The Boy From The County Hell

At the time of writing, Eminem s second major label opus The Marshall Mathers LP looks set to go 12 times platinum in Ireland, which, according to his record company, is its third highest territorial performance on the planet.

This is rare enough for a rock n roll act, unheard of in hip hop. But then, there s something about Mathers that goes deep into the grime of the Irish psyche, illuminating its dirtiest murkiest inner caverns like some poisonous little glow-worm.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Eminem boom is the extent to which he s clicked with kids in the 10-15-age bracket, triggering the usual waves of distaste not just through teachers, police, priests or the ever present spokespeople , but also a generation of parents reared on rock n roll. It s an antipathy that goes far further than a traditionalist s fear of a black planet, the that s not music pack who prize melody and meaning over pulse and polemic. It s more political than that for all its rebel palaver, rock n roll has always been liberal in ideology, and in an age of cosmetic correctness, Eminem s perceived misogyny/homophobia is the hate that dare not speak its name.
For a venomous little bottle blonde like Marshall to be peddling such South Park style filth to our hip-hop kids must seem like the most profane betrayal of the core values of the hippy and even punk movements.
Nevertheless, the little shits of this isle love him.
Why?
I ll tell you why.
He s the latest boy from the county hell, a town they know so well.

Some months ago, an MTV interviewer asked Eminem what he thought heaven looked like. The question stumped him. She then asked him what he thought hell would look like. The rapper characterised it as a place populated by little replicas of himself.
I myself am hell, said Robert Lowell.
Hell is other people, argued Sartre.
Eminem would probably agree with them both. Basically, he was fucked from the get-go.
Born Marshall Bruce Mathers III on October 17, 1974, he was raised by his 17-year-old mother Debbie after his dad split for California. Marshall grew up as a welfare kid, one of the few whites in a rough neighbourhood on the east side of Detroit, constantly moving from school to school and getting bullied and beaten on a regular basis, once so badly that he suffered a brain haemorrhage and lay in a coma for nine days. His mother suffered from Munchausen s Syndrome By Proxy, a disorder where the mother imagines the child to be ill and subjects it to unnecessary treatment in order to gain the attention of medical staff.
When he was nine years old, Marshall s beloved Uncle Ronnie gave him a copy of the Breakin soundtrack, containing Reckless by Ice T. The boy was smitten.
He dropped out of school at age 15. The following year he was shot at by a gang member. Uncle Ronnie killed himself when Marshall was 19 (he still has Ronnie s name tattooed on his right arm) and he also witnessed the shooting of his brother-in-law by his Uncle Todd.
By this time Mathers, or Eminem as he had begun calling himself, had already started to make a name for himself at open mic contests around Detroit (Kid Rock was a contemporary) and even recorded an album called Infinite for a local label. It stiffed, and he continued supporting himself making $5 an hour as a cook, driving his workmates to distraction by rapping the ingredients of the pizzas he was making.
Then, on Christmas Day in 1995, his girlfriend Kim gave birth to a daughter, Hailie Jade. The responsibility terrified Mathers, a wake up call documented on Rock Bottom from The Slim Shady LP. Recording a demo of that song late one night, Mathers got word that yet another prospective record deal had fallen through, and took more than 20 painkillers over a two hour period, but couldn t keep them down.
For a while, Eminem thought about thieving or dealing to support his family. In 1997, he took a plane to LA to compete in a Rap Olympics being held in an Inglewood club called The Proud Bird, a contest which would prove to be a turning point in the rapper s career. William Shaw provided an eyewitness account of it in his book Westsiders.
A good rap battle is great entertainment, he wrote. The rules are simple. In a formal competition like this contestants are paired off and given 30 seconds in which to improvise rhymes, then another 30 in which to reply and try and quash the insults that have just been flung. Rhymes must be spontaneous. Anyone relying too obviously on prepared words will be booed off. The idea is to put your opponent off by trashing him as coolly, as brutally and as deftly as you can. But anyone who just insults crudely, without wit, will also be booed. A panel of judges marks each round, judging who s landed the most blows, as if they were adjudicating at a boxing match.
Eminem, the only white rapper in the competition, cut through the first couple of rounds without much trouble, enduring almost no hostility on account of his colour. In fact, when an opponent made a reference to Eminem s whiteness he was booed by the crowd. Mathers countered with:
Everybody in this place I miss you
If you try and turn my facial tissue
Into a racial issue . . .
Eminem was knocked out in the final round, which made him furious, for he had been counting on the $500 prize money he was homeless, and the previous night had to break into a house in Detroit to find a place to sleep.
All the same, while he lost out on the money, the rapper did win the interest of a couple of representatives from Aftermath, the Interscope-subsidised label Dr. Dre had set up after leaving Suge Knight s Death Row enclave, weary of the violence that had dogged the company.
Dre was intrigued enough by this motormouth from Motor City to sign him up and produce three of the tracks on his major label debut, including the lead off single My Name Is . The accompanying video made him the talk of the town, but crucially for a Caucasian hip hop act, Dre s patronage also gave him credibility.
The Slim Shady LP was a pretty remarkable calling card, a foul-mouthed, equal opportunities hate-in, with its author seemingly hell-bent on broaching every taboo subject left at the end of the 20th century spousal abuse, drugs, date rape everything was permitted. Possibly the standout track was 97 Bonnie And Clyde which spoofed Will Smith s paean to father-son bonding, Just The Two Of Us , with Mathers assuming the character of a guy taking his young daughter on a drive to the coast in order to dump her dead mother s body in the water ( Where s Mama?/She just taking a little nap in the trunk/That smell? Whew!/Dada must ve runned over a skunk ). On the song s sequel, What s The Difference from Dr. Dre s album 2001, the pair joked about putting sunglasses on the corpse and driving it around LA.

Eminem married his childhood sweetheart Kim in a private non-church service in St. Joseph Missouri in June 1999. By that autumn he had established himself as the most remarkable newcomer of the year, and The Slim Shady LP had surpassed the 3 million sales mark. However, all was far from blissful. First, Mathers father, to whom he d never spoken, began trying to contact him. Then his mother filed a $10 million lawsuit against him in Macomb Circuit Court over comments made in US magazines that alleged she was an unfit mother and drug abuser.
Deborah Mathers-Briggs claimed that she suffered forms of emotional distress including diminished self-esteem, humiliation, sleepless nights, harm to her credit rating, and even loss of her mobile home . Her attorney later reduced the claim to $2 million, which Mathers rejected. The matter has still not been resolved.
Meanwhile Eminem kept on working, scoring another hit single with Dr. Dre in the form of Forgot About Dre , and then, a little over a year after Slim Shady, he released The Marshall Mathers LP.
If the previous record was The Bomb, this one was The Plague, with the rapper railing at his record company, his critics, himself, his girlfriend, his mother, making jokes about Columbine, Christopher Reeves, Gianni Versace and generally winding up every majority and minority group in the western world. The hate coming off the last half of the record was so intense that this writer couldn t listen to it all the way through for a month.
Steve Spurgeon, Director of Communications for GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) an organisation that rarely advocates censorship went on the record as saying that the album contains the most blatantly homophobic lyrics we have ever heard. Ever. We can t bring ourselves to condone it merely on his right to self-expression. As with the MTV Awards last September, GLAAD are expected to demonstrate outside the forthcoming 2001 Grammy awards on February 21st, protesting over his four nominations.
So how does Eminem plead?
Faggot to me, doesn t necessarily mean gay person, he recently told Sylvia Patterson. Faggot to me means pussy, a fuckin sissy, if you re a man, be a man, knowhumsayin? Growing up, to me and my friends, faggot was a common word, like (whiny teenage derision), You re bein a fag, man, you re bein a fag , nobody really thought gay person. I never thought, You re bein a gay person....
So it s just a word?
Yeah, it s just a word, he protests. I don t give a shit about gay people, if they wanna be gay then that s their fuckin business. As long as they ain t hurtin nobody, ain t hurtin me, whatever, be gay, do your thing, if you take it in the ass, you take it in the ass, you suck dick, whatever, that s your business, knowhumsayin ? Just don t come around me with that shit, that s all.
Why would that freak you out so much anyway?
(Startled) Why would it freak me out? A man suckin another man s dick?! I just said it! A man suckin another man s dick. In hip-hop it s just not cool to be gay, because hip-hop is all about bein masculine and it just goes with the territory. I don t think people sit there and focus on it in the hip-hop community. It s just the worst thing you can say to another guy in a battle, calling him a faggot, you take it in the ass an this an that, you re choppin down their manhood. The notion of gayness? I try not to think about it. To tell you the truth.
As a case for the defence, this is a bunch of bullshit. The idea that any genre of music is defined by sexual preference is ludicrous even heavy metal had its Rob Halfords and Freddie Mercurys. Eminem has claimed to understand why bullying victims like Harris and Klebold snapped and embarked on their killing spree at Columbine, but his suck-my-dick-you-fag bleatings are of little solace to a 15-year-old getting his head beat off a locker on account of his emerging sexual orientation.
Writing last July, I described Eminem as Norman Bates with beats. All over both his albums, he channel hops from vignette to vignette like a hyperactive kid stricken with Attention Deficit Disorder, in bad need of a worming, agitated, jabbering and miserable. Maybe a dozen times on the The Marshall Mathers LP Eminem lets rip with statements he knows will be deemed controversial, mimics a possible response, then rebuts that response, all within the space of three lines. His routines aren t so much self-conscious as hyper-over-aware. He s constantly wisecracking then gauging the moral temperature of the joke to see if he s Gone Too Far This Time.
Occasionally, on tunes like It s My Fault , he comes close to being the Weird Al Yankovich of rap, but at his best, Eminem s a gas, albeit the kind emitted by corpses in a morgue after God has delivered His ultimate punchline. But he needs to ditch the gaybashing and bitch-dissing and spend those royalty cheques on some good shrink-work and marriage counselling before he ends up Dutch Elming his whole family tree in a chromosome chain of dysfunction.
I wrote this last paragraph in response to the events that took place early that month, as The Marshall Mathers LP spent its seventh week at the Billboard top slot, making its creator the most successful rap act of all time. While her husband was performing at the Portland date of the Up In Smoke tour with Dr. Dre on Friday July 7th, Kim Mathers attempted to commit suicide at her Detroit home. Following a phone call to Eminem, Kim was found in the bathroom sometime after 11pm by her mother Kathleen Sluck, crying hysterically and trying to cut her wrists with a razor.
On the morning of her attempted suicide, Kim Mathers had had a letter published in the Detroit Free Press, in which she defended herself against Eminem s accusations that she had been unfaithful. I don t think anybody in their right mind would cheat on a millionaire husband, her statement said. She also attacked him for the alleged pistol-whipping of one John Guerra, a barman Mathers accused of kissing his wife outside Detroit s Hot Rocks nightclub on June 4. Eminem also faced allegations of having waved a 9mm Smith & Wesson at Douglas Dial of Insane Clown Posse. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and carrying a concealed weapon. Pleading not guilty, he was released on bail.
Just over a month later, on August 16th, Eminem filed for divorce. Five days after that, Kim filed a counter complaint, seeking full and permanent custody of Hailie. (Just last month, there were rumours that husband and wife had been reconciled.)
There s no doubt that the horrible Jerry Springer-like quality of Mathers private life only makes his music more compelling. To play one of his albums is to watch him squirm in the rubber room in Penury Penitentiary, remote in hand, trying to zap his way out of the various Catch 22s triggered by his own fucked-upbringing.
It s the same sordid, seedy feeling experienced when you watch those life-on-the-streets-live-from-LA cop programmes where they apprehend some poor bum out of his gourd on crack and Thunderbird wine, slouching around in a stained vest, jeans hiked around the cheeks of his arse, looking like Ol Dirty Bastard with a weight problem. Both The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP are Notes From The Underground interpreted not by the zany Woody Allen of Bananas but the twisted amoralist of Crimes & Misdemeanors. Take a look at Mathers handwriting in the shot of his lyric book published in Q magazine late last year it s like Kevin Spacey/John Doe s diary of atrocities in Se7en. If, as that renowned gagmeister Nietzsche once suggested, laughter signifies the death of an emotion, then Eminem is a mere shell-suit of a man, a misanthropologist, the Hunter S. of hip-hop railing at Sally Jesse, Riki, Geraldo, Oprah, Judge Judy and Jenny Jones on the tube. Sometimes his verses scan like toilet wall graffiti, Harris and Klebold if they d turned to MC-ing rather than murder, or AIDS jokes scrawled by Celine: If I had a magic wand/ I d make the world suck my dick without a condom on/While I m on the john .

So, to return to the theme of our exposition, how come Eminem has come to eat our children?
Okay, let s recap.
Bullied? Check.
A suicide in the family? Check.
Dysfunctional background? Check.
Brawls in nightclubs? Check.
Homophobia and misogyny? Check
Sounds like a very Irish success story to me.
Until now, hip hop never really happened in Hibernian homes. Tupac or Snoop were distant fantasy figures totin AK-47s around South Central LA, and despite recent rashes of racist attacks and youth violence, it s not a war zone in downtown Waterford or Limerick, not just yet, at any rate.
But Eminem, this gifted little canat in a hoodie with a bleached head, put a white face on a black art just like Elvis before him. To invoke Tod Browning s Freaks, he s one of us, one of us, one of us Here, the whigger clause doesn t apply the guy s rhyming style succeeds precisely because he s like something out of Revenge Of The Nerds; a white misfit with an Oedipussy complex ( How you gonna breast feed me Mom?/You ain t got no tits! ).
Faced with all this, neither the saccharine bilge of Westlife nor the smug yuppie soul of Craig David can cut it. The only possible anti-authoritarian contenders are Limp Bizkit, whose gimmick is to say fuck a lot, or Marilyn Manson, who basically impersonates Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and sounds like a bubblegum Nine Inch Nails (no bad thing in itself, mind you).
So of course Eminem is juvenile. That s the point. Most teenagers have a persecution complex the size of Mathers , he just nursed his into adulthood, parenthood even, when the rest of us try to slake it with alcohol or acquisitions, responsibilities and irresponsibilities, of every kind. Even if you have 30 or 40 winters behind you, dredge deep enough and you ll still find a white hot ball in the gut that you d love to projectile vomit at that twisted fuck of a nun or Christian brother or 12-stone jerk from fifth year who tormented you as a whelp. Eminem taps right into this submerged rage.
I wouldn t say I want people to diss me, he told Sylvia Patterson, but it s like I kinda wait for it. Who s the next person? And it s fun when someone does dis me because I will fuckin demolish your self-esteem. I will fuckin say everything I can in my fuckin power to make you wanna jump off a fuckin bridge. Y knowhumsayin ? (Taps temple) 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 the hiphop circles, in battles. And not just that, in arguments with my mother, knowhumsayin , fights with my girl, period, that s just how I am. I m a very spiteful person if you do me wrong. I run on vengeance.
Read between these lines, and root down deep enough beneath the myriad ornamentations of Dr Dre s production and you ll also find in Eminem s music as I ve said before a kind of damned sadness, a melancholic hate, like an e-mail from hell written in fastidiously rhyming couplets.
It s a feeling that can only have come from loss of some sort, be it the hole left by his absentee father or his Uncle Ronnie. Again, this has resonances in Ireland, a country where young suicides are regular headline material. I d consult the national statistics office on this but I don t have to my mother rings me every other weekend to tell me some 18-30 year old just threw himself in the Barrow, or gassed himself, or strung himself up from a wooden beam. That s a lot of big ripples in small communities. And maybe a lot of the sons, daughters, cousins, nieces and nephews of these rotten statistics recognise the horrible gnawing on the inside of Eminem s brain.

On a lighter note, a lot of Slim Shady s missives are nothing but very cleverly constructed playground taunts, pulling Christina and Britney s pigtails cos they won t kiss him. Although, he does take it to extremes, like on I m Back :
So I just throw up a middle finger and let it linger
Longer than the rumour that I was stickin it to Christina
Cause if I ever stuck it to any singer in showbiz
It d be Jennifer Lopez, and Puffy, don t you know this!
I m sorry, Puff, but I don t give a fuck if this chick was my own mother
I d still fuck her with no rubber and cum inside her
And have a son and a new brother at the same time
Now you don t need a degree in Ebonics to recognise this as an elaborate if admittedly rather warped variation on that trusty Yo mama wind up. Or translated into Dublinese, Yer sister . Rap in its narrowest form is a slagging match between two young males, and Eminem as he s so fond of reminding us cut his teeth in the viciously competitive MC circuit described earlier by William Shaw. It s a ritual that has its roots in the African tradition the dozens , where opposing tribes of young boys would line up and exchange insults, the epithets growing more and more vicious, often involving the badmouthing of family members (including the competitors mothers), until the victor has reduced the victims to shamefaced tears.
Maybe there s a milder parallel in present day Ireland. I m reminded of a passage in John Waters book Every Day Like Sunday. The author has observed two boys of about 18 or 19 talking amidst a larger group on Main Street, Longford. Both young men are chatting in a playful, good-humoured way.
Then, making shouted arrangements to meet later on, they move off in opposite directions. Immediately, one of them turns around and shouts after the departing companion: Good luck, yebollixye.
The second man then turns around and rejoins:
Yakuntya.
The first man again counters with, yebollixye.
Yakuntya.
Yebollixye.
This bizarre responsorial psalm continues for what seems like two or three minutes, long after one of the young men has turned the corner onto Ballymahon Street and disappeared.
Here, Waters observed a post-pubescent panto where the actors speak in a language that allows them to relate to one another without having to betray how they really feel. This is the language of the gibe, the cheerful obscenity and the snort of derision. It is a form of self-protection, which allows one to live in a society in which one has little choice and no control.
Ladies and gentlemen, Eminem, the poet laureate of Yebollixye.
Marshall Mathers would of course blame his more outrageous pronouncements on his alter ego Slim Shady, which in terms of accountability is like a ventriloquist advising you to talk to the hand.
Defending the decision to nominate Eminem for four Grammies, Michael Greene, President of the Recording Academy, recently said, he s got some pretty screwed up ideas in his head, and that s why this record is probably the most repugnant record of the year, but in a lot of ways it s also one of the most remarkable records of the year. Remember, this organisation is a very cognisant of theatre. Eminem is theatre. I think kids see it as theatre. I don t think they take it seriously at all. At least, my kids don t.
If, as Michael Greene says, Eminem is all theatre, then his major breach of ethics is that he doesn t change the names. He can hardly complain about the media making a Punch & Judy show out of his private life if he insists on casting his nearest and dearest in central roles, to the extent of performing mock sexual acts on an inflatable doll named after his wife in concert. Consequently, instead of revelling in the vivid paranoia, slapstick horror and cinematic brilliance of a tune like Kim , which depicts a terrifying row in front of the couple s five-year-old daughter Haile over an alleged infidelity, we re thinking about the effect it ll have on the child when someone plays the track to her in years to come.
It s not something that escaped Kim Mathers lawyer. In her counter-complaint for divorce issued last August, which also alleged that Eminem threatened to evict his wife from the marital home and leave her penniless, a paragraph headed Intentional Infliction Of Emotional Distress cites the writing, publication, recording, performing, and general dissemination of a song entitled Kim which depicts horrific domestic violence against the wife resulting in her grisly murder. The performances of this and other songs, in concert, by the husband has included vile acts directed towards an effigy of the wife, in the presence of several thousand concert attendees.

Far easier to palate is the current single Stan which appears to have brought Eminem to a whole other level of recognition, due on no small part to the strength of the narrative plus Dido s winsome melodic contribution. Few stars have ever dealt with the subject of their own celebrity in a way that rings as unflinching and true as this tune.
Indeed, in terms of technique, Mathers two albums mark him out as the equal of master wordsmiths like Dylan, Brel or Gainesbourg. Whether his work affects you emotionally, or whether you can stomach the content, is another matter. But if nothing else, he s a perfectionist who takes his craft deadly seriously. When I listen to my songs now, I ll stress myself, thinking, I could ve spit that line better , he says in the introduction to his book of lyrics Angry Blonde. Even little things like, I could ve popped that P better on the mic .
This is the Eminem we rarely see, the ruthlessly self-critical MC fussing over fluffed consonants. It s an image I like a whole lot better than Slim Shady, but admittedly, is not as likely to shift so many units.
So now, at the beginning of 2001, the Time-honoured (man of the year last year, believe it or not), Grammy-nominated Marshall Mathers is the closest thing we ve got to a genuine figure of insolence and insubordination amidst a faceless mass of drones and clones (most of them hailing from around these parts). Not since Lenny Bruce has an entertainer so challenged notions of acceptability in mainstream entertainment. You ll even see him being referred to as the Kurt Cobain Of Rap, a handy soundbite that is nonetheless meaningless, given that Mathers is about as far as you can get from a narcoleptic little lamb like Cobain. Kurt sought out a smack habit in the grand rock n roll death trip tradition. The stomach complaint he doused with heroin was apposite, for grunge was the music of bellyaching. Eminem may have inherited the same screwed up family values as Kurt, but I suspect he s had to fight too hard for the good life to flush it all down the toilet.
In the end, Eminem s just another clown, like every pop star from Prince to Patti Smith, Morrison to Madonna. It s just a matter of how seriously you take the joke.

MUST WE FLING THIS FILTH
AT OUR HIP HOP KIDS?

Some of Eminem s more sensitive ejaculations, selected by PETER MURPHY

I m withdrawin from crack so bad my blood itches
I don t rap to get the women fuck bitches
Give me a fat slut that cooks and does dishes.
( Still Don t Give A Fuck )

My favourite colour is red, like the bloodshed
From Kurt Cobain s head, when he shot himself dead.
( Cum On Everybody )

Me and Marcus Allen was butt fuckin Nicole
When we heard a knock at the door, must have been Ron Gold
Jumped behind the door, put the orgy on hold
Killed em both and smeared blood in a white Bronco.
( Role Model )

(Yo! This girl s only fifteen years old
You shouldn t take advantage of her, that s not fair)
Yo, look at her bush . . . does it got hair (Uh-huh!)
Fuck this bitch right here on the spot bare
Till she passes out and she forgot how she got there.
( Guilty Conscience )

My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge
That ll stab you in the head whether you re a fag or a lez
Or the homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest
Pants or dress hate fags? The answer s yes .
( Criminal )

Eminem s book of lyrics Angry Blonde is published by ReganBooks and retails at #19.50