Eminem: The Rolling Stone Interview
This story originally appeared in the July 4, 2002 issue of Rolling Stone.
In a lounge chair in the presidential suite of a Detroit hotel, Eminem sits as he always does: leaning back in his chair, his legs wide apart, eyes straight ahead. He’s dressed head to toe in Air Jordan. Sometimes, he suddenly leans forward to emphasize a point, tucking his hand under his chin or gesturing with a pointed finger, the way he does onstage. His eyes and skin are clear; he looks lean and in shape, and he has an odd, almost angelic glow to him, as if he’s been wandering the desert with hip-hop monks. He’s been keeping late hours, but it doesn’t show, maybe due to better eats. (“Damn, they didn’t get me fries with that,” he says, eyeing a room-service tuna melt. “I’m off that no-carb diet.”) He is relaxed, a king in his castle, ready to greet the world after a year of battle.
Since the release of his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, in May 2000, Eminem has seen his celebrity grow into a sun orbited by his own label (Shady Records), his partners in rhyme D12, a planet of fans, a nascent movie career (with the release of 8 Mile this fall) and an asteroid field of cops, lawyers and judges. In August 2000, he filed for divorce from his twisted muse and the love of his life, Kim, whom he had married only a year earlier. They shared eleven years and now share custody of their six-year-old daughter, Hailie Jade.
In June 2000, while he and Kim were still married, Eminem witnessed her kissing another man outside a suburban Detroit bar. After a very short internal debate, Em pistol-whipped the guy and earned himself the first of two felony charges that year — the second came after an altercation involving the ersatz rap group the Insane Clown Posse. The two charges spelled possible jail time for twenty-eight-year-old Marshall Mathers, a gangsta reality he was scared as hell to add to his portfolio. To spice the stew further, Eminem’s vitriolic rhymes made him the constant subject of protests by gay- and women’s-rights groups.
The threat of prison and his current probation woke him up and grew him up right quick. He stopped drinking and downing purple pills and, as always, took his angst to the studio. The Eminem Show is confident, complex, edgy, banging and fresh. “I’m paranoid as fuck about anything of mine sounding like a track I just did or like anything else out there,” Eminem says. “I practically live in the studio, aside from spending time with Hailie. I always feel that I can improve something until I just get sick of it.” Eminem handled most of the production himself, with three tracks coming from his mentor, Dr. Dre. On his own, Em samples Aerosmith’s “Dream On” in “Sing for the Moment,” sings to his daughter in “Hailie’s Song” and attacks American moral hypocrisy throughout. His new songs make this last point better than ever before, because the man making them, more than ever, is aware of who he is and how to manipulate the world watching him.
It will certainly be watching when he makes his big-screen debut in November in 8 Mile, alongside Kim Basinger and Brittany Murphy. The film, produced by Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind), was developed with Eminem in mind, though it is not exactly a biopic. “I was looking to make a movie about hip-hop that, like Saturday Night Fever did, really puts you in that world,” Grazer says. “I randomly saw Eminem on MTV, and in the span of six or seven seconds, he goes from this icy, urban, scary glare to this fluid, self-effacing, kind of fun character. I had to meet him.”
They did meet, but the free-flowing feeling wasn’t quite there at first. “Em and his manager came in, and Em didn’t say a word for about twenty minutes,” Grazer says. “He just stared. I was only getting the icy part. It got really uncomfortable. But then, Em just opened up and told me about his life for over an hour.” They enlisted the talents of Curtis Hanson, director of L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys. “He’s an extraordinarily gifted artist,” Hanson says of Eminem. “If Internet piracy kills the music business, Marshall Mathers need not worry. He’ll have another career.”
Over the course of two days in Detroit, Eminem surveyed his ever-expanding Shady kingdom. He’s more professional now, but he’s equally eager to run off — to his daughter, to his studio, to his home, to anyplace he can be in peace. Or maybe just to the lyric book he still carries with him everywhere, in which he’s always scrawling, usually too small for anyone else to read.
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