Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [9]
They think that I’m a motherfuckin’ Beastie Boy: Eminem in New York City, 1999.
Rosenberg became a friend first, a manager-lawyer second, as he is today. Eminem’s circle at the time were his classmates in rap school, the peer group with whom he honed his skills: Proof (born DeShaun Holton), Denaun Porter (a.k.a. Kon Artis), and Rufus Johnson (a.k.a. Peter S. Bizzare). Proof had made his own reputation as a battle MC, an omnipresent figure at Detroit open-mike nights. By the midnineties he’d begun hosting the Saturday night proceedings at Maurice Malone’s Hip-Hop Shop. Proof was Eminem’s mentor and sponsor on the scene, encouraging him to rap at events where Eminem would otherwise be a spectator, banking his own name on Eminem’s skills. Eminem began to write and rap with Proof and the others, throwing down at the Hip-Hop Shop and other local venues, such as St. Andrew’s Hall, the Rhythm Kitchen, and anywhere else they had the chance. Proof and Kon Artis, whom Eminem approached for production assistance on Infinite, gathered the rap troop that now call themselves D12, short for Detroit Twelve and Dirty Dozen. Proof’s goal in creating D12 was to form a band of MCs in a loose collective like the East Coast’s Wu-Tang Clan. He approached the rappers he felt were skilled but were stylistically on the outskirts of the Detroit scene. The D12 concept evolved further on a car trip back from a rap convention in New York, when Proof floated the idea that each rapper in the group create a dark-half alter ego to allow each of them to experiment with hardcore styles unlike their own. “The whole thing in D12 was to have a personality where you would just say anything,” Proof says. “You just didn’t give a fuck. Your persona was almost like a mask to hide behind, know what I’m sayin’? We all took our different identities, and Em took Slim Shady and he ran with it. He took it way more serious than all of us, that motherfucker.” With each member of the group in a new guise, they wrote the most abrasive raps they could think of, a cocktail of serial killer-ology, black comedy, and ultraviolence.
Eminem was the last member of D12 to create his alter ego, because the summer of 1997 was a rough one for Marshall Mathers. He worked a lot when he had a job, he drank a lot, he fought a lot, and one ordinary morning, found himself on the path to his dream. Slim Shady became his D12 character and Eminem immediately created a list of words to rhyme with it. Slim Shady became his avenging angel, a figure he pictured as a mummy with its wrists slit; a fiend without feeling and beyond life, death, or caring; a monster freak who only knew how to say and do what no one was supposed to.
“I was taking a shit, swear to God,” Eminem says about the morning he thought up Slim Shady. “I was sitting on the toilet and boom, the name hit me. I started thinking of all of these words I could rhyme with it. So I wiped my ass and got off the pot and went and called everybody I knew. I was like, ‘Bada-boom, badabing, wanna go with it, or no?’ Once I came up with the Shady concept, I wrote the Slim Shady EP in two weeks.” He had found himself and he was serious about it: Eminem showed up to record what became the Slim Shady EP with the Bass Brothers with a $50 “Slim Shady” tattoo on his left arm, complementing the “Eminem” on his right.
The Slim Shady EP laid the groundwork for The Slim Shady LP, executive-produced by Dr. Dre and released February 23, 1999. That included seven songs, three of which made it onto Eminem’s full-length major-label debut: “I Just Don’t Give a Fuck,” “If I Had,” and “Just the Two of Us,” Eminem’s first murder ballad to his baby’s mother, Kim. The EP has all the Slim Shady essentials: flippant nihilism, self-loathing, destruction, acute battle raps, fucked-up family pathology, and comedy, both subtle and slapstick.
Although the EP is seven songs long, two are