[UPDATED] Excerpts: Anthony Bozza/Nick Hasted's Books on Em

[Amaranthine]

Did you type all of that out omg LOL

Yeah...

[limea]

Did you type all of that out omg LOL

Yeah...

Amaranthine's fingers died for our sins.

[Solace]

Did you type all of that out omg LOL

Yeah...

Amaranthine's fingers died for our sins.

I didn't read it but nice job for helping some curious Stans out

[momentsgolden]

Did you type all of that out omg LOL

Yeah...

You fucking typed it?!!!!

[Mathers]

“Hey, Paul, you’re already fired, you fat fuck,” Eminem yells at the slammed door. “You’re so fired and rehired, you’re tired, you skinny fat fuck! Fuck you, you baldfat fuckin’ fuck. Fuck you fuckin’ fuck, your life, it’s over.”

[kiki]

Why is it that regardless of which Eminem book I read Paul always is portrayed as a dick? I just finished Shady Bizness (...) and the little excerpt from Bozza's mention about the eavesdropping manager....Idk

[UofLCard]

Did you type all of that out omg LOL

Yeah...

Now that's dedication.

[Amaranthine]

Why is it that regardless of which Eminem book I read Paul always is portrayed as a dick? I just finished Shady Bizness (...) and the little excerpt from Bozza's mention about the eavesdropping manager....Idk

Maybe he really is a dick.I dunno. But honestly, I think Bozza's book is pretty neutral towards Paul. He's there, and he has to deal with immature, obnoxious, higher-than-the-clouds Eminem.

[melbournian]

Thanks

Probably the first thing that came to the fore when I read that was: shit, why the fuck did he defend himself. I know he had to but I really wish he'd said fuck it, let people think what they want.

If parents were still thinking that he's out to get their kids he maybe he'd still have something to write about.

This quote was interesting IMO -

"If people stop writing about me tomorrow I might not have shit to write about. If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, and all that shit, my songs would be really wack. They’d just be boring.”

Great foresight!!! LOL

[kiki]

^^ I'm preeetttyyy sure he said that not knowing the extend of the drama that was about to come (Proof dead, he almost died himself etc.)

[Stanforever]

This is taking ages for me to complete.lol.read about half of it.will complete it tomorrow.

Props to Amaranthine.

[Amaranthine]

Fun fact about that first set of excerpts: At size 12 Times New Roman, it takes up 58 pages on Microsoft Word, and contains 24,897 words....so congrats if you managed to read it all.

I'm still working on typing up parts from Hasted's book, stay tuned. I'll probably post them this weekend.

[Amaranthine]

Nick Hasted - The Dark Story of Eminem (2003/Updated 2010)

I couldn't resist commenting in [brackets] at a couple of points, sorry if they distract/confuse you.

It was in Dort's playground that Eminem, aged 10, was shoved into a snowbank so hard by an older boy who had been bullying him for week, DeAngelo Bailey, that his brain hemorrhaged, and he fell into a coma for five days...Principal Betty Yee came here 11 years ago, long after the incident. But she has had to look into it before. "You know why Dort has become so famous?" she asks a passing teacher. "They think Eminem was a former student here, from years ago! He had an accident out on the playground. So we're in the newspaper, I guess. But we have no record of him attending, apart from the situation that happened on the playground, many years ago. And you know what? From what I remember, it was on a weekend."

Mathers-Briggs claimed - though it has never been proven - that her husband was drunk and used drugs, and was even with her best friend as she gave birth to Marshall. Marshall Jnr. said these were all lies. Even the manner of their inevitable split is disputed. Mathers-Briggs said he walked out, one more in a generation of absconding fathers. Marshall Jnr. painted a tragic picture of coming back to their apartment one day to find it emptied like the Marie Celeste, of driving around town for weeks, on the apparently impossible task of finding his family. He claimed the eventual divorce was done through lawyers, that he had no way of tracking down the son he loved. So in 1975, he remarried, and moved on.

Marshall's memories, though, leave no doubt that his father was at least partly lying, or of the wound that his absence inflicted. Marshall was about six months old when, for whatever reason, his father moved to California. He was too young to remember having a father at all. But [grandmother Betty] Kresin recalls his childish efforts to communicate with him, anyway. "Marshall used to color pretty little pictures and give them to me," she told The Source. "He'd say, 'Grandmom, can you give these to my Daddy?'" She passed them on to a relative she was sure had stayed in touch with Marshall Jnr. In his early teens, Marshall would send letters, too. All came back marked 'Return to Sender'. The most painful proof that his father had simply chosen to ignore him came when he would visit Marshall Jnr's aunt's house as a child. The adult Marshall recalled the scene to The Source with crystal exactness, and emotions that were still raw and live. "I was always over there, and he would call there. I would be on the floor coloring. I remember!" he exclaimed, as if still childishly desperate for someone to believe him. "I would be there just listening. He would call there and talk to them, and never ask to talk to me."

"I think a lot of anger came because he was raised by his mother - no father image or figure was there," Kresin considered recently, to the Tonight TV program. "I once asked him why he was so angry with me," Mathers-Briggs told the Mail on Sunday. "He said it was because he didn't have a dad. I tried to explain to him that I left his father because he was abusive"...in that Source interview, his memories of hurt had to be squeezed from him. All he wanted to say, and kept saying, was "Fuck him!" It was his father who had done him the simplest, most damaging wrong, by removing himself from his life. The cost of such abandonment to many children in helplessness and compensatory anger, a sense of loss and a lack of self-esteem. Marshall would exhibit all these traits as he grew up, a typical child, in this way, of his times...so in interviews and art, he sealed that wound over, ignored it as best he could, and moved on. His mother was a very different matter.

"Me and my mother have never gotten along from the cradle," he told NME in 1999. That mother was a 17-year old girl when she was left with him...and in the end, all the evidence suggests she did not raise him well. But they were stuck with each other. More than anything, that explains why the dammed fury he kept for his father was not as strong as the hot, active hate he would come to have for his mother; why, by the time he was making records as Eminem, childish love had collapsed into a vindictive state of war.

Everything his parents said after he was famous is tainted by a tone of self-justification, after he attacked them in lyrics and pring. But even his father admitted that, in the time he knew Mathers-Birggs, "She was great with you - you were always clean and well-fed and well-dressed, and I couldn't fault her for that." "I am gullible and loving," Mathers-Briggs said of herself, in the Mail on Sunday. "As a child Marshall was never spanked, and I never raised my voice to him. The real problem is not that he had a hard life, but that he resents that I sheltered him so much from the real world. I love him so much that if he asked me to jump in front of a train for him, I would. I was an over-protective mother who gave him everything he wanted and more." The strained exasperation she felt having to raise this insecure child on her own, barely an adult herself was, though, more realistically described on the Tonight program. "I did the best I could - it was just him and me," she sighed. "Anything Marshall wanted, I would try and get for him. I got kicked out of stores because he'd be like the spoiled brat, lying in the aisle, arms and legs spread wide open."

Marshall's neediness only grew, though, as a direct result of his mother's actions. In one of his most touching early interviews, quoted in his mother's eventual, infamous suit against him for defamation, he described the difficulty of his childhood, with none of the bravado of later accounts.

"Was your home life ever stable?" the interviewer asked.

"Not really," he replied. "I was an only child for 12 years. When I was little, my mother never had a job, so we used to always stay with my family. We would stay until we got kicked out. Some of the relatives stayed in Kansas City, some in Detroit, so we just kept going back and forth. I guess we were freeloaders, so to speak. Whenever we would come back to Detroit, we would stay with my grandmother. Finally, my mother ended up meeting some dude and shit, so we got a house on the east side of Detroit when I was 12 years old." A little later, he expressed how that made him feel, in a tone of forlorn sadness for himself. "If you're going somewhere constantly and the scenery is changing around," he said, "it makes you feel real nervous and shit, especially being so little. I mean, fuck it, now it's done and over with..."

In another early interview, to Spin, he gave more concrete details, this time with a dutiful attempt to understand his mother. "I was born in Kansas City, then when I was five we moved to a real bad part of Detroit. I was getting beat up a lot, so we moved back to K.C., then back to Detroit again when I was 11. My mother couldn't afford to raise me, but then she had my little brother so when we moved back to Michigan, we were just staying wherever we could, with my grandmother or whatever family would put us up. I know my mother tried to do the best she could, but I was bounced around so much - it seemed like we moved every two or three months, I'd go to like six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked."...His mother's response came in the Mail on Sunday. "Obviously, I became overprotective," she said. "I was single, he was my only son. Years later, he abused me because he changed school so many times. Yet the truth is whenever he had a problem at school, he came home and demanded to move. And I gave into him."

Such private, partially remember conversations between relatives now in bitter dispute can't be checked for accuracy now. But Mathers-Briggs' reason for their moves at least tallies with Marshall's memory of fleeing Detroit's bullies as a child for Kansas City. Records entered into court during the libel trial about her raising him...confirmed that Marshall attended five elementary schools in four cities as a child. While not quite as erratic an education as he remembered, it was obviouly deeply destabilizing for a boy already feeling abandoned by one parent.

The wounded, self-protectively sealed nature of that boy was agreed on by him and his mother. "He was a really talented boy," she told the Mail on Sunday. "He was very artistic but he was a very shy child. He was too shy. He was a loner and he never wanted to pal up with people." In that sad, court-quoted interview, he gave more reasons why. "It was real difficult making friends when I was growing up, because we used to bounce from house to house and move so much. It wasn't until I was 12 years old that we finally stayed in one spot. In school, when I was little, I was one of those shy kids, and it was hard for me to make friends. Just as soon as I would start getting close to friends, we would have to leave."

"I was the distant kid," he added to a website. "You know, real distant. The friends I did have knew me well, but I didn't have a lot of friends."...The enduring nature of this hurt was confirmed when Brian Grazer, the producer of his movie 8 Mile, met him last year. "He was very humble," Grazer said, surprised. "He talked about his roots in a way that made me feel...damage."

Mathers-Briggs' own state of mind in these first years of Marshall's life...can only be inferred. Relying on the regularly removed charity work of relatives, unable or unwilling to work, it must have been a harried, directionless existence. The freedom and wilfulness of the "hippie chick" days in which Marshall was conceived are rarely to be found in accounts of her raising him. Her own descriptions of her motherly technique are meanwhile unmistakably idealized, self-justifying in the most transparent way. But when she relates actual altercations with her child...they sound pulled from still strong, specific memories. And they suggest a mother who found her son hard to understand, and found bringing him up too much to handle, more than once.

"My daughter had a lot of boyfriends," Kresin told the Sydney Sun-Herald. "Debbie is not the best mother." There's nothing to critisize in a young girl staying sexually active and searching for a partner. But Marshall's memories suggest she hardly screened him from the changing cast of men with which his father was replaced.

"The worst place was an apartment in a big house in Detroit that had five families living in different rooms," he said in Bliss. "My mom's boyfriends would all come over and go crazy. It was horrible."

"People used to find things about me to make fun of," he told Bliss. "My hair, the way I dressed - anything. Sometimes my mother used to send me to school in these blue pajamas. I'll never forget them. I used to roll them up in the summertime and say they were shorts. I used to get beaten up after school because of that."

It was during his first period on the East Side of Detroit, from the age of five, as he struggled to survive in a series of elementary schools, that this violent intimidation because another factor in alienating the attitude of a child who had begun so happily. He was chased and beaten by gangs, other children, local drunks and addicts. "I was always getting jumped, dog," he told the Guardian. "On the way to school, at school, on the way back from school. I was always getting fucked with. I was puny, timid. Fuckwithable."

"One guy used to beat my ass every day," he told FHM. "I was in the fourth grade and he was a sixth grader. Everybody was afraid of him. I was never the type to kiss ass, so he used to beat me instead."

"Everything in the song [Brain Damage] is true," Marshall told Rolling Stone. "He beat the shit out of me. Pissed all over myself. But that's not how I got really fucked up."...He insulted a friend of Bailey's, in response to which, he told Rolling Stone, the bully "came running from across teh yard and hit me so hard into this snowbank that I blacked out."

"He was the one we used to pick on," the adult Bailey, married with children, happily confirmed to the magazine. "There was a bunch of us that used to mess with him...we was having fun. Sometime he'd fight back - depend on what mood he'd be in. Yeah, we flipped him right on his head at recess. When we didn't see him moving we took off running. We lied and said he slipped on the ice."

"He had to relearn how to do simple things like speak and eat," she added to the Mail on Sunday, "and one of the side effects from the head injury, I believe, was his behavioral problems."

The truth is, no one can know how such a bloody mauling of his brain, and the reconstruction of its functions when so young, affected him. Maybe this was one of the synaptic triggers for the utterly unprecedented lyrical flow with which as an adult he would tear apart Bailey and other enemies was set. If so, it was still hard to be grateful.

...Marshall and his mother retreated to the relative safety of Kansas City. When their options there ran out again, and they returned to the Detroit area, Marshall was, as near as can be gathered from his own subtly conflicting accounts, 11. The teenage years ahead of him would just intensify the fears and frustrations...but, living for the first couple of years in his grandmothers' suburban trailer, he also experienced something like stability for the first time. Starting seventh grade at Lincoln Junior High [in Warren] in 1986, aged 12, he even had enough confidence to make friends.

"It was in seventh grade that I started making friends," he confirmed to Howard Stern. "I didn't really start opening up until eighth grade, going into ninth. I didn't want to leave the school when we moved to Detroit on the east side, so it was like two miles for me to walk to school. My choice boiled down to if I wanted to stay at Lincoln and keep the same friends, or start over at a new school."

He chose the long walk, showing the importance of these tentative social roots to him, and a degree of independent, determined freedom from his mother's choices not evident before. But as an adult, even Lincoln was not remembered with affection. He was still scrawny and funny-looking...he barely raised a ripple when he was at school, still staying mostly inside his simmering head. But it was here, as in other areas of his teenage life, that anger at how he was being treated at last began to bubble up.

"I was kinda nerdy, man," he told The Source. "I used to try and dress hip-hop, and my hair was all fucked up. I think my first year of ninth grade, I had a fuckin' mullet or something until I started to rock the fade. It'd be all shaved on the sides and the back, and my hair used to be spiked up, like a flat-top."..."I was kind of a smart-ass," he told a website. "Teachers always gave me shit 'cos I never went to school. Then when I did show up, they would fuck with me. They'd be like, 'Oh, Mr. Mathers decided to join us today.' This was standard teacher sarcasm, of course, not exactly undeserved. But eventually, one educator went far enough to lodge himself in Marshall's brain, doubting him with such scorn that the memory became a spur, an irritant he could scratch only by proving him wrong.

"There was this teacher," he told The Source, "he once singled me out and told me I wasn't gonna be shit. Everybody in class laughed. I don't even remember why he said that. But it stands out in my head...it really hurt my feelings, and I was thinking that it shouldn't. Here's this guy I didn't give a fuck about saying this, but it hurt."

"I run on vengeance," he said in his most revealing interview, and these were the years when he stored up his fuel.

When his mother left Warren for Detroit's East Side, probably when Marshall was 13, and probably following a boyfriend, a further, vital kind of friction entered his life. Living in a black neighborhood, and making black friends, while still crossing 8 Mile into Warren for school every day, was like trying to blithely pass the Berlin Wall. Marshall and his friends attempted to ignore their city's racial blockade. But others coldly enforced it. "I'm colorblind - it wasn't an issue," Mathers-Briggs told Rolling Stone of being among three white families on their block. "But the younger people in the area gave us trouble. Marshall got jumped a lot."

"Most of the time it was relatively cool," he considered generously to Spin, but I would get beat up sometimes when I'd walk around the neighborhood and kids didn't know me. One day I got jumped by like, six dudes, for no reason."

...Living in a white minority, victimized and twice almost murdered by blacks, Marshall could be excused for starting to feel racist himself. The tribal nature of city hostility works that way everywhere, more so in America, and more so still in Detroit;s huddled, severed communities. But, crucially for his future career, he took the opposite view. He had, after all, also seen white bikers point guns at his black friend Proof, taunting him for daring to enter Warren, when Marshall lived there. They had shot at them right outside his mother's door, whe Marshall challenged them. In this way, his wandering early life had at last done him good. He had walked between white and black America so often, his feet had smeared the borderline. He saw both sides with double-vision, from inside and out. He knew too much to be racist. Instead, his Detroit days made him hair-trigger sensitive to racism, from whatever skin color, from then on.

"I have always loved kids," Mathers-Briggs recalled of the newcomer's route in to the Mail on Sunday, "and fostered four. The house was always full of waifs and strays. One of those troubled souls was Kim Scott, who moved in with us when she was 12. Marshall was about 15, and she lied about her age, saying she was the same. They got together and that was it. Chaos reigned."

Kim and her twin sister had had their own difficult histories, frequently being sent for stays at the local children's home, frequently escaping from it. By whatever means, she was out the day she met Marshall. He was spending his morning as he so often did by then, dodging out of school with a friend once they knew the friend's mother was working, cranking up the friend's stereo to hear the latest raps. Kim was visiting the friend's sister. "I had a red Kangol," Marshall said, still able to picture every detail of the moment for The Source, 14 years later. "I was jumping on the coffee table, singing along to an LL song. I was really into it. I kinda saw her come in the doorway out the corner of my eye. I just kept going. Showing off. She watched until I finished the song, and then my friend's sister introduced us."

"He went througha lot with Kim," she [Mathers-Briggs] told the Sydney Sun-Herald. "A lot of his anger came from that. I could tell they were getting too chummy. Kim was jealous of Marshall and his friends and anyone who took attention away from her, including me. There was a lot of chaos in the house."

"Until then, Marshall was a normal, happy boy," she added to the Mail on Sunday. "She changed him, she wound him up, and they had the most terrible fights. I had to break up the cursing between them. The girl thrives on confrontation. But Marshall was never violent toward her. He may rap about raping and murdering her, but he has never laid a finger on her. When they had a row he took it out on his car, he would come screaming home and punch the car. I've never seen a vehicle with so many dents in it."

"I've been very betrayed by Kim," she revealed to Tonight sadly, when her relationship with her son had fractured. "There are a lot of things that have happened that Marshall's not even aware of."

His home was now a pressure cooker of conflicting, escalating insecurities and needs, and emotional war-zone. Mathers-Briggs' habit of serial fostering, despite subsisting on welfare, when added to her early pregnancy with Marshall, suggests a classic woman's attempted shortcut to affection and fulfillment. As boyfriends passed briefly through her life, surely children would love her? It says more about her vulnerabilities and desires than any of her words...it's hard to tell who in the apartment had the lowest self-esteem. But as Kim sided with Marshall against his mother, when not angrily arguing with him, the unhealthiness of the manipulations for control which seemed to fill the two young women's days together, till anger and spite became the nrom, can only have added to the teenage boy's misery, and his later music's misogyny.

"It was a complicated thing, 'cos my mother was taking a lot of drugs, so she would be in and out of different mood swings. My mother would take three or four naps a day and just get up and start running around the house stomping - 'This house is a goddamned mess' - and start throwing shit, breaking dishes and stuff, 'You get out, motherfucker, you get out and never...' blah, blah, blah. I would end up sleeping over a friend's house for a while and shit like that."

As to his evictions, his grandmother confirmed that he regularly appeared at her door in Warren at night, sighing, 'Grandma, she kicked me out again.' Kresin added that sometimes her daughter would abuse her, too. "She would get mad at me, and punish me by keeping him away from me and my son, Marshall's uncle Ronnie. They were best friends and really close, and she would keep them from each other."

To Rap Pages, Marshall added tired details of his situation: "I had one factory job sweeping floors a mile from home. Doing good. My mother used to keep all of my checks and give me like 40 bucks outta each check, and I made over 140 bucks. My mother would keep the hundred and pay the phone bill or the light bill. That's how I was able to stay. I ended up getting kicked out and staying at my boy's house, three miles away, so I ended up losing that job."

It was to NME, though, that he revealed the full scale of his resentment and hurt at this latest round of changing backdrops to his life, and the screaming matches soundtracking them. "I had to stay with friends for two months at a time," he complained. "I would bounce from house to house. It was shitty. I had a lot of friends who I would stay with and their parents were always cooler than my mother. I would tape my mother throwing me out and play them to my friends' parents just to show them how crazy she is. I'd stay at Proof's house and his mother did not care that we did as long as we wee safe. My friends' parents liked me!" he suddenly pleaded, like he needed witnesses to prove he wasn't worthless. "They liked me! I was a likeable person, it was just me and my mother did not get along." He shook his head to himself. "It wasn't my fault. It wasn't my fault."..."You only realize how bad it was later. I look back now, dog, and I lived a crazy-assed life. I mean, getting kicked out all the time, having no money, getting jumped all the time. I failed ninth grade three times and then left school. I was a fuck-up."

"I don't think music can make you kill or rape someone, any more than a movie is going to make you do something you know is wrong," he said, 'but music can give you strength. It can make a 15-year-old kid, who is being picked on by everybody and made to feel worthless, throw his middle finger up and say, 'Fuck you, you don't know who I am.' It can help make them respect their individuality, which is what music did for me. If people take anything from my music, it should be motivation to know that anything is possible, as long as you keep workin' at it and don't back down. I didn't have nothin' going for me...school, home...until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything."

We were so fuckin' poor," he told Kerrang. "My mother used to do so much fucked-up shit to me, I couldn't wait to get the fuck out of that house and just...do something. Even my mother used to laugh at me about this rap shit. She'd hear me upstairs. I'd have two radios set up - one playing the beat, and the other one recording me rapping over it. She'd be going, 'I don't know why you're wasting your time with that - you can't rap.' Thanks, ma!"

"That crushed me," he told Newsweek, of first hearing 'Ice Ice Baby'. "At first, I felt like I didn't want to rap anymore. I was so mad, because he was making it real hard for me. But then 3rd Bass restored some credibility, and I realized that it really depends on the individual. Vanilla Ice was just fake. 3rd Bass was real."

He was helped by one of his closest friends, future D12 MC Proof...the two met when both were 15...Proof was idly sitting on a brick wall outside his mostly black school, Osbourne High, when a white boy unusually walked towards him, and handed out a flyer. "They was for a talent show he was doing," Proof told Spin. "He said he was a rapper."...Soon, Proof was introducing Marshall to a would-be producer who lived round the corner, Kon Artis (aka Denaun Porter). Kon remember the day..."Motherfucker came to my door and I'm like, 'Hmmm, what the fuck? White boy at my door!'" he drawled to Spin. But it was Proof and Marshall who kept the closest bond. Blasting out his stero "as soon as my mom would leave to play bingo", staying with Proof's mother when his own home overheated, Marshall continued his rap education with his friend. "Basically, we checked everything,
Proof told icast.com. "No matter if it was wack, we would know, because we were bright. Every tape that was out, we bought it. He had a tape collection that was incredible. I had the vinyl, and he had all the tapes."

Proof gave him the first opportunity to test himself, at Osbourne High. "Listen, I'll tell you this," he said to icast.com. "I went to a black dominated high school, and I used to sneak him in there into the lunchroom. And they'd be like, 'We want to battle you.' 'No, you can't battle me, why don't you battle the white boy first?' And everybody would be like, 'I'll kill him.' Then Em would come out and kill the whole lunchroom, which was a black dominated school and would be looking like, 'Damn!' It was like White Men Can't Jump."

"When you're a little kid, you don't see color," Marshall considered to Spin, "and the fact that my friends were black never crossed my mind. It never became an issue until I was a teenager, and started to rap. Then I'd notice that a lot of motherfuckers always had my back, but somebody always had to say to them, 'Why you have to stick up for the white boy?' I'd hang out on the corner where kids would be rhyming, and when I tried to get in there, I'd get dissed. A little color issue developed, and as I got old enough to hit the clubs, it got really bad. I wasn't that dope yet, but I knew I could rhyme, so I'd get on the open mics and shit, and a cople of times I was booed off the stage." One incident in particular lodged in his mind. "I remember I used to go to this place called the Rhythm Kitchen way back in the day," he said. "I was probably 16 or 17. The first time I grabbed the mic, I got booed before I even said anything. As I started to rap, the boos just got louder and louder, until I just got off the mic."

When it happened again, at another venue, it terrified him. "The first time I grabbed the mic and The Shelter, I got dissed. I only said, like, three words, and I was already gettin' booed as soon as the mic was handed to me. I was like, 'This is fucked.' I started getting scared, like, 'Is this gonna happen? What the fuck is gonna happen? Am I gonna make it or not?'"

Many would have quit after one of those nights. For a teenager with self-esteem which was already battered, getting on stage must have been bruising enough. For jeering crowds to let him know he was not wanted in the places he most craved acceptance, sometimes before he could say a words, must have crushed him...but it was also true, as his subsequent career proved, that the beatings, insults and disappointments of his early days did not leave him shaking and weak. Instead, they toughened him, fed him aggressive resentment and rage, determined him not to be broken. The pressure of those early open mics only intensified his will to succeed. And the racist nature of the taunts, like the racist assaults he had suffered, did not make him stupidly racist back. Instead, it made him despise all racism, with a black rapper's force.

He gave him most thoughtful account of his resentments to Spin. "In the beginning," he recalled, "the majority of my shows were for all-black crowds, and people would always say, 'You're pretty dope for a white boy," and I'd take it as a compliment. Then, as I got older, I started to think, 'What the fuck does that mean?' Nobody asks to be born, nobody has a choice of what color they'll be. I had to work up to a certain level before people would even look past my color. A lot of motherfuckers would just sit with their arms folded and be like, 'Alright, what is this?' I did see where the people dissing me were coming from. But, it's like, anything that happened in the past between black and white, I can't speak on it, because I wasn't there. I don't feel like me being born the color I am makes me any less of a person."

That diffident, defensive last sentence could have come straight from the mouth of one of Martin Luther King's black marchers, 40 years before. The weird racial inversion of Marshall's America was proven by the outlandish thing he said next. "There was a while," he admitted bravely, when I was feeling like, 'Damn, if I'd just been born black, I would not have had to go through all this shit.' I'm not ignorant - I know how it must be when a black person goes to get a regular job in society. But music, in general, is supposed to be universal. If I'm a white 16-year-old and I stand in front of the mirror and lip-sync every day like I'm Krayzie Bone - who's to say that because I'm a certain color I shouldn't be doing that? And if I've got a right to buy his music and make him rich, who's to say that I then don't have the right to rap myself?"

He was less considered, but as truthful to NME. "People say I'm offensive. Know what I find offensive? People always dwelling on me being a white rapper, a white this, a white that. That shit makes me sick to my stomach. It's not like it's a huge fucking secret! I wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see I'm white, thank you! It doesn't make what I do any less valid. I've lived just as hard a life as anyone in America. I've been to all-white schools, all-black schools, mixed schools." He paused, to make his most meaningful point. "I've seen it from every angle, and I've always been poor. I've always been poor."

The Hip Hop Shop, on 7 Mile, was the rap record-selling property of hip-hop clothing entrepreneur Maurice Malone. Proof would become an account executive for the company's fashion wing, before D12 claimed all his time. But on the Saturday afternoon which let Marshall know his dreams of rap success might yet succeed, Proof was in charge of the Shop's first open-mice session. Another future D12 member, Head, was the house DJ. He remembered how Marshall rose to the challenge of a full-scale rap battle..."I seen Em take this motherfucker out in like five, six lines," Head told Spin. "It was an open-mic battle, the first one we did. Three hundred people, lines out the door. It was a ruthless, cut-throat battle. And he won it."

"We was gonna do this Western song where we were all outlaws, like the Dirty Dozen," Marshall recalled for Spin. He squinted to remember its lyrics. "I said something like, 'I ride rails to cover wide trails/Slide nails to a killer inside jail, denied bail/Tell him I'mma break him out tonight/And we gonna unite/So be ready for a gunfight.' Some shit like that."

Marshall's Hip-Hop Shop battles also attracted another admirer who would be invauable to his future career. "I heard him in a battle with 50 other MCs," said Paul Rosenberg. "He took them all by himself." [ I know nothing about battling, but, uh...is that even possible?]

"When she got pregnant, she went back home to her mother and wouldn't let Marshall see her or the baby," Betty Kresin said to the Sydney Sun-Herald. "Finally her step-father met him with a gun and said, 'If you ever come round here again, I'll shoot you.' Two years later, they got married. Kim only did it for the money. I tried to tell him."

...Asked by the Detroit Free Press if Kim had supported him as he struggled to be a rapper, he replied: "Want me to be honest? It was off and on. When we were younger, she supported everything I did. The older we got, the more reality started to set in. She's one of those people that's down to earth, like, 'Hello! You're living in a fantasy. These things don't happen with people like us.' I was always the optimist, like, 'Yo, I'm gonna make this happen.' And I just kept busting my ass. To be honest, I really didn't have much support. Nobody in my family, in her family. Just a few friends. And just myself."

..."Me and Kim have been through our dramas and shit," Marshall confessed to Q. "But I'd be bald-faced lying if I said I don't love her, or I'm with her because of my daughter, I'm with her because I wanna be with her."

"Little kids used to walk down the street going, "Look at the white baby!" he remember to Spin. "Everything was, 'white this, white that'. We'd be sitting on our porch, and if you were real quiet, you'd hear, 'Mumble, mumble, white, mumble, mumble, white.' Then I caught this dude breaking into my house for, like, the fifth time, and I was like, 'Yo, fuck this! It's not worth it, I'm outta here!' That day, I wanted to quit rap and get a house in the fucking suburbs. I was arguing with my girl, like, 'Can't you see they don't want us here?' I went through so many changes. I actually stopped writing for about five or six months, and I was about to give everything up. I just couldn't, though. I'd keep going to the clubs and taking the abuse, but I'd come home and put a fist through the wall. If you listen to a Slim Shady record, you're going to hear all that frustration coming out."

"There was this one time when I really felt like I wanted to do something to change my life," he said to music365, remembering those hours in the studio [recording "Rock Bottom"], "whether it would be doing something I regretted, or with rap ir whatever, A bunch of other personal shit was happening in my life right about then, and I just thought I wasn't gonna get a deal no matter what, and I just took a fucking bunch of pills. I puked the shit up. I didn't want to have to go to the hospital but my fucking stomach hurt so bad. I had a little problem and I just took too many. I don't know if I was necessarily trying to kill myself, I was just really depressed and I kept thinking, 'more pills, more pills', I just kept taking 'em. I bet I took 20 pills in the course of two hours, Tylenol 3s. That's why I like doing back and listening to my album, and thinking of what I was feeling back then."

The suddenness of it all [Em signing with Dre] was remembered by Bizarre. "He was missing from Detroit for three weeks. Nowhere to be found. Then he just up and called out of the blue: 'Yo, man, I just signed with DR. DRE! He's got this fresh condo out here, you got to see it - "

"I wouldn't say I was bringing Dre back," Marshall would protest to the Launch website, once their work together was a success. "I don't think he ever left. 'Phone Tap', on the last album, The Firm, was dope to me. Dre basically saved my life; my shit was going nowhere. I was reaching a boiling point, doing a lot of drugs and fucked up shit because I was so depressed. So when I say Dre saved my life, I mean he literally saved my life, and I feel like I owe him a lot. Dre took me in and taught me a lot, not just rap-wise, but business0wise. Whatever I can do to return the favor, I'm here."

To Launch, he revealed how the writing happened: "I collect ideas throughout the week. It might take a while, but I write on a sheet of paper, scattered ideas, words and metaphors. When I have enough ideas, I'll piece the shit together. I do it purposely so that if a rhyme sheet is lost, whoever finds it won't know what it means. Half a sentence will be here...a word over here. I start at the corner of the paper. I write in slants. In the studio, he explained, he and Dre guzzled down Es, heating up their energy and emotions, of love and hate. "We get in there, get bugged out, stay in the studio for fuckin' two days," Dre confirmed to Rolling Stone. "Then you're dead for three days. Then you wake up, pop the tape in, like, 'Let me see what I've done.' In this environment, what became the Slim Shady LP took 12 days to finish.

He wrote "Still Don't Give a Fuck" on the advice of Paul Rosenberg, effectively composing a sequel to order. He toned down his lyrics when asked, too, on "My Name Is" and others, as Rosenberg admitted to the LA Times. "Have there been times when we had to change stuff [because of Interscope]? Yes, Em understands that he wants the stores to stock his records or he won't be heard, so he'll do what it takes for the most part, unless the complaint is just ridiculous."

For the record's release, hundreds of interviews were arranged, along with mind-frying, demographic-bridging tours, playing to rock the rap audiences the same day, leaving no listener immune. Marshall would not complain, til he collapsed. He had worked hard at cooking meatloaf. He would work hard at this.

Rise, a journalist for elamentz.com, watched the journey begin when Interscope introduced him to Eminem in August 1998. A cog in the record company's chanceless hype machine, Rise was told the rapper was "the next big thing", six months before his LP's release. But the white boy in a grimy baseball cap he met standing outside an Ol' Dirty Bastard show on LA's Sunset Boulevard "looked more like he should be delivering pizzas," Rise recalled in his eventual piece. "All I can think of is, 'This guy raps with Dre?' Not because he is white but I guess I just imagined more of an...image." Instead, this boy was still a styleless, hopeless outsider, despite his record deal. He despaired on getting into the show to the Detroit friends and disappointed, dagger-glaring girls with him. "Yo, man, I ain't got no pull around here to get into this shit," he explained, embarrassed even to be trying. "These fuckin' guys don't know who I am. I ain't nobody! Fuck it, let's just go..."

A week later, the man whose interviews would one day be doled out like diamonds casually took Rise to Tijuana in a cheesy white rented convertible. "Yo, are you about to do a real interview for real? he excitedly asked. "Set it off then..."

After using the tape for quickfire comic impersonations (including South Park's Cartman, a minor influence, he'd later admit), he settled into serious responses, about his race ("anything that has to do with color, it's like, next question") influences ("my daughter"), and wanting to be famous. "Would I sound right saying no?" he answered wisely, knowing how ingratitude would play to those in the life he'd just escaped. "Famous is not really the term I'm looking for. I want to be respected. I want to be looked at past the color. But fame if it comes with it, I'm gonna take it, 'cos you know, fame ain't gonna feed my daughter. Fame, money, yeah. That shit's gonna feed my daughter." Looking across to his oblivious subject as he droe, the interviewer started to believe the hype, observing, "You could tell it was his time to shine. Not because he was owed it, but because he wanted it so badly and had worked so hard for it."

September, and Rise caught Eminem on the Lyricist Lounge tour. Outside, street pluggers handing out Slim Shady LP samplers were sneered at by rap fans, for skin reasons ("Vanilla Twice"). Then Eminem's performance was delayed when bouncers wouldn't let him in. He was blocked from the VIP lounge even when he left the stage, protesting in vain, "I'm Eminem. I just performed..." He was barred twice more that night, unrecognized by anyone, still seemingly expecting no better. He and LP guest rapper Royce da 5'9" joked on the street outside about one day being stars, with fans and limos...By February, at his record release party, Eminem was entering unchallenged, past rows of fans wanting his autograph. A limo awaited him.

"That actually makes me feel kind of sick," he'd mention to NME. "Some girl will be telling me how fine I am and trying to sit on my lap and I'll be thinking, 'If I was just me and didn't have all of this fame, you wouldn't look at me twice. You wouldn't look at me once.' People wonder why my lyrics are so misogynistic and violent towards women. But my opinion of girls is not very high right now."

"From the day after we shot that 'My Name Is' video, I remember shit just moving so fast," he'd look back to The Source a year later. "Like, I went from being home all the time to never seeing my girl, to being out on the road, to bitches throwing themselves at me. Shit was like a movie," he considered in wonder, "the shit you see in movies." The fictional world he'd created for The Slim Shady LP had almost instantly dropped out of his control, consuming chunks of his real life he wanted to keep. "I wish I could come off-stage and turn off the lights that flash over my head saying 'Slim Shady' and 'Eminem'," he'd admit to Muzik in 2000, only two years after Slim had saved him. "I wanna turn that shit off and just be Marshall Mathers again."

"It's something bigger than he ever expected, the pressures he has to go through," Jeff Bass explained to City Detroit. "Just because he's doing so well, he's from Detroit, and the media keeps pointing out that he's a white rapper. It's very intense. You're talking about going from making pizzas to being almost a household name. You can't prepare yourself for anything like this. He has to put a hat on and a hood, 'cos as soon as someone sees his blond hair, they know who that is. But," he backtracked, "he's got his age and his experience on his side because he's been doing music so long. He has no problems with it; he rolls with the punches."

That wasn't how it seemed. Eminem was experiencing a new kind of alienation, opposite and yet the same as when he'd locked himself in his teenage bedroom. "I don't trust nobody now because anybody I meet is meeting me as Eminem," he told the LA Times. "They don't know me as Marshall Mathers, and I don't know if they are hanging with me 'cos they like me or because I'm a celebrity or because they think they can get something from me." The sudden pressure swiftly forced him from the trailer park. "Once I hit MTV everybody was coming up to me and talking about it," he explained to Hip-Hop Connection. "People that knew me for the longest were starstruck, the kids in the neighborhood were knocking on the door all day. It got to the point where I was like, 'I've been here all my fucking life, what is different about me now?' Before I could walk down the street and nobody said shit. Now it's ridiculous." Even his anger had to be checked, his assertive street instincts reined in. "One of the main things that's really fucked up is when people piss you off, you can't hit them in the face," he complained to icast.com. "When somebody disrespects you on a street level, you want to do something to retaliate. But you got to learn to control your temper and you got to take the 'Fuck you's and 'You suck!'s.'" Sighed Proof, sitting next to him: "The way it used to be, we was the bully busters."

"He never had money, so he doesn't know what the hell to do with it, and he's scared to spend it," Paul Rosenberg told the LA Times. "His idea of splurging is spending $500 or $600 at Nike Town."

Eminem meanwhile recognized that, now he was rich, he would have to stay that way. To be desperately poor now he'd tasted the security of wealth, to be dragged back through the looking glass and dumped on the sidewalk, would destroy him. "I don't think I'd be able to go back to a regular lifestyle," he admitted to Melody Maker. "I think I'd do something really fucking crazy if I did. It worries me. To be honest, I think about it a lot, and I'm being really, really careful with me money. I think about the future more than anything."..."I'm putting some money aside so my daughter gets an education, and grows up in a decent area," he added. He had bought stocks and bonds, too, and just two cars.

But the single real thrill he seemed to get from his instant millions was much more personal. "When my daughter was born," he toldNME, "I was so scared I wouldn't be able to raise her and support her as a father should. Her first two Christmases, we had nothing, but this last Christmas, when she turned three she had so many fucking presents under the tree. She kept opening them saying, 'This one's for me, too?' My daughter wasn't born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but she's got one now. I can't stop myself from spoiling her."

The intense Interscope schedule that helped pay for Hailie's presents, though, also made such moments depressingly rare. The company put Eminem on a tour so intensive, he couldn't even talk to his daughter when she called. The non-stop tour dates started in January and peaked in June, when he'd play an afternoon slot on rock's high-profile Warped tour (alongside the likes of Blink 182), drive hours to perform nights in hip-hop clubs, then drive on to catch up with the Warped roadshow. He still professed to love the shows, for reasons rooted in class. "I like to go out and earn crowds," he told icast.com, "because it makes me feel like I'm working for my money. I want to be in touch with the crowds and talk to people, keep eye contact and try to see what they're feeling. These are the people that's buying my records, they're paying my way."

He seemed obsessed with sex on this endless time away from Kim, and bragged he was getting plenty, but still muttered about them both being loyal, claiming, "I believe in sticking with the girl who's been with me from day one, before all this fame." [suuuuuure, Em. ]

To keep up with the tour treadmill's grinding pace needed more than sex, though, and it was the drink and drugs interviewers observed him guzzling that should have triggered alarm in his aides. Bacardi was downed his abandon, and his limo slowed to take wraps of Es through its window, Rolling Stone seeing three downed in a night. On May 9, at San Francisco's Fillmore, the wheels inevitably started to whirr from his control. He was reported to have dived off the stage toward a heckler, fists flying, with his bodyguard and security in pursuit, before the heckler was ejected and order restored. To FHM, Eminem gave a rougher account, claiming he'd stopped his show when he saw kids at the front fighting, jumping on them when they ignored him. "I got pulled down in the middle of it and these kids were stomping on me, and then my boys came running, beating the shit out of everybody. I thought I was gonna get arrested that night." The same day, he reportedly punched out a man who challenged him in Haight-Ashbury, and incensed local DJ Sista Tamu so much with a freestyle about slapping a pregnant "bitch" that she snapped his CD on air.

Two months later in New England, near the end of the Warped tour, the crash he'd been hurtling towards all year arrived on cue. It was the second section of his life he termed a "crack-up", excessive success now shattering him, as failure had. Sprinting onto the stage, he skidded in a pool of liquid, and fell 10 feet to the venue floor. He cracked ribs. It could have been his head. "It was insane," he admitted to the LA Times. "I knew I had to slow it down. The fall was like a reminder." In 2000, he confessed to Star, "Last year, I was a little bit gone. There are quite a few things people ask me about that I don't remember. Marshall Mathers stops when the booze kicks in. Then I become Slim Shady."

"The older people are getting it confused," he told Launch, "tending to take my shit too literal. I don't care, it's funny to me, because it I say my brain fell out of my skull, and they believe it, what's wrong with them? The younger people have a sense of humor, and can determine right from wrong. I only get flack from the white-collar motherfuckers, who don't know about hip-hop anway." To Consumable Online, he added: "Maybe I am the first person to say this shit to this extreme, but all I do is say what's on my motherfucking mind, man. Hip-hop is hip-hop, and it's always been like this." His most impassioned response came to Select...as he considered the influence of earlier demonized rapper like N.W.A. on himself. "I listened to it all, but I never went out and shot nobody. I just did dumb shit like getting into fights, because the music made me feel something. If your music makes you feel something, you doin' your job."

"When I got the record deal I took it over [his mom's trailer] - just to give me somewhere to stay," he told FHM. "Next thing, my mother's selling the trailer on the Internet, advertising it as 'Slim Shady's Trailer'. And in the paper, she's saying if you buy this trailer Slim Shady will personally come round and autograph the walls. My mother's crazy. While I was on tour she was taking posters that I'd left, signing fake autographs on them and selling them to kids in the neighborhood. My mother came backstage at a show in Kansas City and she was saying to the kids, 'If you want a picture with my son it's $20." And I didn't know anything about it until this little girl came up and said, 'Can I have my picture taken 'cos I've paid my $20?' My mother's a snake."

To Consumable Online, he detailed the numb remains of their relationship: "I talk to her every now and again, but as little as I can. She's got my little brother, so when I do talk to her, it's really to talk to him. I really don't have much reason to talk to my mother. My mother's done so much fucked up shit to me that it's like, now that I don't have to talk to her, I ain't gonna."

...To the Tonight TV show's Trevor McDonald, Mathers-Briggs would later claim to be "in shock" when her son told her the papers had been served on him [in her lawsuit against him]. "I sat there and though, 'This is not happening.' My lawyer was supposed to send a letter warning him to stop being so demeaning and say if he didn't stop the lawyer would hit him with a lawsuit. I walked up to my lawyer and he said, 'This is a wake-up call.'"

Whatever the truth of that, Eminem's legal response came in Rosenberg's careful, legal language: "Eminem's life is reflected in his music. Everything he said can be verified as true. The truth is an absolute defense in a case of defamation. The lawsuit does not come as a surprise to Eminem. His mother has been threatening to sue him since the success of his single 'My Name Is'. It is merely the result of a life-long strained relationship between him and his mother. Regardless, it is still painful to be sued by your mother and therefore the lawsuit will only be responded to through legal channels."

Of course, Eminem couldn't leave it at that. To the LA Times, he hedged: "I have to be careful about what I say about my mother, because I'm sure her lawyers are looking. How does it feel? It feels like shit. How would you feel? One thing I can tell you is that every single word I said about my mother and my upbringing was true." To Muzik, he added, "She doesn't have a leg to stand on. I would love it to go to court, I want it televised. I want people to see what type of person she is and what my life has been like." To NME: "She's always been out to get me, and now she knows I have money, she won't leave me alone. I know that's not a nice thing to say about your mother, but unfortunately it's true."...Also to Q, he described the finality of his severance from his mother, after the last straw of her suing him. "I speak the truth. I've got no reason to fabricate my past, no reason to life. There will be no reconciliation. I've tried, I'll say that. I can't comment further." All he admitted regretting losing was access to Nathan. "I raised him since he was a baby, changing his diapers and feeding him. It's gonna be hard."

"I'm focused when I'm recording," Eminem told the website music365. "I slip into the zone. I don't like to talk a lot. I like to stick to myself and get my thoughts together, think how I'm gonna map out each song. Each song is fairly easy to write. I record vocals on one day and take the tape home to listen to them overnight. Then I do more vocals the next day. I always do my vocals twice. I might have the skeleton down, the vocals and the beat, for two months before I think of the finishing touches to put on it, like sound effects, or if I want the beat to drop out right here. I take my time on my shit that way."

As the May release date [for MMLP] neared, The Source found him listening to a playback of "Shit on You" (a D12 collaboration eventually held back for their 2001 debut, Devil's Night), Dre nodding silently as his alleged protege snapped off a list of delicate changes to a raptly listening engineer. "We're going to sit back and listen to everything, listen to what I feel is missing on the album, if there's anything missing," he explained. "I want every song to be perfect."

But at other moments, he revealed a more intuitive, if equally self-conscious method of creation. "I also got a studio in Detroit," he told music365, "that I can go to if it's the middle of the night and I want to lay some shit down. I can't help when the ideas come. Most of this shit comes either when I'm laying in bed waiting to sleep, or if people are talking. If they say something, a lot of the time I'll hear the way they've put words together, and they'll be talking to me and I won't even be listening to them because the last thing they said gave me an idea. I sit there with a blank stare and people think I'm on drugs constantly. I do that to my girl a lot. She'll be talking to me and I'll be like, 'Uh-huh, uh-huh.' I'll be looking off and she'll say, 'You're not even listening!' 'Yeah, I am!' 'Repeat what I said!' 'I don't know what the fuck you said!'"

It was a distanced demeanor his Detroit schoolmates would have recognized, the almost autistic withdrawal of a mind constantly ticking at a depth mundane distractions could not touch. And now, he had unlimited access to instant shortcuts to that state, as he explained to Muzik: "For those who are curious about my methods in the studio, it goes a little like this. If I'm writing rhymes I smoke weed or take Tylenol, or muscle relaxants, something to get the stories rolling. Or I take ecstasy."

"A couple of the songs on the new record were written on X," he confirmed to music365..."Somebody will just be looking at me wrong," Eminem continued, "and I'll just flip a table over, like, 'What the fuck are you staring at?' If you're in a good mood you love everybody, but if you're in a bad mood and you got shit on your mind, you're gonna break down. The hardest shit I've fucked with is X and shrooms."

"My whole thing was, what is the big fuckin' deal," he expanded, in Angry Blonde. "Why is that topic [Columbine] so touchy as opposed to, say, a four-year-old kid drowning? Why isn't that considered a huge tragedy? People die in the city all the time. People get shot, people get stabbed, raped, mugged, killed, and all kinds of shit. What is the big deal with Columbine that makes it separate from any other tragedy in America?"

In an interview with The Face later that year, his status as an enemy of the state was reinforced. "Parents should have more responsibility," he declared, asked about Columbine again. "Those parents just didn't pay attention to their fucking kids. That kid's getting bullied every day...I guarantee you, he's coming home, punching some walls. And the parents aren't talking to that kid. Okay - innocent kids died. But those other kids got pushed to the fucking limit. And nobody saw it from their side. Growing up in school, I was bullied a lot. And I know what it's like to feel you want to kill somebody."

To music365, he reflected more widely: "My shit was real political, but people didn't see it like that, they thought I was just being an asshole. I look at the way I came up and the things I was around and the places I was raised, and I figure that shit made me what I am. So if people perceive me to be an asshole, the way I live made me an asshole, what I been through has made me an asshole." Lest there be any doubt, in discussing "Criminal" with Muzik, he called himself a "political rapper": "I'm taking stabs at crooked motherfuckers in the system. When someone says kids look up to me, I'm like, 'Our president smokes weed and is getting his dick sucked and is fucking lying about it. So don't tell me shit, I'm not the fucking president, I'm a rapper and I don't want to be a role model.' I'll tell a kid, 'Look up to me as someone who's come from nothing and now has everything. Don't look up to me for being violent and doing drugs. Don't be like me."

First, there was the home he woke up in each morning. Bought when he had no idea how huge his fame would become, it was on a main road in Detroit, near his old stomping grounds. He had thought it would be a hedge against his success's eventual collapse, a sensible piece of security in his life. Instead, as the celebrity he grappled with on The Marshall Mathers LP consumed all such normal concerns, it made him feel like he was waking in a cage.

"The city won't let me put up a fence." he told the Detroit Free Press. "Everybody wants to treat me like a regular fucking person. But I'm not a regular fucking person. I've gotta have security guards sitting outside my house now because they won't let me put a fence up. I get motherfuckers coming to my house, knocking on the door. Either they want autographs or they want to fight. We've had people getting in our backyard and swimming in our pools. I don't like having security hold my hand to walk me out to my fucking mailbox. There's something inside me that refuses to believe I can't walk down the street or be as normal as I want to be. Whenever something good happens, the bad always follows. That's the story of my life since the day I was born. I should have been out celebrating my record sales. Instead I'm sitting there in jail."

"I've always had a problem with people staring at me," he added to Britain's Star magazine. "And now they have a reason to stare, and I can't get made at them. I'm not gonna tell you it's great to be recognized."

His relatives, too, the people others look to for comfort in times of trouble, made him sweat with distrust, draw further in upon himself. His mother was suing him, his grandmother was threatening to. He felt everyone with his blood, except his daughter, was a leech upon his soul. "I've got second and third cousins crawling out of the woodwork," he told Muzik. "I've got aunts and uncles crawling out of the slim, screaming they always knew I'd make it and they'd like some money and a car. It makes me sick to the bottom of my stomach, 'cos nobody in my family ever thought I would be anything."

Would he take back the last year, the Detroit Free Press asked him, when his anguish and dismay became apparent. "That's a real good question," he considered. "It's 50-50. Sometimes I feel like I'm living my life for everybody else. I wake up at seven in the morning, and the rest of the day is work. I can't sleep. I don't eat. It's just crazy. These past couple of years have really shot by for me. Shit is speeding now. Before I was famous, everything was moving in slow motion."

NME's Sylvia Patterson, interviewing Eminem the month before The Marshall Mathers LP's release, drew out more of the racing, harried emotions pounding in his head in the weeks leading to his June 3 explosion. Perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that he was being face, almost uniquely, by a female reporter. But in their short time together, he veered between the unsatisfiable hyperactivity of a child (swinging a hammer at Patterson, screaming in her face, sprinting to a window to holler at the street), the petulant hostility and sexual defensiveness of a teenager (threatening to "rape" her, staring sullenly, speaking flatly), and mature awareness of the state he was in (richer and more famous than he could ever have imagined, criticized and lusted after by strangers who wouldn't have bothered to spit at him 12 months before). After all the iron control he had poured into succeeding, this was a glimpse of his mind simmering to boiling point.

Eminem's barrier to complete meltdown, as his life swung away from his control, was stated several times in this period. "Right now, I feel like I'm on top of the world," he told Newsweek, discussing his reconciled relationship with Kim. "I did right for my daughter. I figured I would secure the shit down at home," he told The Source, "'cos realistically, truthfully, that's what I need. That's the main thing that keeps my head leveled, having that security at home. I would go crazy if I came home to a house by itself."

"Ever since my success, shit hasn't been all good with me and her," he told The Source. "She wants to act like it is, and talk all this shit about, 'I love my son, and this is just a lesson that he'd gotta learn. I love my son, but I'm suing him to $10 million.' In other words, 'I'm trying to take everything he worked for away from him, but I love my son.' There's a lotta shit that I'm bitter for in my past that my mother has done to me that I never forgave her for to this day. And that's what sparked that whole thing. There's shit that I'm still bitter about that she won't admit to, to my face, and all I want is an apology and I can't get it. To tell you the truth, I could never look at her in the face again."

He told Muzik that, as was true even before the suit, he only spoke to her at all to keep ties to his half-brother Nathan, now 14. "When I call him I bite my tongue," he said, showing the paranoia that sets in with long hostility. "I believe she's listening on the other extension. I'm sure he's afraid of my mother and I'm sure she's doing the same things to him that she did to me."

"If someone does diss me I will fuckin' demolish your self-esteem," he said. "I will fuckin' say everything I can in my fuckin' power to hurt you and make you wanna jump off a fuckin' bridge. I think I was given this ability to put words together like I do in order to do this. That's how I came up, in hip-hop circles, in battles, MCing - and through arguments with my mother, fights with my girl, period, that's just how I am. I'm a very spiteful person if you do me wrong." Did he run on vengeance? Patterson asked. Was that his main motivation? "Yeah," he said at once.

...he gushed about her [Hailie's] personality, and her vocabulary, with doe-eyed adoration utterly at odds with any other side of his combative public face. "She's gonna have everything when she grows up," he told NME. "She's gonna be able to go to college and be something I wasn't. If she never makes anything of herself, God forbid - I want her to do something, be a model, do music, be a doctor, anything - I'm gonna have that money there for her. It's about her now. We're here to reproduce. And I reproduced. So now my life is for her."

"I know I ain't got it all upstairs, but some people are sick," he added to Muzik. "There are people who write saying they're into hurting themselves. They're cult people, fucking devil worshippers, who say I'm right next to Satan in their thoughts. I've had skinheads and KKK members on my case, telling me they love my shit and how I'm one of them.

He dined at his exclusive hotel on egg mayo and chicken salad sandwhiches, and buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken, spending the first day shopping for Hailie, and the second in his room with his old D12 friends. Two years of limitless opportunity hadn't altered the people and things he liked. But two radio interviews showed the relaxed, confident, amused man he was beginning to become.

Asked by Kiss FM's Matt White about D12 solo careers, he spluttered: "What do you mean? Like the group split up? Like this is a stepping stone for everyone's solo careers? We're a crew, we'll whip your ass! There's six of us in this fuckin' crew and we'll stomp you like there's 12 of us!" To Radio 1's Jo Whiley, he was sparkier still. If he had a time machine, when would he go back to? "I'd probably go back to the day I was born and kill my mother as soon as she had me." Would he let Hailie listen to his records? "Yeah, she listens to it, she walks around the house going 'Fuck, fuck, fuck!' She's my little secretary at home, too. She answers the phone, 'Shady Records!'" Would he get into movies? "I've been so busy with doing what I'm doing and I'm so drunk all the time that I couldn't possibly..."

"The thing about D12 is there ain't no leader," Bizarre told the magazine, even if "Em did sell eight million copies, so his opinion does matter."

"We'll still whip his ass [if he's in the wrong]," Kuniva said. "We don't think about it like, 'Oh, his guy, he sold eight million records, we can't speak to him," Bizarre added. "We think about him as our boy, who we always known all our life. He never changed, really."

"The crew's got to stay together," Eminem concluded. "There's gonna be fights. But we're always gonna be friends, because that's what we were before any of this shit. That's the most important thing. Just to fuckin' remember that we're friends."

"We agreed that the first one who made it would come back and get the others," he simply added to another reporter, suggesting a romantic bond more like the til-death blood brothers of the Wild Bunch than the immoral Dirty Dozen; the honorable Western outlaw image they'd started out with in 1995 was clearly still strong in their hearts.

The photos in Spin, of D12 with the Lafayette Coney Island hot dpg diner to themselves, impishly clowning with staff, confirmed the comfort of his posse for Eminem. Relaxed and laughing, for the only time I know of in public (apart from one early photo of him dancing and hugging with D12 and Kim, everyone innocently happy), he is lost in pleasure at the others' antics. For once, as the fat and slyly funny Bizarre perches a British bobby's helmet on his head, and Kon Artis takes charge in the kitchen, no one is watching Eminem. In the pictures, he looks like just another scrawny, amiable white guy, pleased to be allowed in the gang. "There's no fucking master plan, no pressure, no commercial intent with D12," he explained to Q. "It's just something I do with my friends and it's fun. It's not a career thing at all. I don't have to be in the fucking limelight all the time, which is good."

Debbie Mathers-Briggs' first action after the effective failure of her lawsuit had been to follow up her single about her son by writing a book...it was not the sensible course of someone seeking reconciliation, and when NME spoke to her she revealed his inevitable reaction: "He's pissed about it. He's like, 'You and my dad are trying to cash in on me, now you're writing an effing book, go ahead and try and ruin my career."...Eminem's attitude was revealed in what she said was their last conversation. When she called, he had told her he had a woman with him [Mariah Carey, went the rumor), but if she wanted to move back to Michigan, he would help. The next morning, she said, he called back, to spit: "I lied, I had company. The only thing I would put you in is a damn pine box." The undeclared motive in his mother's sometimes confused, impulsive or stupid moves in their feud...was perhaps one of self-preservation, as Eminem moved to cut her out of his family and life with all the vicious concentration of those final words.

The first step had been taken before that August interview with NME, and explained her frustration in it. Eminem had finally moved from his exposed old house in the heart of Detroit to a a large new property in a gated, secure community, a place more practical for a man of his suddenly vast fame and wealth. He had immediately moved in, not his mother (naturally), but her 25-year-old half-sister, Betti Schmitt, and her husband and children. For Mother's Day, Eminem had given Schmitt a new car, with "not even a card" for Mathers-Briggs. He wasn't thinking straight, she complained, he couldn't "move them in and replace your own blood, which is me and his little brother Nathan." But such an act could be about nothing but replacing blood - choosing who would now be his family, and who would not. Still sething about all the times he'd been cast out of his mother's home, there was something more naked than symbolism about the way he now locked her out of his mansion.

Mathers-Briggs and her mother were united in thinking Schmitt was a "gold-digger", [this is their sister and daughter they're calling a gold digger. This family is fucked up on so many levels] which they both also thought about the suddenly divorce-rich Kim (Eminem, the lone multi-millionaire in a poor family, must himself have been racked with suspicion about each relative's motive in talking to him, almost as much as he was with new "friends"). But the strain of events was now also tearing Betty Kresin from her daughter, even as that daughter lost her son. That ill-starred lawsuit was again the damning act. "I turned my back on my daughter," Kresin told the Sydney Sun-Herald. "I said, 'If you don't drop that lawsuit I'm going to come to your house, run you over and go to prison myself. How can you do that to your own son?" [Um, that's your daughter you're threatening to kill] Of the book, she told NME: "She sued her son, I'll probably sue her." As to Eminem, Kresin too was feeling the chill. In February, she admitted to Trevor McDonald on ITV: "Our relationship is not a good one. It has changed. It was good up until Christmas 1999." She would not elaborate on what had caused her exile.

But it was in The Source the next year [2001] that the now unshakeable, central nature of Eminem's hate for hi mother became apparent. It was here that he told the story of her wishing he had died instead of his uncle, with undimmed resentment. "I want her to apologize," he said, in a flat tone suggesting things had gone too far for that. "But that ain't enough because I know she ain't gonna change. She'll go right back to doing what she was doing. She's not right, not now." As to what she was doing, he wouldn't say: "I don't want to get sued again." But the degree of distaste he now felt for her was shown in his decision not to let her granddaughter, now six, set eyes on her. "I don't feel like Hailie would ever grow up to resent me for that...I feel like when Hailie is old enough to know better and wants to find out about her grandmother, she can. But right now her mind is too young to be around that. I don't trust my mother around my daughter. My mother wrote her letters, before she could even read. Real sick letters that she wanted me to read to Hailie or somethin'. I don't know. I throw them in the trash."

According to a report on Sony's Musiclub site in January 2002, when he would no longer take her calls, she had moved to an apartment near his Detroit mansion, to try to get close again. Betty Kresin's comments on what happened next showed she too was still outside the mansion's warmth: "My daughter was involved in a car crash when she first moved there. She nearly killed herself when she was driving Nate to school. She was taken to the hospital in an ambulance, but Eminem wouldn't change his behavior or visit her. She even tore her book up in the hope her son and her would get back together. She did make some mistakes, but she just wants her son back. She's hurting, she's so sad. And she's so thin, she looks like she's just about to die. She misses her son so much. She's living in a condominium as close as she could get to his house, but he's as hard-hearted as ever."

He was also more understanding of the price of his fame, as he told Q when considering the familiar complaint that he couldn't play basketball where he used to anymore, as the people he had played with now just stared, and asked for autographs. "Gotta build a fucking basketball court in the backyard," he laughed. "That just might be the way ahead - all the shit you want to do and miss doing, you just go and do it in your own backyard. Then you shut up and respect it."

...Eminem anyway continued with the places, people and acts that were natural to him, in spite of his fame. He had not become an alienated celebrity, severed from his roots, lost and mad. Instead, in short, chaos-trailing bursts, he still hung out with the friends who had loved him when he had nothing, and went to the movies, or the clubs. "He goes to all the right places where the hip-hop fans go to," Detroit promoter Michael Saunders confirmed to NME. "It's not like he's from Detroit but you never see him. He's here all the time. You would not believe he's on MTV by some of the venues he goes to."

"Everyone wanna eat filet mignon," Swift laughed to Spin. "He still hollerin' about Taco Bell." The material temptations of his status, out of reach for so long, simply meant nothing to him. "A lot of motherfuckers are living way better than me," he told Spin indifferently. "Their houses make mine look like shit."

In December, with staggering cheek, DeAngelo Bailey, the bully who had concussed the child Marshall Mathers by shoving him in a snowbank, resurfaced to sue Eminem for $1 million, claiming "Brain Damage" had harmed his reputation, and hampered his ambitions in the music industry, apparently being pursued from his current position as a Detroit dustman. His lawyer said Bailey "completely denied" the song's allegations, despite merrily elaborating on them to Rolling Stone in 1999. Following in the footsteps on Eminem's mom, he also released a CD, threatening to break down the gates of his one-time victim's new home and kill him, which didn't really help his case. [ ] "He got my address wrong," Eminem sighed to The Face, in mock-despair at his now-impotent tormentor's carelessness. "He's making himself a public figure, which is where my mother fucked up. But," he added, with the mature perspective he was now gaining in non-family matters, "if you have nothing else and you haven't made nothing with your life, then what the fuck? If Eminem says my name on a record, why not get money? I'd do it."

"Eminem had a lot of scripts. He didn't want to do a jokey movie," Bizarre confirmed to the Launch website. When Eminem agreed to meet Grazer, he was at first offputtingly aloof, not looking at him or saying much for 15 minutes, distrustful, perhaps, of Hollywood temptations. But when he did start to speak about his life, Grazer found him "articulate" and "passionate" about the subject, and "humble" and "damaged", he told Premiere. Eminem, a man who had never finished a book, forced his way into the script by Scott Silvers, and the deal was done. "It was a good enough script for me to put my music on hold for like, four, five months," he confirmed to Premiere, with a suggestion of the sacrifice that was to him in this central time in his musical life...There was a generous six-week rehearsal period, during which the 57-year-old Curtis Hanson, a Hollywood veteran, became the first man since Dre to mentor Eminem in a new art. For a second, briefer time, he had a father figure to test himself against. "He was good to work with because he was real," he told Premiere. "Curtis didn't sugarcoat anything. If something sucked, he would say that it sucked. At first I would take it to heart - like, 'Damn, how could he say that to me?' And then I would take it in."

Hanson's instructions before filming included handing Eminem a stack of films containing breakthrough performances from young actors like James Dean, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert De Niro. Hanson said his star had shown a special interest in Dean, astonished at his iconic fame after just three films. But Eminem confessed to Premiere, he had, not for the first time, ducked his homework: "I was so into this movie, I didn't wanna see what other people had done. I didn't wanna copy anybody or anything. I felt like as long as I felt real in a scene, that's all I needed."

Taryn Manning, who played Jimmy Smith's bitter ex-girlfriend, watched Eminem as he worked in Warren. She sensed he was under great pressure. "He just knows he has the power to create something that could have a long of longevity," she said. "He can feel it inside. He's focused. He's intense. He's also really goofy." Part of the strain came from Eminem having to co-create the movie's soundtrack with Dre, a task far from complete as he started to act. "Any downtime, he was writing," Manning said. "You could see him formulating stuff in his head."

[The Eminem Show] would be, Marky Bass told a fan website, more "serious", the same thing insiders had said of Marshall Mathers. "It's better," Bass continued. "He's matured since the last one, and he's been through so much since then, good and bad. He kept going and wrote a fantastic album. He's a tough kid - it's brilliant."

"I do feek he's matured as a lyricist," Dre chipped in, to MTV, "but I don't know if saying he's moving in a different direction is accurate. His stuff is really crazy to me because just when you think, 'Okay, he has run out of stuff to say, he can get no crazier than this,' something comes out of his face that gives you chills. Makes the hair crawl on your skin. So I think the shock value of Eminem is definitely going to still be there." With this new stimulus, rumors flew around Eminem's name again, but this time with a force near to fact, as Interscope leaked and manipulated news, till the day when the waiting would be over. There would be a 70s rock direction. Eminem would appear as Bin Laden in a song. Kim would be back again. "Ohhh, Kimmy, Kimmy," Bass teased. "You'll hear all about her on this one. Is she at the bottom of the lake, or is she in Bel Air? You'll find out..."

So sure was Eminem of what he'd done [with TES] that his thoughts on what you were listening to were hard to find. After previous media blitzes, and in a year which would also include a soundtrack album and a major film, only four carefully spaced print interviews were permitted. They gave only the barest of insights.

To The Face, he considered the production style, which built on changed begun with Devil's Night. "I just took the record on as my own project," he said. "I know how to produce now. I've soaked up everything. When I first got with Dre I was like a sponge, asking him questions. What is this called? What's this button do? And now I know how I want my shit to sound. I was trying to capture a 70s rock vibe for most of it. We treated this record like it was a rock record, as far as how it's produced. It's like, loud. There's a lot of guitars in it. There's a lot of hip-hop shit, too. I tried to get the best of both worlds. But I listened to a lot of 70s rock growing up...when I go back and listen to them songs, you know, like Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith or Jimi Hendrix...70s rock had this incredible feel to it."

To White Teeth author Zadie Smith in Vibe, too, it was sonic shifts he wished to discuss. "I learned how to ride a beat better, that's what I wanted to focus on," he told her. "It's not easy. Sometimes I'll spend hours on a single rhyme, or days. Even if I have my ideas stacked, if I'm flooded with ideas, I'm always trying to figure out how to make it better, make it smoother." To Rolling Stone, he added, "I'm paranoid as fuck about anything of mine sounding like a track I just did or anything out there. I practically live in the studio, apart from spending time with Hailie."

But he also looked back for Rolling Stone on some of the swirling turmoil in which The Eminem Show had been composed. "I have songs on the album that I wrote when I went through that shit last year, with a possible jail sentence hangin' over my head and all the emotions going through the divoice. I went through a lot of shit last year that I resolved at the same times, all in the same year. And yeah, that's when the album was wrote. I was in that shit, and I didn't know what was going to happen to me - I thought I was goin' to jail. But the scariest thought was, 'How am I going to tell this to Hailie?' What am I going to say - 'Daddy's going away and he's been bad, and you have to come visit him in jail?' I never told her anything, because if there was a slim chance that I could get off, then I didn't want to put her through that emotionally - being scared. She hates when I go away, any time. The first song I wrote for the album, 'Sing For The Moment', is that frustration and all that shit. There I was, in the fucking precinct getting booked, and the police were asking me for autographs while they were fucking booking me, and I'm doing it, I'm giving them the autographs. But I'm like, 'My life is in fucking shambles right now, and you look at me like I am not a fucking person. I am a walking spectable.' I signed it. 'They're the police, and I'm sure that if Marshall is a good guy, word will get around, so okay, fuck it, lemme do it.'"

To Smith, he added, "I had a wake-up call with my almost going to jail, like, slow down. That was me letting my anger get the best of me, which I've done many times. No more." But to The Face, he ruefully admitted how such confrontation still fed his art. "It's funny, it's like I need drama in my life to inspire me a lot, instead of just trying to reach for something. Last year was like a really rough year for me. You know, divorce and trying to raise my little girl. Obstacles are thrown at me - you've just got to fall or you don't fall. And I can't fall."

He also talked to Smith about the catastrophe that had happened in his absence, the terrorist assault of September 11: "That was, like, a dark day. It's a subject I couldn't really bring myself to make fun about - then I'd just have no fucking morals or scruples at all."

..."I'm sorry Mama, I never meant to make you cry" suggested he'd heard of Mathers-Briggs' lonely despair on her return to Detroit months before to make up with a son who wouldn't see her...

"Yeah, it's a harsh record," he admitted to The Face. "But I feel like my mother has done some harsh things to me. You just try your whole life to get away from that person and make a life for yourself and not have to deal with it anymore. And it's so hard to break away. And they keep coming back to haunt you, trying to weasel their way into your life somehow. That's my closure song, I guess. It's like I'm washing my hands of it. I'm cleaning out my closet. I'm done."

"I made [Hailie's Song] just for her," he told Rolling Stone. "I'm singing on it, for Christ's sake, or trying to. I wasn't going to use it, but I played it for a few people, and a few of them cried, actually. So I said, 'Fuck it.'"

In its original form, it was built around a sample of George Harrison's Beatles song 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps" - an unlikely connection with old rock royalty which almost came off. "From what I understand, he heard it before he passed and like it," Eminem revealed. "He was going to allow it. But his wife has control of his music now and she said no, so I had to re-sing it all."

Discussing the probation conditions which kept him mostly drink- and drug-free with The Face, he seemed glad of their discipline. "I almost wonder, do I see a reason to even start back again after I've been clean for so long? I'm able to things that a couple of years ago I couldn't do without freaking out. You know, trying to take care of a little girl and trying to do the Daddy things, and trying to make the music."

The Face observed the new family unit he'd formed around himself, with not only Hailie but D12, and his half-brother Nathan, now permanently taken from their mother. With his dyed blond hair and pasty complexion, Nathan looked like Eminem's smaller shadow. What was living with Marshall like, The Face asked, catching him on his own. "Better than living with my mom." Did he like the album. "It's good. I just wish we didn't have to let other people hear it."

When I spoke to [8 Mile] director Curtis Hanson in London, in the week of its US release, he recalled how delicate the process of even starting to make the film had been. "It might have been the incentive of others to make the movie with Eminem in it," he told me of his initial misgivings, "but to me that was a big question mark - whether he could deliver a performance of sufficient emotional truth to anchor the kind of movie I wanted to make. I knew his work. I knew it was dense and serious and provocative. I also knew there was controversy around him. People said to me, 'Do you really wanna get involved with this guy?' My feeling was that I'd been involved with actors of...reputation (Russell Crowe made his name in LA Confidential, and Rob Lowe and Robert Downey Jnr. had been cast by Hanson when at disgraced lows), and I'd always tried to put that to one side, and see how they dealt with me, one-on-one. So I said to myself, 'I don't care about Eminem. I care about Marshall Mathers, the actor with whom I'm going to work."

When the pair met, producer Brian Grazer had convinced first rapper then director to consider the project, but both men were on tenterhooks, wondering how the other would be. "It was like we were on an extended blind date," Hanson remembered. "We were feeling each other out, getting a hit on each other, and deciding if we wanted to take a leap of faith."

As part of this courtship, Hanson asked Eminem to escort him around the landmarks of his life. Over the course of a long day, they toured the places of pain and pleasure that had made Marshall Mathers into Eminem. The fact that he was returning to sites of boyhood humiliation as a grown man, wondering whether to be a movie star, didn't seem to phase him. His life had been that unreal for some time. "We went around the various places where he used to live," Hanson said, "where he went to school, where he met Proof and the guys from D12, where his girlfriend live, and where they used to perform. None of it made him uncomfortable. He was looking back on it the way we all look back on different things. If there was something he didn't like, he was more laughing about it. In fact, I remember him showing me the place where he got beat up badly. He could laugh about that now. Or he was saying to Proof, 'Remember that, where we did dah dah dah...remember where we met on that street?' The reminiscing was more colored by nostalgia, than the emotions he had back then."

Yet Grazer had famously said of his first meeting with Eminem that he felt "damage". Did Hanson feel those scars were still here - or that his star had hauled himself over them, long ago? "Oh, sure," he said emphatically. "I feel he's very strong now. Very focused."

As the tour continued, Hanson was offered another insight. "As we went around these neighborhoods, there was always this feeling of goodwill towards him - from kids on the street, and people who poured out of their houses when they knew he was there. It was very different to how the Detroit media treat him. When we were shooting, they would have these stories: 'Eminem Movie Causes Traffic Jam!' 'Eminem Movie Burns Down House!' Whereas with the people, there was this feeling of pride, and familiarity. He was one of them. He was in his world."

And that world slipped under Hanson's skin. "The degree to which I wanted it to work out with him kept growing, because not only was I getting to know him, I was also spending more and more time in Detroit. It's a city of ghost," Hanson enthused to me. "Everywhere you look you see reminders of its industrial past, and it's almost like there was another civilization there, like Aztecs or Mayans, that vanished without a trace, a civilization that's not connected to the young people living there today. And yet while you have this apparent visual grimness, you also have the populace, the citizens, who have this astonishing energy and spirit, and that's resulted in Detroit's incredible musical history. U wanted to try and capture that reality, and how Detroit and Eminem are inseparable."

He had been keen-eyed enough to notice something else about his possible subject, too. "What's unique here is that at first glance you think you have a story of race. But instead you have a story of class. The character Eminem ended playing, Jimmy Smith, is white, and all but one of his friends are black. But they're all from the same class. And that's the truth about Eminem as well. He grew up around 8 Mile, that's why his voice is authentic. As Future says, 'Once they hear you, it won't matter what color you are.' And that's something new in America."

Eminem and Hanson got along, too. So the deal was done, and work began on the script. Scoot Silvers had already drafted the sort of updated but standard tale of showbiz struggle Grazer had requested (his "hip-hop Saturday Night Fever"), Now Silvers and Eminem sat and talked about the rapper's life, deciding which details to incorporate into his character.

Hanson, meanwhile, added his own touches. He didn't care if it was Eminem's story, so long as it was Detroit's. The production company's plan to shoot in some more standard American city, with Jimmy as a hotel bellhop [lol] was vetoed in favor of a job in an auto plant and filming in Detroit's run-down heart. Scenes expressive of the city - like the symbolic razing of one of its plague of abandoned buildings - were inserted. And one more aspect needed to be changed. "We moved it back to 1995," Hanson said. "The idea of a white guy trying to express himself in that medium and being questioned doesn't really resonate in the same way today. We had to set it in a world before Eminem."

They had six weeks of rehearsal, during which Hanson had to turn Eminem into an actor. "I didn't watch his videos before we met," he told me, "they didn't matter to me, neither did knowing he had another persona, Slim Shady. When you adopt a persona, it's artificial, you hide behind it. What I wanted was the opposite. I needed him to appear to be naked, and be still, and do nothing, so you would feel you were seeing his essence. I was brutally frank. I told him how long and difficult the process was going to be. And I wanted to be frank, because I wanted him to know, I didn't want him to enter into it lightly. And as frank as I was, he still didn't get it."

"I wanted to dabble in movies, I wanted to see if I could do it, I didn't realize it was gonna be this big a deal," Eminem would ruefully admit to MTV Asia after it was all over. "Then Curtis Hanson got involved, and Kim Basinger, and it got massive, it got out of control. All of a sudden it was like, 'Whoa. I gotta take this seriously.' I thought when I read the script that it was gonna be impossible for me to remember all those lines. But the truth is, we did a lot of rehearsing, eight hours a day for two months up until we started shooting. It was grueling. I couldn't help but become this character. It took me back to that time, to that place. It stripped me of all ago, to before I was Eminem, before I was anybody."

There were few rough moments during its shoot. The biggest strain was in its inexperienced star's head. Not just trying to act, but charged with writing the rap battles, and spending spare moments in his trailer writing soundtrack songs in the character of Jimmy, or in a mobile studio completing the soundtrack and The Eminem Show, he had stretched himself to the limit. Hanson's warnings had not been enough. Being a movie star was draining him.

"It was unnatural to him," Hanson said. "There's great courage necessary to lay oneself open as one has to to give the kind of performance I wanted. There was also courage involved because he wanted to be good. He wasn't entering into this lightly. He felt he had a lot at stake. He has sufficient ego and pride that he wanted his performance as well as the movie to appear truthful. And it took over his life. It was also challenging for him becuase it's very different than his normal process. He is somebody who does what he does in a very solitary way. Much the way we show in the movie, when we show Jimmy writing - those papers are Marshall's work-sheets - that little tiny writing, densely packed all over the page. It's a very private and interior process, and in making a movie not only did he have me to deal with constantly, but also the other actors, and the mechanics of movie-making. It was very invasive in his life. He found it wearing."

"I work a lot of hours in the studio, but it's on my own time and it's something I'm in control of," Eminem agreed to MTV Asia. "It hurts being on somebody else's schedule and somebody else's time. It was gruesome. It was like acting boot camp. It was tough, five in the morning til seven, eight at night. Then literally have enough time to sleep, and come right back." To Zadie Smith he confided, "Acting was hard, not second nature, like rapping. I might do another, but not one where I'm in every scene and the whole thing's riding on me, As Hanson remembered, "After we were into it a few weeks, he said to me, 'You weren't kidding..." And the last day of shooting, I asked him, 'How do you feel?' And he said, 'Never again.' And he meant it. It was hard. But rewarding, for both of us."

It had been Hanson's idea to show Jimmy constructing a rap during 8 Mile, littering the movie with fragments of its words and beats, and climaxing with the finished work over the credits. Eminem wrote the track, "Lose Yourself", during filming. 8 Mile's fictional rapper, in effect, had created its musical centerpiece as the movie was made, a reality-bending fire Eminem was built for. "We talked a lot about what rap's opportunities meant to the character, and what the song needed to express," Hanson recalled. "And it was a struggle for him. Because his music, up to that point, all came from within, in whatever form he felt right, and it was all extremely personal and self-referential. Here, he was doing something that was also an assignment, and it needed to apply to his emotional life as reflected in his character Jimmy."

"I've felt since my first day of rapping that my time is ticking. That's how I've based my whole career - that this might never happen again. Fans are so fickle and so quick to turn on you. Suddenly, you're not cool no more, even if at first you were the greatest thing since sliced cunt."

"It's kinda like that thing where you struggle all your life to get it," he told The Source, "but it's just as hard to maintain as it is to get there. I have to keep working if I'm gonna keep being able to laugh at them people who said I wouldn't be shit. I do feel like, 'Look what I've accomplished, ha ha.' At the same time there's the feeling that: 'How do I know that I got the last laugh?'"

...50, for one, had no doubt his boss was still relevant. "Em himself is nowhere near done," he told Bang [in 2003]. "There was a point where he was really unexcited by hip-hop, he thought there was nothing going on. Em uses so much of himself that we know who Hailie is, we know who Kim is, we know his relationship with his mom. He's using his life and as a person, he's gonna grow, he's gonna feel new experiences, and you never lose something to rap about when you use yourself in your music."

Luis Resto, now Eminem's right-hand man at Detroit's 54 Studios...revealed their work rate, as the three men assembled music for new albums by Eminem, D12 and Obie Trice: "When Eminem's in Detroit, we work together every day. A lot of times, we're writing for all three projects. You go in and you're jamming, doing music, and it gets spread here and there. Some stuff goes to Eminem, some to Obie and some to other artists. We sit down and write and we parcel it out. Marshall takes home CDs and he listens to them, some things intrigue him, some things not so much - you keep backlogging the ideas, and see what comes of it."

Detroit's Obie Trice barely bothered to hide his resentment at Shady's over-stretching. "The reason why it took so long to get my album done," he offered, "is because Eminem was into a lot of shit. We didn't get a change to really get into the studio like we wanted to. He dropped D12's album, he dropped The Eminem Show, then he went off into the movie thing. So 8 Mile came about, all the time he's busy doing this, busy doing that. I can't get into the studio with him, I can't get into the studio. Then around the 8 Mile movie, 50 Cent was getting signed, he was coming to the table with an album damn near done. Then boom we dropped 50 Cent first. He had the momentum, this what you want to hear? He had the momentum, he had the buzz, he had all that shit from New York, he's been shot nine times, yes, yes, you get what I'm saying? So, Obie Trice, now I'm here, that's the thing. Why it took so long? We don't want to know about that..."

Mother Debbie, by contrast, seemed almost invisible to Eminem now. There was talk of her appearing in an Osbournes-style reality show, after her son refused point-blank. She then made the news on January 22, 2004, when 16-year-old James Knott pointed a silver pistol at her at an 8 Mile gas station, dragging her our of the car by her hair and stealing the vehicle, before his swift arrest. "I tried to contact Marshall," she sniffed, "But he apparently must not be in town." He no longer cared.

"He's definitely equivalent to Elvis Presley in a sense that Elvis only thought that black people were good enough to be his servants," said Freddie Foxxx. "His goal is to do better than the people he stole from. What else do you expect from a white man? I'm sure he was the N-word a whole load of times." Skillz: "If you say the word 'n*gger' out of anger and frustration and call a black girl a bitch, I'm pretty sure you'll do it again." Petey Pablo: "I don't think you can really apologize for that, because you call me a n*gger, then to me, that's always on your mind and that's what you think about us. That's the way you look at me."

The enduring contradictions of D12's existence were brought out more seriously in interviews. "We get asked about Eminem a lot," Kon Artis compained to Hip-Hop Connection with unfaked hurt. "I understand that, I mean, we're on his label after all, but sometimes they ask 10 questions and nine are about Eminem. I'm like, 'So why are you even interviewing me then?'"

The answer was obvious, if unflattering. D12 were like a girlfriend only Eminem knew why he loved, but who others had to tolerate to get to him. Kuniva had no illusions about the relationship's imbalance. But he also knew it was co-dependent, in a way outsiders missed. "There's a million things Em could be doing besides doin' an album with D12," he admitted to Rolling Stone. "But we're the only real friends he has. We grew up together, lived together, flipped burgers together. There's a bond between us that nobody can break. And there's a whole thing with him feelin' like he owes it to us. He knows without D12 there wouldn't be a Slim Shady."

The depth of that adolescent loyalty was revealed when, for the first time, Bizarre recalled Eminem's desperate efforts to fulfill the group's blood oath that whoever made it out "alive" would return for the rest. In his first weeks in LA after being signed in 1998, as Dre was magicking his life of poverty away, and the pressure to repay the Doctor with great work had begun, Eminem was begging his savior to sign D12. "Marshall was tryin' to force us on Dre," Bizarre said. "'This is my boys! D12!' And Dre said, 'Wait a minute - it's about you!' Dre told him, 'Build your house before you have your friends walk in it.'"

"They're my foundation," Eminem said simply. "If I lose my foundation, then what do I have? Just to be myself on a big-ass mountain, a little lonely rich bastard? Not only are these guys my friends, I don't trust nobody new that I meet. At all."

His bond with Dre was equally fierce. "Dre saved my life, literally saved my life, just by giving me a chance," he told Vanity Fair. "To me he's 'boss man'; if he needs something done, whatever I am doing is dropped - my loyalty always goes that way with him." The men who had stuck with him when he seemed doomed, and the man who scooped him from the abyss - all were loved not like colleagues, but family. Like Hailie and his half-brother Nathan (as well as his 8-year-old niece via Kim, Alaina, also living with him now), they were part of the ad hoc emotional core he had built to replace his parents, and help withstand his fame's crushing pressure. The unchecked, innocent force of Eminem's loyalty to this tight inner circle, inside which he could be himself, dwarfed vagaries of career and critics' opinions. Betrayed in his own mind almost since the womb, viewed by every new acquaintance through a star-struck prism, he'd stop a bullet for any of them, because they kept him alive. In the face of this, whether Kon Artis was good enough to share the mic with him was a pathetic consideration.

When XXL queried his choice of single [for Encore], a man who had by now sold 50 million albums, and was by far Interscope's most valuable asset, showed an unwillingness to flex his power bordering on cowardice. "Well, you know, we had discussions about that - me and Dre," he hedged. "And it's not just me running that food chain. It's not just me calling the shots. I'm not necessarily my own boss, so to speak. Between me, the label, and Dre, it's got to be a mutual decision. Do we come out with [a serious single] right out the jump, come out so serious and dark to where people don't even know the album's out because it ain't getting played on the radio?" As if, even in the ultra-conservative world of US airplay, the new Eminem single could ever be excluded. The gratitude that lingered to those that had signed and so saved him in 1998 mingled with the engrained cautiousness of a man who had once been unable to support his family (he still talked in 2004 about Hailie's college fund, though by now he could found her a college). He remained a frustrating mix of fervent radical and meek company man.

Back in the real world, he listed his parental rules to Rolling Stone, including these: "Never lay a hand on them. Let them know it's not right for a man to ever lay his hands on a female. Despite what people may think of me and what I say in my songs - you know, me and Kim have had our moments - I'm tryin' to teach them and make them learn from my mistakes."

As to the trauma of Kim's trials on their family, he told Vanity Fair it had been the "toughest year" of his life. "But with her bein' on the run from the cops," he added to Rolling Stone, "I really had no choice but to step up to the plate." Explaining Kim's absence to Hailie and Alaina had been "one of the hardest things I ever had to go through." And as he started to talk about why he had gathered Alaina and Nate into his family, he let slip why he was so desperate to shield them from pain. "My little brother was taken away by the state when he was eight, nine," he explained, shining a little more light into their life with Debbie. "I tried to apply for full custody when I was twenty [three years before the state intervened] but I didn't have the means. They had come and got him out of school. He didn't know what the fuck was goin' on. The same thing that had happened in my life was happening in his. And then Kim's niece was born. Watched her bounce around from house to house - just watchin' the cycle of dysfunction, it was like, 'Man, it I get in position, I'm gonna stop all this shit.'" His pride in what he'd achieved peeped through for a moment. "And I got in position and did."

And what of Kim, he was asked in October. Were they together now? "No, not necessarily," he answered Vanity Fair. "But because we share parenthood we have this mutual respect for each other." Their relationship was "neutral at best," he told Rolling Stone; romance seemed "pretty much out the window." But in Vanity Fair, he still couldn't move beyond her. "There's things I went through with Kim that I could never experience of go through again," he admitted. "From back in the early days, Kim had been there, fought with me, in fights, fought dudes, in fights. I'm kind of stuck between this place. I don't think I could ever fall in love with her again. Or anyone, for that matter."

Liner notes by [in Loyal to the Game] Tupac's fiercely loyal mother Afeni Shakur revealed Eminem's eagerness to contribute. "[Many] vow that they are 'here for me' and 'here for Tupac' or for whatever I may need," she wrote. "Yet in the same conversation they ask if I have $150,000 to send their way, or if there is an unreleased Tupac verse for the single on their next album." In contrast came "the gift of generosity given to me by a young man who not only asked for nothing in return for his service, but refused to accept anything I offered...I must personally thank Marshall Mathers."

"There's that fine line of walking where I have fans that I don't want to let down," he pondered to Vanity Fair. "I don't ever want to become soft. I don't want to compromise my music for my life at home. It's almost like I do live a double life. When I get behind those gates and I go home, I'm Dad."...How would he choose, he was asked, between a happy family and fame's needs? "If there ever comes a day where I would have to pick one or the other," he said at once, "I already know what it would be. I would walk away from all of this if I had to."

On April 18, his body lay in a 24-carat gold casket in the city's Fellowship chapel, as mourners filed past for 12 hours. On the morning of April 19, 2,000 filled the church, and many others packed its parking lot to listen to the two-hour service on loudspeakers. Dre, 50 Cent, and D12's remnants were among those in the pews. Anthony Bozza observed Eminem all in black, moving slowly, "hunched over...crying with [Proof's family], hugging them, and rocking back and forth." [Bozza's article is here, if you've never read it]

When I wandered Detroit in 2002, Eminem was still a regular visitor to his old haunts. When Guy Adams went on his trail for the Independent in February 2009, he seemed more like a ghost. "No one had seen him at all," he says. "Everyone knew someone who'd seen him - 'a friend of a friend saw him three weeks ago in a bar...'"

"I had this slurry tone," he told Spin of the failed recordings he made next. "It sounded like I was talking-rapping. I'd become so fucking lazy. Songs where I would talk about eating so much and getting fat and saying, 'Fuck it, I don't care.'"

...As the pills muffled his mood, Eminem would creep down to his basement and eat "nachos and popcorn, just sitting around getting fat," he told Spin.. "I just gave up." In his basement cinema, he watched the Rocky flims, Boogie Nights and Shooter 150 times each, clinging to the comforting familiarity like a child to nursery tales.

...Like a montage from the Rocky films he'd also been addicted to, he burned off his flab with legendary Detroit boxing trainer Emanuel Steward. "Eminem's a workout maven, and one of those healthy mind, healthy body people," a Steward associate told Independent.

"Encore feels a little too self-loathing to me...like I'm pissing and moaning about whatever...I beat up the subject of what was me."

D12's four other survivors had been equally distraught about Proof's death. Their follow-up to 2004's D12 World also had to wait in Shady parent Interscope's corporate line for Eminem to surface. Kuniva spoke to the Detroit Free Press on their future in 2008. "I've read the blogs where people are so fucking cruel: 'Why do they call it the Dozen when two members [Eminem included alongside Proof] are dead?'" Bizarre put out three solo albums independently, telling XXL, "I'm trying to get away from the whole Eminem thing...He's at the point in his career where he needs us to stand on our own, and he's come for the finishing touches...We can't be on my man's left nut sack."

His competitive urge to stay on top had become its own, self-generating subject. "Realistically, if I don't rap, what the fuck am I going to do?" he asked Vibe, knowing the answer. "It's too late to just be unfamous at this point."

The end.

[Trimss]

This is awesome, a really great read.

"There's that fine line of walking where I have fans that I don't want to let down," he pondered to Vanity Fair. "I don't ever want to become soft. I don't want to compromise my music for my life at home. It's almost like I do live a double life. When I get behind those gates and I go home, I'm Dad."...How would he choose, he was asked, between a happy family and fame's needs? "If there ever comes a day where I would have to pick one or the other," he said at once, "I already know what it would be. I would walk away from all of this if I had to."

That's some real shit.

[slimshady18]

Eminem knows he will have some explaining to do, as surely as he fears Hailie’s teens will bring out the Slim Shady in him. “I’m sure Hailie is going to come to me and ask me about all of it when it’s all said and done,” he says. “I’m sure she’ll come to me, probably when she’s a teenager—which I dread. I have no fucking idea what I’m going to do when she starts dating. I’m gonna kill boys. It’s gonna drive me crazy.

poor guy that breaks Hailie's heart