Sunday Book Review: Exploring the Origins of Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers

Sunday Book Review is a recurring feature devoted to bridging the gap between music fans and music books. We aim to give you a taste of new and classic books that dive deep into the psyches of musicians. Tweet requests @nmcalone.

This week Eminem dropped "Berzerk," the first cut off his eighth full-length album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2, which is due out November 8. The title of the album suggests a return of sorts to his roots, to the spiritual (if not sonic) tone of his second major release, 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP. Because of this, now seems the perfect time to revisit the era Eminem is trying to recall, to explore the formative years of Slim Shady, Eminem, and Marshall Mathers.

In 2004, Three Rivers Press published a book by Anthony Bozza titled Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem. Bozza, who would later help pen Slash’s autobiography, published a Rolling Stone cover story about Eminem in 1999 that helped catapult him into the role of respected journalist and Eminem into rap superstardom. Though Bozza was one of the first and only journalists to have unfettered access to Eminem, the book he produced is not a juicy tell-all dripping with gossip on Dr. Dre and just how much ecstasy Marshall Mathers was dropping.

Instead, Bozza takes on the project of trying to place Eminem in context and analyze his relationship to American society. It’s an ambitious goal, and one of the smartest things Bozza does is enlist the help of other critics to fill out the arguments, notably Sasha Frere-Jones, formerly of the Village Voice and now The New Yorker. At its best, this book brings together the opinions of music scholars to provide a compelling picture of not just what Eminem did, but what it means to us. This question is more relevant than ever now, as we look back on Eminem’s legacy and try to make sense of it. Though the book can get dry at points, we've cut through the more plodding portions to bring you the meat of Bozza’s sweeping book. Read on.

Marshall Mathers is the first to admit he owes much of his early success to the maniac goofball that is his alter ego, Slim Shady. He bemoans it—in typical tongue-in-cheek fashion—on “Without Me,” declaring, “I’ve created a monster / cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more / they want Shady / I’m chopped liver.” Slim Shady arose out of the creation of D12, the Detroit rap outfit created by Proof, whose founding principles included every member having a persona that “didn’t give a fuck.” Proof says Eminem took Slim Shady and ran with it, taking the entire concept of an alternate personality “way more serious than all of us, that motherfucker.”

Bozza relates that Eminem came to picture Slim Shady as his “avenging angel... 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.” Slim Shady allowed Eminem the mask he needed to push his art in ways that ultimately resonated with the public, and got him his first big break. Not bad for an idea he came up with while sitting on the toilet.

Eminem has made a sport out of skewering, in rhyme, those who have slighted him. After Christina Aguilera revealed his marriage to Kim before he wanted it public, Em eviscerated her in “The Real Slim Shady,” claiming she gave him a venereal disease and that she blew both Fred Durst and Carson Daly (embarrassing! Though, for the record, probably inaccurate). Bozza also mentions the simulated beating Moby got in “Without Me,” and Eminem’s entire diss song devoted to beating wannabe rapper-bluesman Everlast into a rhetorical pulp, complete with a nice death-threat bow tie.

Bozza sees these outbursts as a “fitting outlet for a sarcastic and entertaining battle MC,” and this is certainly true to a large extent. But elsewhere in the book, current The New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones brings up the question of Kim, and it’s a question that’s hard to ignore. Over the course of his career, Eminem has torn Kim Scott apart in front of an audience in myriad ways, both in performance and on wax. How can she respond? It’s good to remember, while we are laughing at the latest barb tossed by Eminem, that the objects of our derision are more often than not completely outgunned by this master wordsmith, and that maybe at some point a bit of mercy is in order.

That being said, Bozza relates a hilariously telling scene of Em messing with Yale School of Drama Honorary PhD, Mark Wahlberg, on Eminem’s first appearance on MTV’s TRL. Bozza claims Marky Mark represented twin pillars of hate for Eminem: “crappy white rappers and teen pop.” Wahlberg was there promoting the movie Three Kings, probably trying his hardest to forget the Funky Bunch ever existed, and decided to remark off air, “What, is there supposed to be some fucking tension in here or something?”

Did I mention Eminem is sensitive? On air, Eminem declared, “We’ll just stand around like one big fun bunch,” and then threw a bug-eyed look at the camera. While it may have made Wahlberg do a double-take, it was pretty mild by Eminem standards, but the real comedy comes from the fact that Eminem was so upset by the incident that he went on an epic rant about Wahlberg afterwards, calling him a “fucking asshole,” a “bastard prick,” a “fucking little faggot,” a “little fucking homo,” a “fucking dick,” a “fucking bitch,” a “fat fuck,” and a “fucking little queer.” Once that train is rolling, there’s no stopping it.

Sometimes when I’m bored and feeling a bit nostalgic I’ll go back and listen to “My Name Is” (or maybe the homophobic diss remix by Insane Clown Posse, “Slim Anus”—never) and think, damn, this song slapped. Eminem never has moments like that because Eminem hates “My Name Is” with a passion (although he could not be reached for comment on what he thinks of the ICP version). Eminem says he didn’t hate it back when he recorded it, but that after a few listens he got this building feeling that it was starting to become “cheesy.” He says that’s when he knows it’s going to be a big record is when he thinks it's cheesy. Eminem thinks the songs he really “puts [his] heart and soul into” don’t get recognized. This is perhaps why his more recent work has steered a bit away from humor (with exceptions, of course) and more towards an earnest look at life. Again, Sasha Frere-Jones comes in with a bit of a dissenting opinion, saying that it “really bugs [him] out that Eminem has this conception of himself that he thinks his older music was silly and his real music is the incredibly grimacing method acting shit he does.” With a base of work as diverse as Eminem’s, there’s room for both opinions.

Bozza believes Eminem’s humor is one of the great keys to his success. It has allowed him to “subvert pop culture while being a card-carrying member of the mainstream.” It also hinges in part on Eminem’s uncanny vocal abilities, especially his ability to mimic voices. Eminem embodies the voices of other the character’s who inhabit his raps in such a humorous and natural way that sometimes when I listen to him, I forget not all rappers can do this. In fact, it’s very rare. Eminem himself reflects that he was “always a comedian, since [he] was a kid,” and that the reason why his first album, Infinite, wasn’t good was because it strayed too far from that.

Given his comments about “My Name Is,” and his more goofball work in general, Eminem presents a slight internal contradiction. On one hand he wishes his more overtly serious work were recognized for its “realness,” but on the other hand he thinks his songs start to suck when he strays too far from his natural tendency towards comedy.

In many ways this book is one long (over)analysis that we don’t know whether Eminem would or would not approve of. The exhaustive way in which Bozza places Eminem in societal context leads to conclusions Eminem himself might be reticent to draw. Eminem has admitted that he even get’s a bit confused about the meanings of his own lyrics when people start to dig into them.

He explains it like this: “Man, when people start to overanalyze, I tend to start over explaining myself and in my head I’m questioning it instead of taking it the way I meant it. It’s like, ‘I like to wear my raincoat in the rain'—what did I mean by that? I couldn’t have meant, like, that I like to wear my raincoat in the rain! Could I? Do I? Do I like when it rains, so I can wear my raincoat.” This might be one of the reasons why Eminem hates interviews, combined with the fact that, according to Bozza, he thinks they are “pointless at their worst and redundant at their best.”

One of the reasons as to why Eminem lashes out so violently at those who slight him is because he seems to be, at the core, an incredibly sensitive person, easily wounded by the words of others. In a scene where Bozza and Eminem hang out at the restaurant Eminem worked at while trying to get his rap career going, a waitress comes up and says, “Hi, Marshall! You know, I heard you were on MTV all the time, that’s what they’re telling me, but I watch it and I never see you.” Eminem is gracious to her face, but as soon as she leaves he starts in on her. “Fucking bitch, I never liked her. Always watching MTV. She probably doesn’t even have a TV. Bitch.” Later in the night, Eminem’s manager, Paul Rosenberg, says. “Man, everything can be going right, but a comment like that will stick with him for days.” It reminds the reader that even if fame comes knocking at your door, the insecurities that you’ve carried your whole life don’t just vanish, they just change form.

“For white rappers, there’s such a fine line between shit you can and can’t do. The main thing is to be yourself. A lot of white rappers — look at Vanilla Ice. Yo, he got exposed. You can only put up a front for so long before people start coming out of the woodwork like, ‘Yo, you didn’t grow up here, you didn’t do this.’ You talk about guns in your rhymes and you never shot a gun! Talkin’ about shit you never lived, you’ve never even seen. If you ain’t got the balls to walk up and sock somebody in the mouth, don’t write it down, because if you say that shit on wax, you’re gonna get tested. If you’re not not that type of person, don’t say it! Don't’ talk about growing up in hard times in the city if you grew up in the fucking suburbs. White rappers, if they grew up in the suburbs, should play off it, like, ‘Hi! I’m white.’”

Or you can try your best to duck the question.

Most Eminem fans at some point have engaged in trying to explain away the misogyny in his lyrics. “But he loves Hailie so much,” “It’s metaphorical violence,” “He’s just expressing his inner pain”—the list goes on. I have definitely said similar statements at one time or another. And yet in the midst of this overwhelmingly positive book about Eminem, Bozza quotes journalist Richard Goldstein asking the simple question: “Why has the greatest artist of his generation never written a love song to an adult woman?” At first this might sound like a gay scientology conspiracy theory in the making, but at second glance, it is certainly a worthwhile question. Is Eminem in some ways incapable of moving beyond his particular brand of Kim-inspired “modern male machismo?”

Near the end of the book, writer Soren Baker is quoted as saying that the thing that people have bought into about Eminem is “his life.” He goes on to say that Eminem made his life “into entertainment like the title The Eminem Show would suggest, but also "made his life matter to people.” Bozza believes the movie 8 Mile also pushed towards this, creating Eminem in the image of a redemptive hero. Rap is filled with posturing, as are many Eminem songs, but these critics suggest that Eminem’s success wasn’t just due to his technical prowess and inventiveness, but also to his vulnerability. Though people talk about Eminem paving the way for other white rappers perhaps he did more to encourage a tradition of vulnerability in rap, not based in the borderline-melodrama of a rapper like Slug, or the earnestness of Macklemore, but in the raw and sometimes contradictory emotions of an artist like Kanye West or Danny Brown.

At the end of this book, Bozza looks back on a 1999 quote from Dr. Dre, when he says that if Eminem remains that same person he was the first day they went into the studio, a man who’s “dope“ and “very humble,” then “he’ll be fucking bigger than Michael Jackson.” It’s been over a decade since that quote, and yet it seems we don’t have a firm answer to Dre’s sentiment.

In so many ways, Eminem’s legacy has been solidified, has surpassed even Michael Jackson’s in its resonance in American culture, but there’s still not a sense of peace. There’s still something uncertain about the way time will regard Eminem’s legacy, how we will continue to interpret it as he grows old. I would guess Eminem understands this better than anyone. We can see it in his reaching back, titling his new album The Marshall Mathers LP 2, searching somewhere in his past to anchor his future. But in the end there's one thing that is certain: Eminem will keep digging through Slim Shady, Eminem, and Marshall Mathers until he finds what he’s looking for.