Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [94]
“I never asked Dre if he knew I was white when he heard my tape,” Eminem says. “I had met one of his A&Rs at the Rap Olympics, so I guess he knew. I don’t think it really mattered much. It’s because I’m dope. It sounds corny coming out of my mouth and I don’t want to sound prima donna or nothin’, but if somebody takes it to a certain level, it doesn’t matter. A few people who work with Dre told me at first when they heard about him wanting to work with me, they were like, ‘no white rappers.’ Dre told them he didn’t give a fuck if I was green or yellow or whatever color, he was working with me as his next project.”
“To be real with you,” Dr. Dre says, “usually white MCs aren’t good—it’s as simple as that. It’s not a racial issue, you just have to be good and most of them aren’t. Someone like Eminem is rare. A white MC is like seeing a black person in a hockey rink—it’s gonna get some attention, but you know he’d only be playing if he was real good. Eminem is one of the best MCs I’ve worked with and one of the best out there, period. I didn’t think twice. To me, I don’t give a fuck if you’re purple; if you can kick it, I’m workin’ with you.”
Another key to Eminem’s unassailable identity is his fundamental honesty about his position in hip-hop; a quality he learned when writing battle raps: By dissecting himself, he left his opponent little ammunition. His timing doesn’t hurt either: As Eminem’s success reached unprecedented levels for a white rapper, in a type of prediction of the fact, the rapper addressed the commercial advantage of his color just before The Eminem Show took off. “It’s just an obvious fact to me that I probably sold double the records because I’m white,” Eminem says. “I’m not saying that if I’d been a rapper of another race I wouldn’t have sold records. In my heart, I truly believe that I have talent, but at the same time I’m not stupid. I know that when I first came out, especially because I was produced by Dre, he gave me that foundation to stand on. That made it cool and acceptable for white kids to like it. In the suburbs, the white kids have to see that the black kids like it before they do.” On the album he made his point even more clearly with lines such as “if I were black, I would have sold half,” “hip-hop wasn’t a problem in Harlem, only in Boston,” and “I’m not the first king of controversy, I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley to do black music so selfishly and use it to get myself wealthy.” Clearly, this is a man who knows how race has played for and against him; it’s proof that he knows the score—and so should everyone else.
Eminem personifies the subdivisions of America—black, white, city, suburb—and the limber cultural convergence of race identity in America. Above and beyond his gifts as a musician, Eminem is a lightning rod for debate, for projection, and for conjecture, because he is an embodiment of what is happening, the most visible, most complete example of a complex evolution. Like so many significant artists who come to represent their times, Eminem did not campaign for the job, he is merely reflecting the influences that formed him and the times in which he lives. Hip-hop to Eminem was an escape from his life—literally and figuratively—as it is to so many others, more every day. It bonds inner-city kids who hear their reality reflected in the lyrics of the same black rappers that spell out to suburban kids, both affluent and poor, how to escape from whatever real or imagined prison holds them. Alienation from society, each other, and ourselves knows no boundaries and neither does the art that reflects it. In that trait, it offers some salvation.
“There’s always going to be assholes,” Eminem told writer Matt Diehl in 1998, “but if there’s one music that could