Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [69]
But the late-nineties underground hip-hop scene, even at its most innovative, focused on a return to basic, straightforward rap: looped grooves and MC skills first and foremost. Rap battles and ciphers—lyricists passing the mike from one to the other—hadn’t disappeared, but had become a staple of underground parties. An MC’s credibility depended on how well he could captivate a room on the spur of the moment, not on his clothes, clique, or cash. Competitions where MCs would take each other down with prepared and improvised verses, as in the final scenes of 8 Mile, were the building blocks of a rapper’s reputation.
The golden age of gangsta rap and the late nineties underground are the two influences at play in Eminem, a convergence of the hardcore sensibility with a rhyme style born of a diverse, MC-centric scene. Eminem first heard rap music when his uncle Ronnie Polkingham, who was just a few months older than Eminem, played him Ice-T’s “Reckless” from the soundtrack to the 1984 film Breakin’. Eminem grew up break-dancing, listening to LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., and the Beastie Boys, and began writing his own rhymes in his early teens. He performed at local talent shows and at school functions in groups with names such as the New Jacks and Sole Intent. As he continued writing, performing, and consuming rap, Eminem found his way into the heart of Detroit hip-hop, and when he turned his skill to a different end, accomplished locally what performances alone could not.
“Eminem started out just doing shows,” Proof says. “He was doing local little high school shows, like at Center Line, the high school in Center Line, Michigan. They had a lot of them there. He wasn’t really a battle-rapper. That was more my forte. I did it because I enjoyed it. I clung to it because I was more of a freestyle artist. Em was focusing on constructing songs. He was a genius at it then and he still is now. But what he had to battle for was credibility. Battling solidifies your street credibility as an MC. You don’t go talking about killing motherfuckers in your songs to gain credibility in the street. Most people are homing in on your skills, ‘Can he rap? Can he flow?’ Em is an extraordinary rapper and he was doing extraordinary things with his songs then, too. But it didn’t matter; he had to earn that credibility in battles. Now, everybody is doing battles, dropping verses about each other the way Jay-Z and Nas have been doing. Back then it wasn’t really happening that much with that level of artists.”
There is a well-documented history of popular artists battling for supreme boasting rights on record, with songs aimed at each other and popular opinion as the judge, that has come in and out of vogue. LL Cool J and Kool Moe Dee (formerly of the Treacherous Three) went at each other ceaselessly in the late eighties over who stole whose rap style. 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. taunted and accused each other over a series of songs and, though the tradition cooled following their deaths, it has returned with gusto: Jay-Z and Nas have lobbed lyrical shots at each other since 2001 and an animosity between Dr. Dre and Eminem’s Shady Records and Aftermath camps and the Murder Inc. family of Ja Rule and Irv Gotti, in part inspired by 50 Cent, grew into another theater of conflict in 2003. These recorded battle tracks and their renewed popularity bring the tradition to the radio waves—literally. New York’s Hot 97 set up a battle of the beats during which Nas