Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [77]
“Hey, Slim Shady,” one of them says, “I like your song.”
“Oh, yeah?” Eminem says. “Which one?”
“The one with the video,” she says. “It’s really good.”
“Yeah, when you dress up like Marilyn Manson,” the other says. “That shit’s really funny.”
“Thanks a lot.” He looks unimpressed. “Hey, have you met Paul?” he says, looking at his manager. “He’s a fuckin’ fuck. His life is over.”
“You’re too late,” Paul Rosenberg says, bemused. “I already quit.”
“Oh, yeah? Well you’re so fired then that you’re rehired, you fuckin’ fuck. You know why? Because you’re fat, bald, and Jewish.”
The girls smile awkwardly.
“Can I get a beer?” one asks someone next to the cooler. He doesn’t notice.
“So you’re from Detroit?” her friend asks Eminem. “What’s it like?”
I predict, to myself, that this will end her interview.
“It’s aiight,” Eminem says, a mischievous glint in his eye. “Hey, you two know Dee, right? You’ve met Dee?”
The girl crinkles her nose. “Dee who?” she says.
“Deez nuts!” Eminem shouts in her face. The joke is a hip-hop test and it looks like these girls have failed. “Deez Nuts” is a classic gangsta rap track featuring Snoop Dogg, Nate Dogg, Warren G, and Daz from Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992); it starts with a phone call skit much like the joke Eminem just played. “Deez nuts” is big in Eminem’s crew right now; anyone answering a “who” or “what” often gets “deez nuts” as the response. “Deez Nuts” are tough to avoid even if you know the joke; as the newest hanger-on, I myself am served plenty of “deez nuts,” the loudest set coming in the middle of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. I didn’t stand a chance, anyway; interviewing is a minefield of “who” and “what” questions. Before I was finished, though, I doled out “deez nuts” myself. Once. I’m not sure, but I think it signaled the end of that joke’s run in Eminem’s crew.
Everyone in the room is laughing, including the two young women, but it’s clear they don’t quite know why. Eminem stares at them with a toothy, he-crazy grin.
One of them pokes him. “You’re funny!” she says.
“Am I funny? Paul, am I funny?” Eminem asks.
An authoritative knock at the door reveals a man in a headset. “You’re good to go,” he says. “They’re all ready up there.”
The crowd in the lounge has grown and is now pressing up against the dressing-room door. Eminem’s security guard and the club staffer back us all up, and we file out in a line, Eminem in the middle. I hear drive-by comments from the VIP peanut gallery:
“Who’s that?”
“Yo, that’s him?”
“He’s a little guy.”
“He is so cute. He doesn’t look that good on TV.”
“Oh my God, I have to meet him.”
“Yo, Shady, mushrooms, dawg!”
“Why he rollin’ like dat?”
“Dre got a white Snoop, yo.”
The dance floor is full of grinding bodies, so is the balcony overlooking it. The DJ fades the music and announces Aftermath/Interscope-recording-artist Eminem’s performance as we enter the room. DJ Stretch Armstrong waits on a platform in front of us. He drops the needle onto the groove of “Scary Movies,” juggling and winding it back and forth between the turntables. Heads peer from the balcony. I sidle onto the platform, between two people on the back edge. Eminem and Royce hop onto the platform and pick up their mikes.
Royce strides from side to side, loosing his verse, while Eminem, loose from his dinner of more substances than sustenance, paces stage right, pointing and punctuating Royce’s lines with shouted whats. The two are raw, tight hip-hop; the song, two long serrated battle raps bound by the chorus “Y’all want drama? Wanna make a scary movie?”
This isn’t the kind of jiggy anthem that was rocking the room minutes ago. The audience stands still; the expressions are hard to read, but I place them between intrigued and unsure—and stuck at “What the fuck?” The three white Jersey girls whom I recognize from the doorway of the dressing room are in front of the stage, bobbing with enthusiasm, though they don’t seem to know the song. Eminem stands,