
“Everyone seems to love Eminem,” says Frere-Jones. “I think short of killing his own daughter, it doesn’t seem like he could do anything that would repel people. You open the paper and Jimmy Carter is saying, ‘Oh, I like Eminem’—they’re clambering on top of one another to be offended less and less. I’m not trying to sell my cure or anything, but Eminem, what is this idea that people hate you? As far as I can tell, nobody hates you, other than Richard Goldstein—God bless him for being out there on his own.”
“The challenge now is,” says publicist Dennis Dennehy, “to keep from willfully overexposing him. I don’t think he’s overexposed, but he’s everywhere. When you really get down to it, in the last year, he’s done maybe seven interviews in this country. It’s going to be a challenge with the next record, or the next whatever he does—but we’ve got to maintain the press he gets without giving him away. We could go out tomorrow and do an interview with almost any outlet in America—no one would say no to an interview with Eminem. But there’s nothing to be gained by it. He’s got a lot to say, he explains himself really well. But it’s better to maintain some mystery. I think for anyone who really cares about artists, your favorite bands are always the most mysterious. You didn’t read about them everywhere—so when you did, it was a big deal.”
The truth is that Eminem doesn’t like to do interviews; he prefers to save his sound bites for song. That’s not to say he’ll make the experience unpleasant. He is civil, charming in a subdued way, passionate, and if he’s not too swamped or tired, a lot of fun to be around. He’s learned to do interviews well over the years—probably to make them go faster, since he thinks they’re pointless at their worst and redundant at their best. As for the storied past and personal life he chronicles in verse, he prefers to keep the intimate details private. “If you listen to the songs and don’t take the words out of context,” he says, “it’ll tell you why I’m saying this or why I’m saying that. I might say it in the song later on, but you’ll hear it. If you don’t listen to the whole song, it’s like watching the middle of a movie and turning it off and then talking about it. Just listen to the fucking songs. If you listen to them, they will tell you. The album’s like a fucking instruction manual—and sometimes interviews are like somebody trying to put something together but they don’t know how. Read the instructions! Why are you making me sit here and tell you?”
But Eminem being Eminem/Shady/Marshall/him/them, it can’t be that simple. There are subtexts, metaphors beneath the metaphors—right? “Somebody asked me today in another interview,” he said in 2002, “‘When you said you feel like your father, you just hate to be bothered—what did you mean by that?’ And I sat there for a minute and I was like, fuck! What did I mean by that? They almost had me thinking that there was a deeper meaning to it. No, dummy, it’s a metaphor! My father didn’t wanna be bothered with me. And I hate to be bothered by everything. Man, when people start to overanalyze, I tend to start overexplaining myself and in my head, I’m questioning it instead of taking it the way I meant it. It’s like, ‘I like to wear my raincoat in the rain’—what did I mean by that? I couldn’t have meant, like, that I like to wear my raincoat in the rain! Could I? Do I? Do I like when it rains, so I can wear my raincoat?”
The four years of media angles on Eminem can be summed up with four questions: (1999) Is he a novelty?; (2000) Does he matter?; (2001) Should he be stopped?; (2002) How great is he? The year 2003 and beyond is interesting: What comes next? Since Eminem has been deposed from moral monsterhood by everyone but the most extreme right and left wings, he will be an MC with one less battle. And since he may have done some healing with his own “issues” over his past three albums, maybe he’ll look