A private star takes off the raps
Here's a frank confession: "I'm only as crazy as people made me," writes rap star Eminem in his new, scathingly honest memoir, "The Way I Am." Indeed, he has a point. His father abandoned him. Two uncles committed suicide. He was beaten by classmates. And at age 14 he moved from a trailer park in Missouri to various homes in Detroit, where he and his mother faced evictions and subsisted on welfare. Is it any wonder that Eminem became one of the angriest rappers of all time?
"I've always had issues with my temper. I used to wave guns in front of people's faces," he writes. "I used to hit people for the dumbest reasons in the world. . . . My brains were scrambled."
Enter hip-hop as the savior. "I don't know how else to put it - this is the only thing that I'm good at," he writes, noting that composing rhyme schemes "forced me to get off my [rear] and shout [expletive] at people."
Eminem (born Marshall Mathers III) shouted so well that he has since won nine Grammy Awards. There remains a fascination with his back story - and he shares it liberally here (part of the book came from interviews with journalist Sacha Jenkins), except for talking about his ex-wife, Kim, the subject of much vitriol in his music. They have a daughter, Hailie, who has clearly softened Eminem's harder edges. He devotes good chunks of this snappy, street-vernacular-filled memoir to his efforts as a father. "Eminem - concerned and involved parent," he notes. "Not what you'd expect, huh?"
No, probably not, but millions of record sales later (with a palatial Detroit house to show for it), Eminem emerges as a maturing figure despite the volatility of his past. There are still F-bombs and other swear words throughout the book, but he makes an attempt to grow up. He's gone through rehab and anger-management counseling as he's tried to transcend the more vicious side of his personality represented by the alter-ego rap alias of Slim Shady in "The Slim Shady LP," which sold 9 million copies.
This is not a genteel memoir but a compelling look at a gritty, workaholic rapper who first made a name in one-on-one contests against black rappers in Detroit's Hip Hop Shop. "It was the 'White Man Can't Jump' theory. No one thought the white boy would win," he writes.
Eminem's rapper/best friend Proof took him under his wing ("he was my ghetto pass") and trained him in relentless rhyming sessions by picking a word and seeing how many rhymes Eminem could produce for it, or choosing five words and asking him to create rhymes for each of them in under a minute. Eminem became a perfectionist, as revealed by the dozens of lyric sheets that accompany this book (which includes 250 photographs as well as a companion DVD shot by the author). The lyrics are photographed from personal notebooks and hotel stationery in a tiny, manic scrawl. The images can be even more controversial and violent than what finally appeared on the records. Sample lyric: "It's like I just explode, my head is a stovetop."
Eminem is notoriously private (he says he often stays home now to avoid possible conflicts in clubs), so this memoir may be as much as we hear about his inner life for a while. He also addresses the importance of his rehab in 2005 and the impact that Proof's death in a shooting in a Detroit club two years ago had on him. You end up pulling for Eminem, because his past life was so chaotic and impoverished.
He says cryptically on the DVD that "it might seem like my life is balanced now . . . if you only knew!" Perhaps we'll never know what is going on in Eminem's mind, but this memoir helps explain the many obstacles he had to hurdle just to stay alive.
Steve Morse is a freelance writer in Cambridge and can be reached at spmorse@gmail.com. 