Read Online The Dark Story of Eminem by Nick Hasted - Free Book Online
Authors: Nick Hasted
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petty criminal in a city with nothing for the young, rap had shown him a route out.
The records he heard as he moved through his teens replaced the education he’d abandoned at Lincoln. LA’s N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude) and Miami’s 2 Live Crew were among his favourites in the late Eighties. While the latter specialised in obscene, juvenile, sexist sex songs, without balance or apology – handy training for Eminem’s misogyny – they became best known for police and government attempts to censor them. These culminated in the 1987 arrest of a female shop assistant for selling one of their records, a 1990 Federal court ruling that their single ‘As Nasty As We Wanna Be’ was illegally obscene, and a contrasting jury trial finding 2 Live Crew themselves innocent of obscenity.
N.W.A. meanwhile provided a more skilful and complex lesson in what rap could say, and how easily it could appal figures of power and authority. Guided by ambitious producer Andre Young (aka Dr. Dre), and including main rappers O-Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) and Eric Wright (Easy-E, who also financed the group, initially with money from drug-dealing), N.W.A. pushed rap’s rebel appeal to the limit. On their début album
Straight Outta Compton
(1988), they replaced the more literary, distanced super-pimp persona of original West Coast gangsta-rapper and Marshall inspiration Ice-T with more lurid, exaggerated evocations of LA’s violent street life. Brightened by Dre’s bouncing, Seventies P-Funk sampling beats, they ranged between the poles of their first hit ‘Express Yourself ‘, Cube’s ode to rap’s inspiring of individualism, and the infamous anti-LAPD rebel song ‘Fuck Tha Police’. It was the latter which made the FBI fire off a threat to N.W.A.’s Ruthless Records, and police departments across America loathe them. Though their “gangsta” image was mostly a contrivance, intended to sell records to Compton’s thousands of real Bloods and Crips (whom Dre especially had studiously avoided in real life), the American Establishment easily confused art and reality, and overreacted accordingly.
Eminem would exploit, and suffer from, exactly that vein of lazy thinking. He would also, to his humble amazement, find that Dre, ten years after his teenage hero-worship, wanted to be his producer. Most important of all, perhaps, was N.W.A.’s tapping of an eager white audience for their gritty fantasias of black life, until suburban white kids became gangsta-rap’s main market, and the music’s gunplay and misogyny grew still more cartoonish, to reflect these outsiders’ expectations.
Marshall experienced this shift from a uniquely clear-eyed perspective: as a white boy partly from the suburbs, and partly from black ghetto streets like the ones N.W.A. eulogised. He was hearing a powerful fantasy and his grinding, inescapable reality, all at once. But what he responded to most was simple. In a home, neighbourhood and hormone-addled body that made him feel cramped and trapped, N.W.A. showed him how to scream with rage: fuck tha police, and everything else. Analysing his own audience later, he described the sensation. “My attitude attracts a lot of kids, especially white kids from the suburbs,” he told
NME
. “When someone comes along and goes against the grain and just truly doesn’t give a fuck, they wanna be that person. ‘Cos I know when I was younger and the Beastie Boys came out they seemed like they didn’t give a fuck, and when N.W.A. came out they
really
didn’t give a fuck. The whole attitude attracts people.” The Eminem anthem ‘The Real Slim Shady’ would imagine, and try to inspire, an army of such listeners. But he did so with such feeling because in 1988, aged 15, he was one of them himself, “putting on the sunglasses and looking in the mirror and lip-synching,” as he remembered, “wanting to be Dr. Dre, to be Ice Cube”.
Marshall would follow Dre and Cube out of N.W.A., into their solo
The records he heard as he moved through his teens replaced the education he’d abandoned at Lincoln. LA’s N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude) and Miami’s 2 Live Crew were among his favourites in the late Eighties. While the latter specialised in obscene, juvenile, sexist sex songs, without balance or apology – handy training for Eminem’s misogyny – they became best known for police and government attempts to censor them. These culminated in the 1987 arrest of a female shop assistant for selling one of their records, a 1990 Federal court ruling that their single ‘As Nasty As We Wanna Be’ was illegally obscene, and a contrasting jury trial finding 2 Live Crew themselves innocent of obscenity.
N.W.A. meanwhile provided a more skilful and complex lesson in what rap could say, and how easily it could appal figures of power and authority. Guided by ambitious producer Andre Young (aka Dr. Dre), and including main rappers O-Shea Jackson (Ice Cube) and Eric Wright (Easy-E, who also financed the group, initially with money from drug-dealing), N.W.A. pushed rap’s rebel appeal to the limit. On their début album
Straight Outta Compton
(1988), they replaced the more literary, distanced super-pimp persona of original West Coast gangsta-rapper and Marshall inspiration Ice-T with more lurid, exaggerated evocations of LA’s violent street life. Brightened by Dre’s bouncing, Seventies P-Funk sampling beats, they ranged between the poles of their first hit ‘Express Yourself ‘, Cube’s ode to rap’s inspiring of individualism, and the infamous anti-LAPD rebel song ‘Fuck Tha Police’. It was the latter which made the FBI fire off a threat to N.W.A.’s Ruthless Records, and police departments across America loathe them. Though their “gangsta” image was mostly a contrivance, intended to sell records to Compton’s thousands of real Bloods and Crips (whom Dre especially had studiously avoided in real life), the American Establishment easily confused art and reality, and overreacted accordingly.
Eminem would exploit, and suffer from, exactly that vein of lazy thinking. He would also, to his humble amazement, find that Dre, ten years after his teenage hero-worship, wanted to be his producer. Most important of all, perhaps, was N.W.A.’s tapping of an eager white audience for their gritty fantasias of black life, until suburban white kids became gangsta-rap’s main market, and the music’s gunplay and misogyny grew still more cartoonish, to reflect these outsiders’ expectations.
Marshall experienced this shift from a uniquely clear-eyed perspective: as a white boy partly from the suburbs, and partly from black ghetto streets like the ones N.W.A. eulogised. He was hearing a powerful fantasy and his grinding, inescapable reality, all at once. But what he responded to most was simple. In a home, neighbourhood and hormone-addled body that made him feel cramped and trapped, N.W.A. showed him how to scream with rage: fuck tha police, and everything else. Analysing his own audience later, he described the sensation. “My attitude attracts a lot of kids, especially white kids from the suburbs,” he told
NME
. “When someone comes along and goes against the grain and just truly doesn’t give a fuck, they wanna be that person. ‘Cos I know when I was younger and the Beastie Boys came out they seemed like they didn’t give a fuck, and when N.W.A. came out they
really
didn’t give a fuck. The whole attitude attracts people.” The Eminem anthem ‘The Real Slim Shady’ would imagine, and try to inspire, an army of such listeners. But he did so with such feeling because in 1988, aged 15, he was one of them himself, “putting on the sunglasses and looking in the mirror and lip-synching,” as he remembered, “wanting to be Dr. Dre, to be Ice Cube”.
Marshall would follow Dre and Cube out of N.W.A., into their solo
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