Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [7]
The cold air wakes me as I crunch through the snow on the stairs. Marshall stands in the doorway, Kim at his side, one of Hailie’s blankets in his hand. He nods a good-bye. Standing there, the next rap superstar doesn’t look dazzling. He looks weary, wary, and content. He’s as home as he can be.
IN 1996, MARSHALL BRUCE MATHERS III had already changed his stage name from his initials, M & M, to their phonetic synonym, Eminem, for obvious legal reasons. If M&M/Mars had sued him, it would have been hilarious: He was barely getting by on the five-bucks-and-change minimum wage he received hourly for washing dishes and cooking at Gilbert’s Lodge in St. Claire Shores, a suburb of Detroit. At the time, he took home in a month what a top corporate lawyer makes in half an hour. That amount wasn’t even enough to cover the costs of pressing Infinite, his first independent release. Yet his rap career was under way. Mathers had been signed to an outfit called FBT Productions for four years. He still is, more out of kinship than contract, and as of 2003, FBT claims production credits on thirty of the fifty-eight songs on Eminem’s three major-label albums; his mentor Dr. Dre’s count is twelve. FBT is the Detroit production duo Mark and Jeff Bass, two brothers from Oak Park, one of Detroit’s more racially integrated areas. The Basses had been playing music and writing songs together since they were kids, their first paid gig coming when they were only seven (Mark) and eleven (Jeff), recording a Greyhound Lines jingle. The Basses grew up tough white kids who felt more at home in black social circles. They’ve seen their share of street fights—one of which claimed Mark’s right eye, necessitating a glass one. As they tried to establish a name for themselves as producers, the pair worked as inexpensive remixers for hire in the late eighties and early nineties, on cuts like the B-52’s’ “Love Shack” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Give It Away.” By this time, Mark was well into hip-hop, but his brother remained skeptical. His opinion didn’t change when he met the fifteen-year-old white kid his brother was eager to work with. Mark had found this new muse while in his car listening to a group of teens rapping on the radio, on an open-mike show hosted by a DJ called Lisa Lisa. One of them was Marshall Mathers, the one Mark ended up speaking to when he later phoned the studio. Bass invited Mathers down to the brothers’ modest basement studio that night. When Mathers arrived at 4:00 A.M., he freestyled with a pair of friends. It was the first time he’d ever seen a studio. The Basses then started cutting tracks with Mathers, watching him experiment with rhyme styles, from laid back to rapid-fire, until he found himself.
The boy who would be Shady: Eminem at age eighteen in 1990.
Mathers lived with his mother on the East Side of Detroit at the time and spent his nights after work writing rhymes until the early morning. He honed an even-flowing style laced with a gift of rhythm and a preference for intricate vocabulary inspired more by the joy of rhyming words than weaving a narrative. He began writing songs for an album called Infinite, one of the first recorded in the Bass brothers’ new studio, the Bassment, in 1996. The Bass brothers borrowed $1,500 from their mom to press 500 copies of the album, signing Mathers to the label they had created, WEB Entertainment. The record landed in local Detroit stores and in the hands of hip-hop radio programmers—and was unanimously ignored.
Infinite chronicles Eminem’s early days, his dreams of rap superstardom that flourished while he tried to pay the bills. While he was writing his first record, Mathers’s longtime girlfriend, Kim Scott, became pregnant and gave birth to Hailie Jade Scott on Christmas in 1995. The album is laced, in skits and lyrics, with his anxiety about raising his daughter on limited funds, his hope to leave her with half a million dollars, and a fantasy future full