The Origins Of The Urban Crisis: Race And Inequality In Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue (Princeton, 1996) was particularly helpful on the history of Detroit; Have Gun Will Travel by Ronin Ro (Quartet, 1998), A Change Is Gonna Come by Craig Werner (Payback, 2000) and Westsiders by William Shaw (Bloomsbury, 2000) were all useful in thinking about hip-hop and Eminem.
Thanks also to Anthony LeQuerica for Detroit hospitality, and Sebastian Krop for Detroit driving, both beyond the call of duty.
And to Sarah Jezzard and Andrea Nettleton, for making my life better.
Infinite (Web Entertainment, 1996)
The Slim Shady LP (Aftermath/Interscope, 1999)
The Marshall Mathers LP (Aftermath/Interscope, 2000)
The Eminem Show (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2002)
Encore (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2004)
Encore Collector’s Edition – includes extra tracks ‘We As Americans’, ‘Love You More’ and ‘Ricky Ticky Toc’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2004)
Curtain Call: The Hits (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2005)
Relapse (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2009)
Relapse: Deluxe Edition – includes extra tracks ‘My Darling’ and ‘Careful What You Wish For’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2009)
Relapse: Refill – includes extra tracks ‘Forever’, ‘Hell Breaks Loose’, ‘Buffalo Bill’, ‘Elevator’, ‘Taking My Ball’, ‘Music Box’, ‘Drop The Bomb On Em’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2009)
Recovery (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2010)
With D12:
Devil’s Night (Shady/Interscope, 2001)
D12 World (Shady/Interscope, 2004)
With various artists:
8 Mile (Shady/Interscope, 2002)
Eminem Presents: The Re-Up (Shady/Interscope, 2006)
As Soul Intent:
‘Fucking Backstabber’/’Biterphobia’ (Mashin’ Duck, cassette only, 1996)
As Bad Meets Evil (with Royce Da 5–9)
‘Nuttin’ To Do’/’Scary Movies’ (Beyond Real, 1998)
As Eminem:
The Slim Shady EP (Web Entertainment, 1998)
‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’/ ‘Brain Damage’ (Aftermath/Interscope, 1998)
‘My Name Is’ (Aftermath/Interscope, 1999)
‘Any Man’ (Rawkus, 1999)
‘Guilty Conscience’ (Aftermath/Interscope, 1999)
‘The Real Slim Shady’ (Aftermath/Interscope, 2000)
‘The Way I Am’/’Bad Influence’ (Aftermath/Interscope, 2000)
‘Stan’ (Aftermath/Interscope, 2000)
‘Without Me’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2002)
‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2002)
‘Lose Yourself’ (Shady/Interscope, 2002)
‘Sing For The Moment’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2003)
‘Business’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2003)
‘Just Lose It’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2004)
‘Like Toy Soldiers’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2005)
‘When I’m Gone’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2005)
‘Crack A Bottle’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2009)
‘We Made You’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2009)
‘3 a.m.’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2009)
‘Beautiful’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2009)
‘Not Afraid’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2010)
‘Love The Way You Lie’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2010)
‘No Love’ (Aftermath/Shady/Interscope, 2010)
With D12:
‘Shit On You’ (Shady/Interscope, 2001)
‘Purple Pills’ (Shady/Interscope, 2001)
‘Fight Music’ (Shady/Interscope, 2001)
‘My Band’ (Shady/Interscope, 2004)
‘How Come’ (Shady/Interscope, 2004)
‘5 Star Generals’ single – Shabaam Sahdeeq (Rawkus, 1998)
‘Green And Gold’ on Green And Gold EP —The Anonymous (Goodvibe, 1998)
‘Trife Thieves’ on Attack Of The Weirdos EP – Bizarre (Federation, 1998)
‘We Shine’ on Episode 1 EP – Da Ruckus (Federation, 1998)
‘Fuck Off’ on Devil Without A Cause LP – Kid Rock (Atlantic, 1998)
‘ThreeSixtyFive’ single – OldWorlDisorder (Beyond Real, 1998)
‘The Anthem’ single – Sway & Tech (Interscope, 1999)
‘Hustlers And Hardcore’ on Behind The Doors Of The 13th Floor LP – Domingo (Roadrunner, 1999)
‘Get You Mad’ on This Or That LP – Sway & Tech (Interscope, 1999)
‘Busa Rhyme’ on Da Real World LP – Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott (EastWest, 1999)
‘The Last Hit’ on Home Field Advantage LP – The High & Mighty (Rawkus, 1999)
‘Watch Dees’ on Heavy Beats Vol. One EP – DJ Spinna (Rawkus, 1999)
‘Macosa’ single – The Outsidaz (Ruffnation, 1999)
‘Forgot About Dre’ (also single) and ‘What’s The Difference’ on 2001 LP – Dr. Dre (Aftermath, 1999)
‘If I Get Locked Up Tonight’ – Funkmaster Flex & Big Kap, with Dr. Dre (Def Jam, 1999)
‘Dead Wrong’ (also single) on Born Again LP – Notorious B.I.G. (Bad Boy, 1999)
‘Rush Ya Clique’ on Night Life EP – Outsidaz (Ruff Life, 2000)
‘Get Back’ on The Piece Maker LP – Tony Touch (Tommy Boy, 2000)
‘Stir Crazy’ on Tell ‘Em Why You Madd LP – Madd Rapper (Columbia, 2000)
‘The One’ – Royce Da 5–9 (Game, 2000)
‘Don’t Approach Me’ on Restless LP – Xzibit (Loud, 2000)
‘Renagade’ (sic) on The Blueprint LP – Jay-Z (Roc-A-Fella, 2001)
‘My Name’ (also single) on Man Vs. Machine LP – Xzibit (Loud, 2002)
‘Rap Superstar’ on Skull & Bones LP – Cypress Hill (Columbia, 2002)
‘Patiently Waiting’ and ‘Don’t Push Me’ on Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ LP – 50 Cent (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope, 2003)
‘Lady’, ‘We All Die One Day’, ‘Hands On You’ and ‘Outro’ on Cheers LP – Obie Trice (Shady/Interscope, 2003)
‘One Day At A Time’ on Tupac: Resurrection LP – Tupac (Amaru/Interscope, 2003)
‘911’ on Koastra Nostra LP – Boo-Ya T.R.I.B.E. (The Oglio Entertainment Company, 2003)
‘Welcome to D-Block’ on Kiss Of Death LP – Jadakiss (Interscope/Ruff Ryders, 2004)
‘Warrior Part 2’ on The Hunger For More LP – Lloyd Banks (G-Unit/Interscope, 2004)
‘Soldier Like Me’ and ‘Black Cotton’ on Loyal To The Game LP – 2Pac (Amaru/Interscope, 2004)
‘We Ain’t’ on The Documentary LP – The Game (Aftermath/G-Unit/Interscope, 2005)
‘Lean Back (Remix)’ on All Or Nothing LP – Fat Joe (Atlantic, 2005)
‘Hip Hop’ on Hannicap Circus LP – Bizarre (Sanctuary/SonyBMG, 2005)
‘Drama Setter’ on Thoughts Of A Predicate Felon LP – Tony Yayo (G-Unit/Interscope, 2005)
‘Pimplikeness’ (with D12) on Searching For Jerry Garcia LP – Proof (Iron Fist, 2005)
‘Gatman And Robbin’ on The Massacre LP – 50 Cent (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope, 2005)
‘Off To Tijuana’ on Bulletproof LP – Hush (Geffen, 2005)
‘It Has Been Said’ on Duets: The Final Chapter LP – The Notorious B.I.G. (Bad Boy, 2005)
‘Welcome 2 Detroit’ (also single) and ‘No More To Say’ on The People vs. LP –Trick-Trick (Motown, 2005)
‘There They Go’ on Second Round’s On Me LP – Obie Trice (Shady/Interscope, 2006)
‘Smack That’ (also single) on Konvicted LP – Akon (Konvict/Up Front/SRC/Universal Motown, 2006)
‘Pistol Poppin” on The County Hound EP – Cashis (Shady/Interscope, 2007)
‘Touchdown’ on T.I. vs. T.I.P. LP – T.I. (Grand Hustle/Atlantic, 2007)
‘Peep Show’ on Curtis LP – 50 Cent (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope, 2007)
‘Who Want It’ on The Villain LP – Trick-Trick (Time Entertainment/Koch, 2008)
‘Chemical Warfare’ on Chemical Warfare LP – The Alchemist (ALC/E1, 2009)
‘Psycho’ on Before I Self-Destruct LP – 50 Cent (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope, 2009)
‘Drop The World’ on Rebirth LP – Lil Wayne (Universal Motown/Cash Money, 2010)
‘Airplanes, Part II’ on B.o.B. Presents: The Adventures of Bobby Ray LP – B.o.B. (Grand Hustle/Atlantic, 2010)
‘Love The Way You Lie, Part II’ on Loud LP – Rihanna (Def Jam, 2010)
‘Celebrity’ and ‘Where I’m At’ on The Hunger For More 2 LP – Lloyd Banks (G-Unit/EMI, 2010)
‘Roman’s Revenge’ on Pink Friday LP – Nicki Minaj (Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Motown, 2010)
‘Living Proof’ – Royce Da 5–9 (2010)
‘All She Wrote’ on No Mercy LP – T.I. (Grand Hustle/Atlantic, 2010)
‘Any Man’ on Rawkus Presents Soundbombing 2 (Rawkus, 1999)
‘Bad Guys Always Die’ with Dr. Dre, on Wild Wild West soundtrack (Interscope, 1999)
‘Murder (Remix)’ on Next Friday soundtrack (Priority, 1999)
‘Off The Wall’ featuring D12, on The Nutty Professor 2 soundtrack (Universal/Def Jam, 2000)
‘Forever’ (also single, with Drake, Kanye West, Lil Wayne) on Music Inspired by More Than A Game soundtrack (Zone 4/Interscope, 2009)
Up In Smoke – tour documentary (Universal, 2000)
Eminem – video compilation, ‘Just Don’t Give A Fuck’ to ‘Stan’ (Universal, 2001)
The Slim Shady Show – cartoon (Universal, 2001)
All Access Europe – tour documentary (Universal, 2002)
Eminem Presents: The Anger Management Tour – tour documentary (Interscope, 2005)
Live From New York City 2005 – tour documentary (Eagle Rock, 2007)
The Wash (dir. DJ Pooh, 2001)
8 Mile (dir. Curtis Hanson, 2002)
Entourage, Series 7 finale – as himself (2010)
FLASHBACK. In Detroit, you can never go back far enough. People who talk glibly of the Death of the American Dream do so only because they’ve never been to this place, and seen the corroded, crudely hacked up corpse of a century of false hopes for themselves. Read the history books before you arrive, and you realise the city in which Eminem had to make his way is the end of every kind of American line.
Its rise was swift and promising enough. At the 19th century’s start, it was little more than a break in the Midwestern wilderness, a settlement known only to trappers from the French Canada it nearly touched. “De troit” was French for the straits, the narrow riverway down which they rowed, as they slipped between nations. But by 1805, the state of Michigan’s first governor, Judge Augustus Woodward, was already planning to transform it into “the Paris of the West”, a perfect new city of rationally designed parks and boulevards. This was the first dream Detroit dashed.
Still, in 1825, when the Erie Canal linked Canada’s Great Lakes to New York, it was chosen as the staging post for the settlement of America’s Northwest. In 1884, a railroad linking Detroit and Chicago added to its importance in the growing nation; although typically, this was one of the last such routes to be built. By the 20th century’s dawn, its downtown district was bustling and thriving in the style of grand American cities like New York, factories, bars, civic buildings and homes clustering together. But Detroit’s would be the last such urban area to be attempted in America, as a new, suburban life beckoned; and it would suffer the most sickening decline.
Such a fall would have seemed unimaginable when Henry Ford, born in nearby Dearborn, watched the millionth Model T roll from his factory in 1915, in a Detroit he had turned into the boomtown centre for the automobile industry he had started and ruled. His high factory wages sucked in families from as far as Palestine, Eastern Europe and the American Deep South. They rioted outside his gates in the clamour for those jobs, and by 1921 Detroit’s population had quadrupled, to a million. War work in the Forties brought a fresh surge, many of them Southern blacks, seeking opportunities away from their oppressive homes. Detroit was named “the arsenal of democracy” then, or simply Motor Town. It had the highest-paid blue-collar workers in America, its factories spread for miles, their machines turned incessantly, growth seemed the city’s permanent condition. But the segregated, devastated wasteland called “Amityville” by Eminem, or simply Shitville, was already being built, behind that veneer.
The segregation of its black and white citizens now defines Detroit as much as the Model T did. It was in the boom decade of the Forties that this time-bomb was set, as the city’s black population doubled, but the streets they were allowed to live in barely moved. Real estate covenants forbidding black occupation, white hostility and government collusion kept them hemmed into decaying districts like downtown’s Lower East Side, otherwise known as “rat alley”, for the rodent bites its cramped residents suffered, in homes absentee white landlords let fall apart as rents rocketed, in a ghetto stuffed to bursting point. Family life was strained, residents became transient, crime and squalor rose. Whites had their preconceptions confirmed. So when, in the Forties, the auto industry Detroit had birthed began to abandon its factories, following capitalism’s logic into cheaper suburban sites, white citizens fled with it. As civil rights legislation also challenged racial covenants in the city, whites entered new suburbs, which spread almost endlessly into barren hinterland. Past Detroit’s northern city limit, the long highway 8 Mile Road, these townships were not physically separate from Detroit. But legally, their vast grids of new bungalows, carved into “city” limits and school catchment borders, could not be penetrated. Protected by subtler real estate racism, and neighbourhood associations who harassed and attacked black “invaders”, as they had previously in the city, these new suburbs became a white world.
South of 8 Mile, an ordinary road as uncrossable as the Berlin Wall, blacks were abandoned, living among the cadavers of the factories that had tempted them from Dixie. Tax dollars had left for the suburbs too. In the black world of downtown Detroit, jobs, money and hope disappeared daily. And in 1967, this place of invisible apartheid became a site of race war, a vision of where such iniquity could lead.
There had been one race battle already, back in the boom year of 1943, a little after Life had realised: “Detroit is dynamite: it can either blow up Hitler or blow up the US.” 34 had died then, 25 of them black, in a 3-day battle finished by federal troops. That lit the fuse. And the 1967 eruption, in a decade of race riots, was the most vicious in America since the Civil War. In other cities in the Sixties, there had been order in the destruction, a concentration on white-owned businesses, a statement being made in the flames. Detroit was already too far gone. Sparked by a police raid on an after-hours drinking joint one hot July night, black rioters torched indiscriminately. A Vietnam general and nearly 5,000 paratroops were needed to pacify the city. In five days, 43 people were killed, 30 by law officers. There were 7,231 arrests. 2,509 buildings were looted or razed. Vacant lots from those days still pock Detroit. “It looks like Berlin in 1945,” Mayor Jerome Cavanagh said, looking at his smashed city. “America’s first Third World city,” it was also dubbed.
That was five years before Eminem was born. The riot’s ash hasn’t yet been buried. In 1967, a third of Detroit’s citizens were black. Now 80 per cent are. The quality of life in the metropolitan area that includes its suburbs is quite high. But in Detroit itself, it’s as if some organic, irreversible decay has set in. Since 1950, its population has shrunk by a million. Over 10,000 houses and 60,000 lots stand empty. A third of its citizens are beneath the poverty line. Many live in zones of hardcore unemployment, prospectless. In the Seventies and Eighties, when the race lines of other American cities blurred, Detroit’s hardened. It was de-industrialised, dead-beat. 8 Mile Road was the scar that showed its character.
There was a better history Eminem was heir to, a musical heritage of exceptional richness. In the early Sixties, black Detroiters Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson had founded Motown (a contraction of Motor Town), and quickly gathered other local talent including Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Supremes, Martha Reeves, and The Four Tops to the label. From Gordy’s modest home, with the wooden sign “HITSVILLE U.S.A.” on its roof, a hit factory was built to specifications as tight as Henry Ford’s. An Artist Development Department groomed raw teenage talent, while house musicians The Funk Brothers and house writer-producers including Robinson and Holland, Dozier & Holland maintained immaculate standards on smashes from ‘Stop ! In the Name of Love’ to ‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’. Sent on a dangerous tour of the apartheid South in 1962, Gordy warned his stars they were representing “all of Detroit”. And, according to Gordy’s own accommodating beliefs, these records made in his seething, schismed city spent much of the Sixties integrating the pop charts with visions of yearning uplift, till they had fulfilled his boast to be “the Sound of Young America”.
Detroiters’ more complex, harsh reactions to the music, though, were proven when Martha & The Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In The Street’ became a rallying cry for thousands in the 1967 inferno. The label’s departure for LA in 1972 signalled the closure of another reason for hope in the city.
The more brutal realities of Detroit in the Sixties were translated into not only later Motown records like Gaye’s What’s Going On, but the grinding proto-punk garage rock of the MC5 and Iggy Pop’s Stooges. Pop said his sound was partly a product of the pounding noise of the city’s remaining auto factories, and garage rock continues to thrive in Detroit, oblivious to fashion, in bands like The White Stripes and Von Bondies.
Equally pivotal was the early Eighties creation of Techno, by three young middle-class blacks, Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunder-son, living in rural Belleville, 30 miles from the city. Representative of the obscure fact that, as Atkins told Simon Reynolds, depressed Detroit is “[also] the city that has the most affluent blacks in the country”, they made a kind of post-industrial, art-dance music, from influences including Kraftwerk and George Clinton. On tracks like May’s ‘Strings Of Life’ they made sounds of eerie, funky electronic beauty, the first to directly respond to the cavernous, closed factories that now littered Detroit, where they were only marginally liked.
As a major inspiration for the European rave scene which eventually popularised Es among Eminem’s set, May’s influence on the rapper can faintly be traced. The decline from popular music of aspiration to cultish music of devastation, though, shows more clearly where Eminem entered Detroit’s lineage.
In music, industry and politics, he lived in a place whose glory days had nearly gone. In a nation which by the Nineties was ruled by hip-hop, from East or West coasts, he rapped in the middle of nowhere. He was like the working-class men still scrabbling for auto jobs in the city. He lived in the home of Hitsville. But the Hit Factory had closed its gates.
Take a journey around Detroit today, though, and you’ll find new landmarks, staging posts in Eminem’s own story. Like his music, they’re inseparable from the fallen, fractured state of the city itself.
Midtown is as good a place as any to start. Walk through Wayne State University’s campus, towards the grand industrial skyline which was once the city’s heart, and you drop into an alien landscape, composed of all the things Detroit has lost. You can walk for 15 minutes, and not see another soul. It’s like touring Pompeii, soon after the volcano. The sense of some natural disaster is imprinted on every empty building. Rows of roughly cemented windows look like wet mould. The paint on every wall of what were once factories is peeling. It’s as if these streets have been dredged from underwater. Asbestos is left open to the air, hundreds of windows are simply smashed. One vast building’s roof is ripped off, and inside it seems a crashed plane of junk has landed nose-first, ploughing through its floors, filling it to the brim. The wind moves the debris, as if it’s alive. Nearby are great empty parking lots, long deserted alleys, wild grass patches. This nearly silent wreckage is peaceful and calming to a visitor. Only when bored youths appear in the distance do you remember people were meant to live and work here, and that Detroit is dangerous at night now, because they can’t.
Turn right along the old city limit, Grand Boulevard, and you’ve entered the Lower East Side, still the ghetto’s rotted core. There are charred frames of houses turned to ash here, cracked roofs, large muddy lots. Destroyed things aren’t replaced down here, just left as gaps and ghosts. Eminem lived here for a while, with Kim and Hailie. But not long enough to make you stop. To get where you’re headed next, you could speed up Gratiot, the freeway that splits this old neighbourhood. You’d move fast and see nothing, the way most whites from the suburbs like it; it would help explain how this place has gotten so isolated. But Eminem had no car, growing up. And going slower, a different way, will keep you to his path.
So keep going, straight across Grand Boulevard. Before long, you’ll be on 8 Mile Road. Eminem has talked about it so often in interviews, naming it “the racial borderline”, even calling his film 8 Mile, so large does it loom in his mind, that you expect a simmering ghetto cauldron. It is certainly Detroit’s central fact, the end result of its racial history, the track Eminem boldly crossed onto the wrong side of, to make “black” rap music. But walk as far as you like along it, as it runs the length of Detroit’s northern edge, and its potency is invisible. It looks like just another American highway. It is lined with auto repair shops, warehouses, cheap motels. It is only when you choose a side of it that 8 Mile’s mystery is unlocked, and you truly start to step in Eminem’s shoes.
Turn right, back down into Detroit, towards 7 Mile (you can count a lot with numbers in this place; they go up to 19 Mile, and down into hell). Depending which junction you choose, you might not be sure on which side of Eminem’s border you’ve fallen at first. Walk one way, and you could be in a leafy English suburb, with mock-Tudor stone houses, substantial with wealth. Except every person you see is black. This is Bagley, one of Detroit’s oldest black middle-class districts. Keep going along 7 Mile and the ghetto soon appears. There are more broken-windowed factories, burned houses, scrubland. There are outposts of life, too: schools, churches, recording studios. Every face you see is black again. In Detroit, skin separates you.
Eminem lived here on 7 Mile, for a while. The Hip-Hop Shop where he honed his rapping skills was there (it’s now moved), so were his black friends in D12. And, as a teenager, he lived with his mother just south enough of 8 Mile, in a small, two-storey home, one of three white families on his block, behind the sprawling, ugly Bel-Air mall. And it was outside this mall that black teenagers stripped him to his underwear and jammed a pistol to his head, because he was white, before a passing, armed white trucker saved his life.
“If they grew up in Detroit, in the city,” Eminem complained to City Detroit magazine of his critics, when he first tasted fame, “they would know what the fuck is going on. They would know why I feel the way I do, and why I say the things I do. When you’re white and in hip-hop, everybody wants to know your background. You have to come from the ‘hood. And I don’t see the point in it. But it’s like, okay; if everybody in the world wants to know where I came from, then this is where I came from. And I’m gonna show you.”
The day before, he had done just that, taking MTV to his old home behind the mall. But he was being too defensive, back then. And he was only telling half the story. He was never just some white foundling, abandoned in a black world. The boy who as a national star would give himself new names and identities at will understood Detroit’s dangerously split personality from both sides. Step off 8 Mile the other way, into the white suburbs, and you’re still walking in his world.
You’ve left Detroit altogether now, according to the statutes barring its borders. You’re now in the city of Warren. Like 8 Mile, it is a place hardly anyone would have heard of, if Eminem hadn’t left it.
It is a sprawling grid of small, one-storey frame houses, replicas of the crumbling East Side it was built to replace, in the decade of the suburban dream, the Fifties. In the years afterwards, smashed windows, arson and violent threats greeted black Detroiters who tried to join whites’ flight to it. Eminem’s grandmother, Betty Kresin, lived in a trailer park here, and Eminem spent much of his youth there too. He has called this place “the white trash capital of the world”. Not for the last time, he exaggerated for effect. Walk through Warren to the school where he spent the most years, Lincoln Junior High, and the white ghetto you expect from his interviews is hard to find.
It has the feel of a quiet English coastal town, off-season. It certainly isn’t the home of people made wealthy by whiteness. It is just where Detroit’s white working class retreated to, as their own futures shrank. The strolling teenagers of 7 Mile, or the cramped bustle of the Lower East Side, are absent. Adults drive to and from here in their cars, some to factory jobs, still. More kids stick in school. American flags flutter in yards. Neighbourhood Watch signs are prominent. The few, white faces you can see are working on their small gardens. Their subtly, determinedly different wood houses are often chipped, as on 8 Mile’s other side. Some toys are left in the street, slovenly, but safe. There are wide mud alleys between the backs of some streets. The impression is of a place just keeping itself above the flood-line. “White trash” is too harsh.
Lincoln Junior High is on the corner of one of the wider avenues. A Drive-Thru Pizza place, a Rustproofing shop and a fire station are the nearby landmarks. “Thoughts and Prayers are with the Rescuers and Victims”, says a post-9/11 sign in this peaceful-looking, loyal American backwater. A white boy is crossing the school’s large parking lot suspiciously early in the day, with a rapper’s low jeans and lope.
Eminem was here from 1986 to 1989, when, at 14, he quit education, to rap. It is the only school where he stayed long enough to make friends. When his nomadic mother moved again to Detroit, he walked two miles back every day, so he could keep them. So this is as close as you will ever get to picturing his school days.
Those were over a decade ago, of course. But the long corridors, metal lockers, and din of fractious, spirited adolescents can’t have changed much. Only a small, significant number of black faces, and a few more white boys with a hopeful hint of hip-hop style suggest time’s passing. Principal Paul Young has been here three decades. In Eminem’s time, he was an English teacher. His take on Warren differs from his ex-pupil’s.
“It’s very much a blue-collar neighbourhood, of hard-working, honest people,” he says in his office. “It has areas that are very poor, and areas that are relatively well-off. Quite a few families moved here from the South, to work in the auto industry. To some extent, it’s been hit by that industry’s decline. And it’s an older neighbourhood. Some of the folks who have retired from the industry have moved further north. The area’s become somewhat more transient. When homes go up for sale, in many cases, they’re turned into rentals. As a result, the population’s become more fluid, and lost some of the sense of community it used to have. But it’s always supported the schools.”
His view of 8 Mile, a short walk from his school gates, is sanguine too. “At one time, there were some racial issues here,” he admits. “But I think that 8 Mile symbolism is less true today than it might have been when Eminem was a youngster. I think one of the reasons is that many of the whites who moved in to Warren from the South have retired and moved on. It’s now their kids that are here, and they’re more culturally aware, and more tolerant of diversity. Our school’s much more diverse than it was even 10 years ago, when he was here.”
Eminem’s own life suggests how much Detroit’s racial divide has frayed along the edge of 8 Mile, in recent years. But think of the unbroken black faces less than a mile to the south of Lincoln, and the small number of black children in its classrooms, and the gap remains stark. Walk down these corridors with Paul Young, and white and black children look up at you suspiciously, wary of a stranger.
Peer into the lunchroom where Eminem used to eat, and you start to see the child he once was. The food is cheap, ladled out in a small serving room by what in Britain would be dinner ladies. Boys and girls sit at small round tables eating quietly. One boy is dressed as a military cadet. Another has pink punk hair. But no one still here has such distinct pictures in their mind of Eminem.
“When he was here, he was Marshall Mathers,” Young says. “I wasn’t even aware of him then. Because I didn’t have him in any classes. And his attendance wasn’t very good. Certainly he’s a very popular person now. I’ve had film crews and newspaper reporters turn up here, wanting to walk in and talk to the children. He was only here three semesters. When he left, I don’t know where he went. I checked once with our counselling office, and there was no record of any other school asking for his transcripts. I heard at one time that he might have gone to an adult education programme someplace. But he was not a graduate. He only got to ninth grade.
“There are one or two teachers still here who had him in classes. But he was nothing out of the ordinary. It’s not like he was suspended a lot, or had a lot of fights. He was a pretty okay kid when he was in school.
I looked through his records, and I don’t see anything like he was expelled, or suspended. Not good attendance. Not good grades. But he stayed pretty much to himself. He was here. He wasn’t any trouble. He was kind of nondescript. He didn’t make a big mark.”
When Eminem remembers Lincoln in interviews, it’s usually to rage at an unnamed teacher who told him he’d never amount to anything. With an irony he must see as sweet vengeance, he’s now recalled in its corridors only for being the success he is today.
“I’m interested in the fact that he’s made a name for himself,” Young says. “The coolest thing is that when I tell kids, ‘Marshall Mathers went to Lincoln High School,’ they go, ‘Oh, that’s neat.’”
There is one more thing to see here, on the way out. Open a thick, heavy door, and you’re in a darkened auditorium. There is a plain wood, half-moon-shaped stage area, flush with the rows of seats looking at it from the shadows. Eminem performed in a talent show here once, the first time this shy, nondescript boy pushed himself forward in public. He didn’t win, of course. His talent hadn’t yet been found.
There is another school out here in the suburbs that figures importantly in his story. To reach it, you now have to bear north-east, till you’ve left Warren, and risen above 10 Mile, into the township of Roseville. The neat rows of identical, two-storey clapboard houses announce you’re in a slightly better neighbourhood now. And Dort Elementary School, a small, low building, looks an inviting place to start your education. But 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 weeks, De Angelo Bailey, that his brain haemorrhaged, and he fell into a coma for five days. The song ‘Brain Damage’ on The Slim Shady LP recounts the attack. Its central impact on his life, and mind, can only be guessed at. It happened during playtime, on a schoolday, according to interview accounts. But here, even more than at Lincoln, Eminem’s passing seems to have left no trace.
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.”
If Eminem, in his wandering childhood, did ever alight at Dort for more than one vicious, weekend hour, seeing it now, he could not have been luckier. All the facilities that might have helped him are on hand, from a music room to experts to help pupils “who need extra reinforcement”. The children look happy and involved in their work. This is as far from the ghetto, or any suburban hell, as you can get. It is also far from the rundown trailer park where Eminem spent much of his time this side of 8 Mile. But as Yee talks, you begin to wonder if all the bad things that scarred him can be the fault of the places he was raised.
“Roseville is a blue-collar community, of hard-working parents, who really do want the best for their children,” she says, echoing Lincoln’s principal. “For me, it’s a good community.”
When you reach the playground itself, the place where Eminem’s brain was jarred and his body shut down when he was just a boy, the violence is easier to picture. A plain stretch of concrete ground in the open air, empty of children now, only playthings at one end break up its hard surface.
“Yes, I can’t imagine,” Yee says, looking out. “The playground is pretty much the way it was, except we’ve added equipment – swings, and monkey bars. They weren’t there, way back when he was pushed.”
Walking away from this brutal landmark, Yee runs into an ex-pupil she recalls better than any place of education seems to remember Eminem. The teenager happily recites a motto she learned in her Dort days: “If my mind can conceive it, and in my heart I believe it, with hard work I will achieve it.” “We do it every day, after our Pledge of Allegiance,” Yee explains. You wonder if, in an uprooted life which could have moved him through Dort too swiftly for any record, Eminem was taught such an all-American promise, to battle in his head with the sneering dismissal of that high school teacher, as he forged his utterly American path to self-creation and success. But all anyone knows for sure about what happened to him here is the sudden, spilled blood he left on its concrete, and how close he came to being a corpse.
Bear south-east now, for one last stop. You are leaving Roseville, for St. Clair Shores, close to the wealthy white enclave of Grosse Point, and to Lake St. Clair, where the Detroit River rolls. You’re leaving Eminem’s schooldays, too, and looking for an adult milestone: Gilbert’s Lodge, the restaurant where he worked between 1996 and 1998, right up until worldwide fame seemed to snatch him from everything he had known before.
You head down Harper, a bit beneath 9 Mile. Shady Lane stands opportunely to the right. The future Real Slim would have seen it every day. Walk across Gilbert’s Lodge’s gravel car park, and cement bear-prints lead you into a mock-hunting cabin. Stuffed pheasant, bear, sturgeon and snow-shoes are mounted on the walls. There’s a long bar, and TVs showing sport. Groups of working-class families and friends sit eating and laughing in shadowed corner booths. “BUY AMERICAN. EAT HERE”, says a sign. The food is straight domestic, burgers and meatloaf. This is the place the unknown Eminem worked the most, out of sight behind that bar, as a short-order cook. A waitress comes to take your order. Her name is Jennifer Yezvack. And at last the trail you’ve followed, which has seemed so faint, glows white-hot. As she speaks, it is as if Eminem has only just left the room.
“He’s here in Detroit right now. I just talked to him,” she says. “When he’s doing something downtown he comes in here, Friday and Saturday nights. Then it gets too crazy, and he has to leave. He’s loyal to Detroit. He still goes to all the bars downtown – Lush, Pure, all the different clubs, he hangs out at Marilyn’s, on Monroe. He has to call ahead so that everybody can be taken care of. But he still hangs out.”
Newspaper reports say, though, that Eminem now has to live far from downtown, and from Warren, in some plush outpost of the wealthy. But as Yezvack recalls the reasons, zigzagging casually through intimate details of his life, you know that his roots here, at least, are still strong.
“Yeah, there were a lot of problems in his last house,” she says. “It was on a main road, people could just come into the backyard. People were looking in the windows, stealing stuff from the house, from the mailbox, from the lawn. So he lives in a gated community now. His main goal is living a normal life, with his daughter, and that is the honest to God’s truth. His daughter is everything to him, and he wants her life to be as normal as it can. She knows who her father is, though. Hailie knows Daddy can’t go to the movies like any Joe Dad would. Even though he does – he’s put a baseball cap on and gone to the movies with her. I’m like, ‘You’re crazy !’ But he just sneaks right in, and sneaks right out. But she’s in school now, and the other kids at school know who she is. It’s hard, just too hard. People are too starstruck. Everybody’s just flabbergasted that someone made it in this area, that they can approach. So they do.”
What was he like when he worked here, when he was just Marshall Mathers, you wonder. Yezvack talks on freely, with no apparent fear that Detroit’s most powerful son will swoop down on her and exact a paranoid vengeance. In this place, even now, it seems Eminem can feel trust for old friends.
“I know him, and he hasn’t changed to me at all,” she says. “He’s a very nice guy. He’s not how he comes across in public. He was very quiet when he was here. I mean, he was always a smartass, sarcastic, but only every now and again. He was never mean or harmful to anyone, although him and I used to argue all the time, and he was quick, very quick with his responses. When he was here, he had no enemies. He just did his own thing. He was very into his music, always. Not even girls, really. Kim he was with, but he was never into drinking, never did drugs, nothing like that. He would bring a change of clothes into work, and from the minute he was finished, he would change in the break room in the evening and go round one of his friends’ houses to rap. We knew he was going to do it. We were all happy for him. He kept saying it forever, when he was here – ‘All I wanna do is rap.’ He was always involved downtown. He’d go to open mics, all that stuff. I’ve been through a lot with him, over the years. We dated, on and off. He’s a good guy. It’s all a show, in a sense. We’re talking about Marshall,” she says casually, to a manager.
You digest the inadvertent gossip, that Yezvack was probably seeing Eminem at the same time as his fractious, notorious relationship with Kim, his now ex-wife, mother of his child, and brutalised subject of his songs. And a moment later, you’re brought one last step towards your quarry.
“Who was here,” Yezvack politely asks, “so I can tell him?”
You tell her your name, knowing this is the closest your life will brush his. You ask if you could speak to him like she does, anyway.
“No,” she smiles, “he doesn’t even like it when I talk this much.”
So you say goodbye, and you leave Detroit, and you go back home, and start to think about the things you’ve seen and heard. You can see what Eminem loves about his fallen, forgotten city. It’s a place that educates you in how race and money work in America, every day you walk its streets. It’s a place so hard, it leaves no room for the illusions peddled on his country’s coasts. It’s one reason he makes the music he does. Of course, Eminem is not just the city he’s from. He’s the things he’s done, too, and the people he was with. So you go back again, to the day he was born.
Everything about Eminem’s early life is unstable. Details of homes, relations, schools, jobs, all shimmer and fluctuate from one reminiscence to the next, as if nothing stayed still long enough to be sure of, and no one cared enough to take notes. Even his date of birth was a matter of conjecture till recently, the rapper seemingly pushing it forward two years in interviews, apparently wanting to be even more of a prodigy than he was. After the date was challenged by his mother last year, new publicity quietly started to admit he was born on October 17, 1972. Immediately, all the other “facts” and dates assumed about him pre-fame lock into a different, more believable shape. But still, many things have stayed in flux, maybe for good. You can even take your pick of names. But in the years before the world got to know him, he was always Marshall Mathers.
His mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, was the one constant factor in all that time, the itch he would scratch with escalating, obsessive violence on his subsequent records. She was just Debbie Briggs, a 15-year-old girl, when she met the 21-year-old Marshall Bruce Mathers, Jnr. in 1970. Her family was of Scandinavian origin, and scattered across Missouri and Michigan, his father’s family was from Wales, and he was from Dakota. They played together for a while in a band called Daddy Warbucks, touring Ramada Inns along the Dakota-Montana border. “My mother used to listen to Jimi Hendrix and shit like that,” their son would recall to FHM. “She was like a little flower child growing up in the Sixties. A little hippie.” His tone had a rare touch of affection, in an interview characteristically hostile to her, as he recognised her own rebellious streak. His grandmother, Betty Kresin, remembered the wilful and passionate way her daughter forced the under-age marriage with Marshall Jnr. into being. When Kresin first refused to give special permission, she told The Source, “She threatened me about six months later. ‘Okay, if you won’t let me get married and go to school, I’ll get pregnant and get married.’” It was a typically teenage impulsive ultimatum, in the heat of first love, and at a time when teenage Americans were resisting parents and following sexual desires as never before. Kresin backed down, and in 1972, Debbie and Marshall, Jnr. were married. They lived for a year in his parents’ basement in North Dakota. And before that year’s end, in Kansas City, Missouri, Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born.
The earliest picture to be made public gives little hint of the conflicts that were to follow. Debbie, now 17 and renamed Mathers-Briggs, is a skinny-armed, T-shirted girl with long, dark, centre-parted hair, her legs folded in a near-lotus position, her mouth in a happy, hopeful grin for the camera. She is holding up baby Marshall, in red, knee-length dungarees. He is looking distractedly at something away from the camera, with big-eyed seriousness. “He always seemed like he was hungry. And always happy,” Kresin told The Source. “And you know most babies are screaming; he wasn’t. He was looking around at the world and very happy, it looked like, to be here. I mean, those big blue eyes. He was such a beautiful grandson from the beginning.” The charismatic blue eyes would stay. And the essentially accepting, contemplative mood Kresin noticed would remain his natural state, whenever stress or public attention were removed. It was the things that happened to him over the next 25 years that mixed that docile intelligence with the violent, vengeful rage which turned Marshall into Eminem.
The first blow came as a consequence of his parents’ immature love. “We married so young, it was ridiculous,” Marshall Jnr. admitted to the News Of The World in a self-serving interview years later, “but I was delighted when your mum became pregnant.” Still, passion was quickly spent, and, moving to their own apartment, the young parents soon tired of each other. 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 round 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 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 Kresin recalls his childish efforts to communicate with him, anyway. “Marshall used to colour 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 colouring. 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 programme. “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” – partially clearing one mystery. “When you see my Dad, tell him I slit his throat in this dream I had,” Marshall declared himself in ‘My Name Is’, the single that announced him as Eminem to the world. But his father was never seriously mentioned again in his work. And 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 is helplessness and compensatory aggressive anger, a sense of loss and lack of self-esteem. Marshall would exhibit all these traits as he grew up, a typical child, in this way, of his times. Most of all, though, what his father left behind was a hole in his head, which could not be filled. 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. The consequence-blind teenage gamble she had taken with her life, by marrying his father and having him, had already failed. 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 print. But even his father admitted that, in the time he knew Mathers-Briggs, “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 SundayTonight