Eminem about to become even bigger

By DAVID USBORNE

Prepare yourself. The mum-loathing, gay-dissing, rhyme-spitting rapper from Detroit with the yellow-bleached hair and white-trash tongue releases a new album on Tuesday and already the atmosphere is fizzing with excitement from his fans and indignation from the critics he so regularly appals. Call it The Eminem Show, if you like. That is the name of the album, after all.

Not everyone is fond of Eminem, 27, real name Marshall Mathers III. They deem him a monger of hatred and a dangerous influence on our children. They have their reasons.

He has nasty tattoos (the latest suggests that his ex-wife, Kim, "rot in pieces") and his lyrics are often filled with bile. They have called him homophobic, misogynistic, racist and more.

But Eminem is infinitely more interesting than that. And a very much more important figure of our times.

For one, he is a monster success. His last release, The Marshall Mathers LP (2000), sold five million copies in the US in the first month. If you don't listen to his music (which, we have to suspect, is true of those who most fiercely attack him) ask almost any 13-year-old about it. Kids like his sounds and, what is more, they like the hard edge of his rhymes. Even some who despair of him love him at the same time. The gay community has tied itself in knots over this almost-cute guy.

All of which Eminem enjoys very much. The Eminem Show is exactly what it says it is. The new album, like the other two mainstream releases before it, is about the artist or his whimsically created alter-egos. They have included "Slim Shady", who debuted on The Slim Shady LP (1998). He sings, well yells, into a spittle-soaked microphone about the mess-ups of his unarguably dysfunctional life and about the many people who have brought him grief, whether members of his own fractured family or the conservative table-thumpers who think he should be silenced. For sheer in-your-face honesty, Eminem is hard to beat.

There are as many targets as tracks in the new album. Some are very personal. In Cleaning Out the Closet, he tries to sever the cord with his mother who famously sued him for US$10 million ($21.5 million) for allegedly slandering her to reporters. "Ma, remember when [uncle] Ronnie died and you said you wished it was me?/Well, guess what, I'm as dead to you as can be."

Other references are less personal, as in Without Me when he jokingly compares himself to Elvis Presley as "not the first king of controversy/I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/To do black music so selfishly/And use it to get myself wealthy".

A megastar who chooses to be the centre of his own art necessarily loses his privacy.

"Nothing I do is private any more," the artist complains in an interview in Rolling Stone. "I usually feel like a monkey in a [expletive] cage with people looking at me. The whole Eminem Show concept was just: [expletive] it, if the world wants a show, here's my show."

But in the cage, of course, is exactly where his bosses at Interscope records, a division of media behemoth Vivendi Universal, want him. He is one of the most lucrative gigs in town. Which brings us to the big question about Eminem. How much of what we see is the real guy and how much is manufactured to bring commercial success?

In Without Me, he seems to offer almost a confession in that regard. "I've created a monster," he yells. Is all that anger just designed to shock? Sometimes it seems so.

Dressing up as Osama bin Laden for the video for Without Me looks lamely predictable. And he guaranteed fresh controversy for himself by using one track to insult Lynne Cheney, the wife of the Vice-President, who has been at the forefront of those excoriating him. "[Expletive] you, Miss Cheney," he spits, "with the freeness of speech this divided states of embarrassment will allow you to have."

The answer, of course, is a shaded one. Eminem - the name comes from the two initials of his name - has had a lifetime of woes already.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, he never met his father and was raised by his mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, partly there and partly in Detroit, where they finally settled when he was 12, moving repeatedly between relatives' homes.

A shy kid, he retreated into comic books and music and dropped out of school early. He was already fascinated by rap music and was working on his own style of rhyming. For money, he did the usual dead-end jobs, including flipping burgers in a shabby restaurant.

With fame and success, his life only went more haywire. First, there has been the protracted falling out with Mathers-Briggs. She filed her lawsuit in September 1999, alleging her son had made defamatory comments about her in interviews, including descriptions of her as "pill-popping" and "lawsuit happy". A line in the number-one hit My Name Is, from the Slim Shady LP, claims "my mom smokes more dope than I do". She eventually won US$25,000 ($53,600) from him.

Still more traumatic has been his relationship with his ex-wife, Kim, with whom he has a daughter, 6-year-old Hailie. Kim was taken in by his mother when she was just 12 and was at first more of a step-sister figure. They finally married in 1999.

But the turmoil between them was evident in the lyrics Eminem wrote. In one of his songs, he ends up killing Kim. After she attempted suicide while he was touring in 2000, the marriage crumbled and they were divorced last year. Hailie spends much of her time with him.

"Divorce was the hardest thing I have ever been through," he told Rolling Stone.

Then there have been all the other tangles with the law. The most serious stemmed from a brawl outside a Detroit bar in June 2000 when he spotted a man kissing Kim. He hit the man over the head with an unloaded gun.

In February last year, Eminem pleaded guilty to two felony charges from the incident, which could have landed him in prison. Last summer, a judge spared him that fate, sentencing him to a year's probation as well as community service.

He dodged similar charges arising from a different incident involving firearms that also blew up in June 2000 between him and a member of another Detroit rap group, the Insane Clown Posse.

With a life thus tortured, it is fair to assume that Eminem has genuine distress inside him. He also, clearly, has talent as a rapper. And thus, he has been an extraordinary gift to the music industry, which could not have dreamed up so marketable a product.

Here was a young man - a white young man - who could freestyle alongside the best African-American rappers and was a natural spokesman for disenfranchised youth, black and white. Eminem was the ideal anti-hero to rant at conservative, conformist, patriotic America.

The music scene needs Eminem, just like it once needed the punk explosion or Alice Cooper. He provides the polarity to a landscape dominated by pre-packaged, squeaky clean candy-bar acts such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and the Back Street Boys. And he resonates because he is simultaneously so ordinary. He raps for the millions of teenagers who feel alienated and are contemptuous of adult society.

But has the bad-boy image been burnished a little along the way to crank up the shock value? Of course it has. Strip away the slurs and the bigotry, erase the tattoos and yelping voice and you glimpse a sweetness in his face. All the evidence suggests that he is a doting father.

"He went from being very positive to absolutely negative," Mathers-Briggs said in a recent interview, claiming that her son had been a shy, sensitive child who had been moulded into something foul by his music managers. "I never dreamed things like that would come out of his mouth."

Among those to spot Eminem first, when he was just 15, was Marky Bass, a Detroit producer, who would later groom him for years and eventually help to produce the Slim Shady LP. Recently he admitted that Eminem was quite a different performer at the outset, indistinguishable from other aspiring rappers. It was Bass and his brother, Jeff, who hit on cloaking the young man in a shock-rap persona.

"His lyrics were a lot tamer when he first started out. We came up with the idea of shock rap. When we went to Interscope, we worked him as the Marilyn Manson of rap."

So, let's say that Eminem's offend-everybody antics are half real, half fake. How long can he maintain it? His personal life, if he is lucky, will calm down, and his stunts will become more transparent. The anti-hero is already embraced by the music establishment. Last year, he won three Grammy Awards. More alarmingly still, Sir Elton John performed his single Stan with him at the awards. Just as much as it alienated some in the gay world from Sir Elton, it brought Eminem further into the mainstream.

The homophobia has been further punctured by the Pet Shop Boys. Their new song, The Night I Fell in Love is about a young male fan going backstage at an Eminem concert and ending up sleeping with him. If we can't take his homophobia seriously, what is there left? Certainly the charges of racism are nuts, given that almost everyone he works with, including his mentor and musical collaborator, Dr Dre, are African-Americans.

You can take Eminem or you can leave him. But for the rest of this year it will be hard to escape him. There is the album and at the end of the year he will cross to celluloid with the feature film 8 Miles, a semi-autobiographical account of his early days in Detroit in the tradition of Prince's Purple Rain, with Kim Basinger as his mother.

And if you don't enjoy him, your offspring will. "Kids in general get where I'm coming from," Eminem tells SonicNet, the music website. "They know when I'm serious and I'm joking."

So if you are still in doubt, ask them.

- INDEPENDENT