Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [70]
“Em’s worked really hard to get where he is,” Bizzare, of D-12, says. “He went everywhere back in the day, battles, conventions. I was one of the first to take him out of town, actually. He had never been nowhere besides Kansas City and Cedar Point in Michigan. Around ’94, I think it was, me and him drove down to the How Can I Be Down? conference in Miami. There was like five of us in a Honda Accord, driving all the way down there. We didn’t do too good, we passed out a couple tapes, we didn’t get no respect, whatever. We had to leave early because all this bad shit was happening back home with Kim at the house Em had with her. They was getting broken into and they was getting evicted. Me and him had to get back to Detroit right away so we tried to catch a bus and they wouldn’t let him on it because he had his clothes in a garbage bag. He had to, like, put the clothes on and put shit in my bag.”
It is impossible to relate the history of hip-hop and understand Eminem’s place in it without including the white people who have affected the scene for better and worse. In hip-hop’s early years, punk and New Wave artists such as the Clash and Blondie were early supporters: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five opened for the Clash on all seven nights of concerts that they played in Bond’s International Casino Times Square in 1981, in front of sets painted by graffiti artists such as Phase 2. Blondie was, in truth, the first group to land a proto-rap on the pop charts, with “Rapture” in 1980. Former Sex Pistol John Lydon and Afrika Bambaataa teamed up in 1984 for the cutting-edge dance hit “World Destruction,” and it’s impossible to think that plenty of the half a million copies of Kurtis Blow’s The Breaks sold didn’t go to white fans. In the early days of the music, white executives such as Tom Silverman (Tommy Boy), publicist Bill Adler, and producers Rick Rubin and Lyor Cohen (Def Jam) and Barry Weiss (Jive) supported rap when black execs at the black-music divisions of major record labels regarded rap as a novelty, opting to develop R&B divas and funk bands. The Source, the self-proclaimed “bible of hip-hop,” was started by two white guys, Jonathan Schecter and David Mays, out of a Harvard dorm room in 1988. From visionary believers such as producer and Def Jam cofounder Rick Rubin to charlatans such as N.W.A’s manager Jerry Hibbert, whites have been involved in hip-hop from the start; they’re as old-school of a feature as the rapper who never got paid—and the record company entrenched in white corporate America that didn’t pay him.
The only unquestionably supportive role that whites have played in nurturing the music are as members of the record-buying public and the select critical media. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s landmark single “The Message” was heralded by white rock outlets such as the Village Voice and Rolling Stone back in 1979. The groups who have had the most universal appeal—Run-D.M.C., Public Enemy, N.W.A, Naughty by Nature, Snoop, Tupac, Biggie Smalls, Eminem—have drawn fans from the same well.
Of course, there is white rap. When Eminem debuted in the hip-hop press, each magazine, in one form or another, ran articles such as The Source’s “Other White Rappers Who Don’t Suck,” as a remembrance. All those articles were duly short. The Beastie Boys were the first significant white rap group; they weren’t the only one to be nationally known before Eminem, although it may have been better if they were. Most white MCs have done more damage to white hip-hop credibility than C. Dolores