Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [80]
“I think we’ve been discovered,” Eminem says.
“Which one of you is Slim Shady?” she asks, chewing and looking at us.
“Uh, that would be me,” Eminem says.
“Can I get a signed picture?” she asks.
“I don’t got any pictures,” he says.
“Where you from?”
“Detroit.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Back to Detroit.”
“Will you sign this for me?” she asks, holding out an unused, unfolded slice-to-go box.
“That’s a bugged-out song you made,” she says.
“You should get the album,” he says. “What’s your name?”
She extends her name tag.
“Rashida,” he says.
“What are you writing? Here, will you sign this one for Jimmy?” She holds out another box.
On both, Eminem writes “High, my name is Slim Shady.”
It is time to leave, just in time—the fans and the curious are growing. We pass the three white girls, still huddled near the doorway.
“Are you a singer?” a brown-haired one asks.
“Nah,” Eminem says.
“Slim Shady?” another asks.
“How you doin’?” he says to them, smiling wide. “I should just have cards ready to give out,” he says as an aside to me.
I’m not sure if the variations in race, sex, age, and background of the curious he has met today alone have registered with Eminem. They’ve approached him, mobbed him, sought verification of his identity, or solicited him on this trip in ways he has only seen, perhaps, in his dreams. I think that the encounters I’ve witnessed must be more amazing to me right now than they are to him, not only because I’ve never seen anything quite like this, let alone at such close range, but more because he is too busy living for every second of right now to analyze it. I have a feeling that he wouldn’t notice anyway. The vision of music Eminem is tapped into and the hip-hop creed he believes in doesn’t see differences. It sees only people, and that makes anything possible.
RACE PLAYS INTO EMINEM’S STORY just as it does throughout American history in the post—Civil Rights era. The divide of, the struggle of, and the prevailing opinion on both sides were more clear when patriots such as Martin Luther King Jr. stood up to be counted; now, more subtle differentiations between the races exist, overlapped by subdivisions of class and the practices of the ruling autonomy—our national government and the corporate institutions that run America. Eminem is the product of a white background as well as a black culture, and he was alienated from both groups when he was growing up. He was picked on for “acting black” by white kids in the trailer-park suburbs; he was jumped for simply being a white kid on the streets of the city. In hip-hop, his talent triumphed over stereotype, and as he gained national recognition, the handicap of his color became an asset beyond his estimation. Eminem personifies city and suburb, archetypes of black and white culture, and the common ground where they have met for fifty years: pop music. He also represents the current paradigm of race consciousness in America, whereby skin color is almost of secondary consequence to one’s racial identity, where racial association seems to be more defined by behavior than color.
It cannot be said that Eminem is a white musician poorly imitating black music. He represents a synergy of black and white styles so completely that he destroys convention by transcending it, as only a few artists in pop music have done. In 1956 America, just two years after state legislatures were ordered to end segregated schooling, Elvis Presley brought black music into American homes with “Heartbreak Hotel,” the song that remained number one on the pop charts for eight weeks, and his explosive stage presence stamped the music with an image. Presley was censored on his infamous television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, during which his sexually suggestive swiveling hips were kept out of the camera’s eye. Much has been made of Presley as an American icon, more for the pop-star excess that killed him than his talent, but also regarding the debate whether or not and to what degree