Word: eminem
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...late 1990s, hip-hop became weighed down by bling and, taking its cue from the diamonds that adorned the necks of most of its artists, grew harder and more polished. Electronic sounds further stretched the genre, but an orthodox mainstream was born and experimentation fell by the wayside. Eminem made a movie and then disappeared, Kanye West and Estelle bounced irresistibly delicious sounds back and forth from both sides of the Atlantic, but nothing really changed—nothing was really revolutionized. Hip-hop continued to sit quite comfortably in its own little groove. The Knux’s debut...
...class clown and being the shy kid" bullies pounded on - and wound up inhabiting both characters. Out of the struggle to continually remake himself sprang three distinct on-stage personas: Marshall Mathers (his real name), who raps earnestly about the joys of fatherhood and the oppression of celebrity; Eminem, "the emcee who goes onstage sober and spits his metaphors"; and alter ego Slim Shady, "the guy who shows up after a few shots of Bacardi - and wants to fight." Repressing this last figure is a battle whose victory only comes with maturity. "We've all got Slim Shadys up inside...
...Eminem has a "fascination" with the movie Rain Man. He considers the Dustin Hoffman character a kindred spirit: whereas Hoffman boasted a facility with numbers, he is the rapper-savant. "This is all I know how to do," he says. "I can get in my car and drive, but I don't know how to get places." He sells himself a bit short: in addition to being a devoted father, he's a talented graphic artist, and the book contains a series of impressive sketches depicting the superheroes of rap (Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, himself) and comic books (the Incredible...
...Even after word of his talent began to spread, his road to success was plagued with potholes. He split with one manager over a Burger King Whopper - Eminem couldn't afford one and figured any manager unwilling to shell out for a client's lunch wasn't serious about the rapper's prospects. And while the opening scene in 8 Mile - in which his character suffers stage fright during a rap battle - may have been cinematically embellished, he "choked" in the finals of a 1997 battle in Ohio, returning to Detroit "depressed and totally broke...
...Lowdown: If you saw 8 Mile, you're familiar with much of Eminem's story already, and unfortunately the narrative is crisper on the silver screen. Though sprinkled with anecdotal gems, this tangled history veers closer to "annotated picture book" than autobiography and crumples under the weight of too many half-baked attempts at introspection. The book's structure, it seems, was dictated not by laziness but by personal philosophy: he's not much of a reader. ("If there are no pictures in a book, forget it.") But he doesn't seem much for writing, either. Die-hard fans will...