8 miles high

Forget that Eminem had both the biggest and fourth biggest-selling albums in the US last year. Forget the 10 million copies of The Eminem Show sold worldwide. Forget that ‘Lose Yourself’ was one of the most blistering singles of the winter and a Billboard chart topper to boot. Forget that Eminem currently sits atop the Irish album charts, exactly two years after hotpress last ran a cover story asking why the guy sells proportionately more records in this country than in any other territory in the world.

Forget all the 8 Mile hype.

Forget the statistics and the spin.

This listener realised Eminem had achieved the ultimate in market penetration when flipping through his 12-year-old niece’s CD collection in Enniscorthy and found, stuck between Shakira and Sugababes, a copy of The Marshall Mathers LP.

That’s when you know someone’s infected the culture.

Even as Marshall Mathers’ first film opens in Irish cinemas, his spirit also informs the competition: Martin Scorsese recently told of how Daniel Day- Lewis worked out each morning while listening to Eminem in order to cultivate the kind of "smiling rage" necessary to transform himself into Bill The Butcher on the set of Gangs Of New York.
So, on the face of it, Eminem can’t get much bigger. By the same token, he’s unlikely to stay this big for much longer. Very few artists have operated at such a pitch for any length of time without turning into some horrible Pop Babylon sideshow like Michael or Mariah, or faking their own motorcycle accident, or compromising, or cashing in, or crapping out in some fashion.

Ambition is a funny thing.

To want it all when you haven’t got it is seen as noble; to still want it when you have it is to start looking like a needy power freak. The smart ones, the U2s and Madonnas, keep their naked megalomania clutched close to their bosoms while employing loyal foot soldiers in the management and marketing corps to strategise and plot and do the grunt work. Other, more guileless operators – Robbie or Ronan – blow it with their tiresome mantras about breaking America, hauling their own egos up that Fitzcarraldo hill. They become slaves to their own various and nefarious lusts, unsure if they’re driving the chariot or the chariot’s driving them, and we, the Roman public, end up hating them for it.

These are interesting times for Eminem. By starring in a motion picture gleaned from the stuff of his life story, he’s crossing into a twilight zone where everybody knows your name but significantly fewer can name your last album.

In a post-Popstars universe you can be number one for Christmas and all washed up by the following fall. Eminem’s already had an amazing innings by anybody’s standards; 8 Mile may just be his point of overkill, or it may provide him with an escape route into a more peripheral role as a writer and producer rather than persona and performer; or it may simply be seen, from the perspective of, say, 2013, as just another chapter in the growth of one of modern pop’s most significant and enduring icons.

Right now, he’s standing on the Rubicon, with the rest of us rubberneckers looking on.

2002 was the year Eminem broke through the fourth wall in terms of artistic, commercial and social impact. As Eamonn McCann pointed out recently in these pages when he proposed Mathers for the mantle of journalist of the year, he was one of the few voices of dissent in a time of cultural cop-out.

9/11 exposed the American media’s willingness to toe the establishment line. We know that, but the artistic community didn’t exactly distinguish itself either. Filmmakers, novelists, poets and pop singers found themselves subject to a new McCarthyism. The best were full of passionate intensity; the worst lacked all conviction and submitted to self-censorship – the worst kind – rather than run the risk of offending their editors. Studios cancelled movies; bands abandoned tours; directors removed the Twin Towers from their NY skylines. The World Trade Centre had been brought down. Now people were pretending it never even existed.

These were scary times for a writer: read the intro to the paperback edition of Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men to see how cowardly the publishing industries got. Visions of Orwell and Bradbury and Phillip K. Dick all came into terrifyingly sharp focus. Author Chuck Palahniuk declared that, post September 2001, the era of the transgressive novel was over.

There were dark whisperings of publishers withdrawing the promise of legal support for authors vulnerable to lawsuits over hypothetical copycat killings or acts of public mischief, and of book companies spiking their more controversial projects and writing off the advances. In this climate, galleys of Fight Club or American Psycho would’ve been fed to the shredder.

The implications were deadly serious: in the realm of fiction, nobody was allowed do anything nasty anymore. Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie and William Burroughs must’ve been doing 78 rpm in their graves at the notion of an America instructed to buy American, act American and think American thoughts, at the behest of the first American president elected by a minority, his kin and cronies allowed to get away with this bloodless coup by an opposition afraid of being seen as stick-in-the-muds over such tiresome details as accurate tallying of the votes.

Eminem was one of the few mainstream pop stars to address this issue, giving a shout out to "The women and men who broke their back for the freedom of speech the United States government has sworn to uphold/Or so we’re told". He took flak from Lynn Cheney for dressing up as Bin Laden in the ‘Without Me’ video, as if we’re all supposed to regard evil with some kind of hushed reverence – as if the very act of laughing at the darkness makes you into some latter day Lord Haw Haw.

In musical terms, Mathers also proved he could go it alone without his mentor Dr. Dre. And, to the collective relief of those who felt Eminem’s homophobia was the last obstacle to their endorsing his talent, he managed to challenge the allegations of verbal queer-bashing with a little help from Elton John on ‘Stan’ at the Grammies.

I was one of those. I’ve no time for PC plodders who go around being professionally offended on behalf of others, nor those who want to rewrite the first amendment when it comes to their own social clique, but still, I was glad he quit ragging on the fags.

Queer folk, especially those of an age where they’d be getting into hip-hop, have enough to deal with without Marshall Mathers providing more ammo for the bullies.

"Faggot, to me, doesn’t necessarily mean gay people," Mathers recently told journalist Sveti Slavik. "Faggot to me just means taking away your manhood. Like, you are a sissy or a coward. Where I come from, Detroit, is [a] rough hood and we don’t talk smooth. And I’m who I am. When I started saying ‘faggot’ on record, I started getting people saying, ‘You have something against gay people’ and I thought it was funny, because I don’t."

It’s a sorry excuse for an excuse of course, Eminem saying he doesn’t have it in for gay or bisexual people, only the weak and the unmanly and the narcissies. Or, he might have added, someone as inoffensive as Moby. His tirade against the latter at last year’s MTV awards was about as pleasant as watching the class wanksta picking on the most innocuous nerd in the yard, the one who doesn’t fit with either the machine shop jocks or the stringy-haired stoners. It left a sour taste.

Nevertheless, the cumulative weight of three 70-minute albums crammed with complex couplets, quality one-liners, chunky beats, thousands of niggling tinker toy overdubs, layers of subliminal melodies, and a seemingly inexhaustible stream (of consciousness) up there with Dylan’s mid-60s trilogy, seemed to sway more than a fair few of the fence-sitters over the last year or two.

By 2001 it seemed like Eminem was into his stride, doing what he was meant to do. The concerts, essentially Punch and Judy with chainsaws, were well enough received, given that DAT-driven hip-hop gigs tend to bore the pants off everybody after an hour. Mathers had managed to graduate without going to jail or OD-ing or blowing his head off. Those We’re All Very Worried About You, Marshall editorials tailed off. He’d gotten props from most of his peers (amusingly enough, his bitterest critic was Vanilla Ice, who took all the white-boys-can’t-rap flak a decade previous, and had precious little talent for armour). Marshall was okay.

Marshall was taking care of business. One source that met Eminem on the D12 tour remarked on how relaxed he seemed compared to the hooded, somewhat paranoid figure that toured the first album. This time out he seemed buffered from a lot of the on-tour pressures by his posse, who for their part were making the most of the attentions of platinum Scandinavian blondes and a specially prepared Detroit diet of barbecue chicken wings and beers.

Everything was cool.

Then what does he go and do?

He decides he wants to act. Sweet Jesus.

Forget the homophobia, the misogyny and misanthropy, the lawyers, guns and money, by far the most hazardous artistic risk Mathers has taken over the course of his career is 8 Mile, his first movie role (barring last year’s cameo in Dre and Snoop’s comedy The Wash).

That people are talking Oscar nominations is probably more a barometer of spin power than the guy’s actual acting talent, but there’s no denying that the kid done good, virtually carrying the whole film on his skinny shoulders, providing the focal point of every scene.

Mind you, some of the most god-awful singers-turned-thesps in history have managed to make impressive movie debuts through sheer beginner’s luck. Jagger coughed up an impressive turn in his Richard III-meets-Keef-meets-the-Kray Twins role in Performance, Bowie made a believable alien (surprise, surprise) in The Man Who Fell To Earth, and Madonna was flirty and shirty in Desperately Seeking Susan. It helped that they were all effectively playing extensions of their onstage personas. But there’s no law against that.

So it goes with 8 Mile, a tailor-made roman a clef based on Eminem’s bread and water days, set in 1995, with Mathers playing the role of trailer park rapper Jimmy ‘Bunny Rabbit’ Smith. The whole project was hatched as a result of Interscope head Jimmy Iovine chewing the fat with film producer Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind; How The Grinch Stole Christmas; Nutty Professor) about the possibilities of a hip-hop remake of one of their favourite pop films like Purple Rain or Saturday Night Fever.

When Grazer saw Eminem at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, apparently he was impressed with the breadth of expression in Mathers’ face, from ice cold to boyishly charming. The two met and discussed Eminem’s upbringing, and Grazer duly commissioned Johns screenwriter Scott Silvers to run up a first draft, while he sounded out directors. Early candidates included Danny Boyle.

The choice of director would prove crucial – there was no way Eminem could afford to make a hip-hop Flashdance first time out. Enter Curtis Hanson, who had already proved his commercial clout with The River Wild and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, as well as earning critical kudos for his adaptations of James Ellroy’s LA Confidential and Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. Moreover, Hanson was a music lover, as attested by his careful scoring of Wonder Boys, for whose theme song ‘Things Have Changed’ Bob Dylan won an Oscar.

On the face of it, the director and his leading man had little in common. Hanson was a 57-year-old veteran of the boardroom jungle; Mathers a hard working but short-fused little rap canat. However, as Hanson was quick to point out, he was used to handling loose cannons like Robert Downey Jr and Russell Crowe. And just as he’d been bewitched by the layers of intrigue and illusion in Ellroy’s city of angels, his director’s eye was also attracted to the grim urban wasteland of Eminem’s native Detroit (which, thanks to Mexican cameraman Rodrigo Pieto, looks absolutely gutted in the finished cut).

At first the two were wary. Hanson didn’t watch any of Eminem’s videos, Eminem declined to check out Hanson’s recommended viewing (which included Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, and East Of Eden, suggesting that the director was already thinking of Jon Voight’s angel-faced naïveté, De Niro’s Johnny Boy drive, and James Dean’s combination of the two).

Eminem lost weight, dyed his hair brown and worked out. Hanson booked six weeks of rehearsal, just for insurance. The rapper found the shoot itself gruelling, "like acting boot camp": besides the 15-hour shooting days he was also scripting the film’s raps and writing the soundtrack. When the film wrapped in January 2002, Eminem swore never again, but by the time 8 Mile premiered to uniformly positive reviews and an opening weekend gross of over $54 million in the US last November, he had changed his mind and was talking about doing more roles in the future.

Which is all very well – but is 8 Mile any good?

It’s nowhere near Hanson’s last two masterpieces, but it is a big-hearted underdog-comes-good movie that brings to mind a rap Rocky, with Detroit deputising for Philadelphia and MC standoffs in place of boxing bouts.

It’s also the first real mainstream picture to treat hip-hop with the respect it deserves. Previous to this, rap movies were either daft skits (Fear Of A Black Hat) or heavy social realist dramas (Juice, Boyz N The Hood). Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog probably came closest to evoking the music’s abstract sense of vision-quest, but until now there were precious few films about the craft.

In emphasising this, Hanson played it smart with 8 Mile on a couple of levels. First off, he recognised the dramatic possibilities in the basic adversarial format of rap competitions. Rhyming battles are hardly new. In black culture, their obvious antecedent is the African tribal ritual of The Dozens, which in turn informed the poetry slams of 80s and 90s New York. But they also carry a Shakespearian gene – the honour-bound duels in Romeo & Juliet (reshot as a gang feud between the Montagues and Capulets in Baz Luhrmann’s bang-on LA update of the fable) were punctuated by brilliantly crafted snatches of dialogue, put-downs, running commentary.

Secondly, by sticking to the skeleton of Eminem’s tale, Hanson and crew had no need to go looking for screenwriting-by-numbers elements like narrative arc, character motivation and backstory. It was all there: a messed up childhood, absent father, disturbed mother, shit jobs, raw talent, the outsider angle, and most important of all, a good-looking, white, heterosexual male lead. In short, Rebel Without A Cause for the suburban homies.

Just look at the footage of B. Rabbit in his hoody and woolly hat, toting his PVC sack full of stuff around Detroit’s mean streets like it was some totem of white trash pride, like even if he had the money he’d still favour it over matching pieces of Gucci luggage. Hanson knows an iconic image when he sees one.

There are plot points that rankle. In the light of all the queer-bashing business, it’s hard to swallow the scene where Jimmy defends a gay co-worker at the car stamping plant with an anti-homophobic rap. Plus, casting Eminem as young, free and single was clearly a teen market concession. Most significantly of all, however, the rewriting of his daughter into the role of little sister makes for a small but important shift of emphasis that cancels out some of the complexities of Mathers’ own character.

One of the most interesting things about Eminem is that he’s a father, and by all accounts, a dedicated one. This is what keeps Tipper Gore, Joe Liebermann and George Dubya – who famously described Eminem as being as big a threat to America’s young as polio – from being able to dismiss him as merely another post-pubescent devil’s advocate. Eminem is not a threat to family values per se, he just proposes an alternative to the retro-50s illusion of the American nuclear unit, and one that figures poverty and dysfunction into the equation at that. (Speaking of alternative family values, there were rumours Mathers had a fling with his screen mother Kim Basinger on set, which you can interpret either as being too Freudian for comfort, or merely the echo of an adolescence spent with the remote in one hand and a Kleenex in the other. Whichever, he asked her to sign his copy of 9 1/2 Weeks. She in turn provides a competent semi-comic performance.)

In any event, one of the things that made Eminem’s debut album so mind-blowing was that you could hear in it the impotence and trapped-rat rage of a young provider who couldn’t provide, whose daughter was down to her last diaper. His delivery on The Slim Shady Album seethed with panic, the pressure of an unstable 20-something marriage, and a crippling fear of the future – the ever-present threat of having to ditch hip-hop hoop dreams in order to do the right thing, even if it means sacrificing those dreams on the altar of a Motor City production line. Hanson should have milked this for all it was worth.

One element he did milk for effect was the climactic rap battle, roughly based on Eminem’s Rocky-est moment, the MC contest that resulted in him signing a record deal. This episode, which in actuality took place in an Inglewood, California club called The Proud Bird, is recounted in William Shaw’s undercover-in-South-Central book Westsiders. On that night, Eminem lost out in the final round of the competition, but Dr. Dre’s emissaries were impressed enough by his performance and demo tape to offer him a deal with Aftermath soon afterwards. Shaw himself admitted that he barely recognised the significance of the event at the time.

"I have to be fair, I didn’t," he said. "If you looked at the first draft just before I handed it in, just about when Eminem was coming up, I had written it entirely from the perspective of the audience, thinking it was fascinating seeing their reaction to him ’cos I just thought there was a level of honesty there which I wasn’t expecting.

"I thought one of the tragic things about South Central in some ways is that I received very little racism, and he received no racism that night apart from one performer, and the audience hated hearing that racism in a way that I don’t think our own society would live up to, so that was quite impressive. They weren’t treating him as a novelty; they were treating him by the fact that he was obviously quite an extraordinary talent at that point.

"I took lots of notes about it, but it was only in retrospect that I sort of put that scene together, because it was obviously so important. I’d written in my notes ‘M+M’, and when the first Eminem stuff came out it didn’t connect, it took me a couple of minutes and I thought, ‘God, that was that guy I saw down at The Proud Bird’."

That guy down at The Proud Bird has covered a lot of ground in the interim, but as of yet the whore of fame hasn’t tempted him from fidelity to the craft. The 8 Mile theme ‘Lose Yourself’ is a pretty powerful track, and a departure in Eminem terms because it’s written largely in the third person, without the protection of the Slim Shady ventriloquist dummy. It’s also the kind of tune that can be appreciated by anyone, athlete or artist, who’s ever had to screw up their courage and seize the moment. The song has a key role in the film; Jimmy Smith is writing it the whole way through.

"I had an opportunity, as a lover of music in movies, to do something unique," Curtis Hanson said recently. "We showed an artist struggling to create, saw him putting down words and heard fragments of a beat, and then at the end, when the character has found his voice, we heard a full blown version of the song, performed by the artist we had just watched creating it. I didn’t know of another movie that was able to do that. Eminem wrote it as we filmed, and it was a struggle because his music, up to that point, all came from within, and was self-referential. For the first time, he couldn’t do that. It was Jimmy’s emotions that mattered."

Methinks Hanson is overestimating the originality and impact of this device, but we’ll leave Mr Holland’s Opus out of it for the moment. The important thing is that the song bodes well for the day when Mathers tires of using his own spilt guts as subject matter and looks elsewhere for the pig iron of his art.

A couple of years ago I wrote that I liked Eminem most when he cut the knee-jerk bigoted bullshit and concentrated on the mechanics of the work itself. On evidence of the four new songs on the 8 Mile soundtrack he’s done just that. ‘Lose Yourself’ could almost be Bruce with a beatbox: "Baby we were born to rhyme", an unashamed paean to bootstrap ambition and the supposed democracy of the American dream.

Of course that’s all it is, a dream, a mirage, a crapshoot with marked cards and loaded dice, an uneducated gamble in a rigged lottery.

But it’s a dream Eminem lucked into, big time.

Let’s see if he can keep it from turning into a nightmare.

What I’d really like to do is act... when pop stars turn thespian

Jon Bon Jovi
Corny poodle rocker in acting talent shock! In his film resume and Ally McBeal cameos, JBJ has exhibited a subtlety and lightness of touch markedly absent in his records.

Jewel
The corn-fed Lilith princess put in a pretty respectable cowgirl turn in Ang Lee’s Ride With The Devil.

Steve Van Zant
Who’d have thunk it? Bruce’s sidekick and agitprop rocker Little Steven displays serious New Jersey goodfella chops in The Sopranos, the most acclaimed TV series of the decade

Chris Isaak
The retro crooner acquitted himself ably enough in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and was even more assured as a SWAT team leader in Silence Of The Lambs.

Bob Dylan
He was curiously magnetic in Peckinpah’s Pat Garret & Billy The Kid and plain awful in Hearts Of Fire, but his role as Jack Fate in the forthcoming Masked & Abandoned may put Bob back on the acting map.

Iggy Pop
The fine art of playing yourself: the Ig hammed it up equally in Cry Baby, The Crow II and Dead Man.

Nick Cave
Acted (or not, as the case may be) opposite Brad Pitt in Johnny Suede. Stick to the singing, Nick...

Tom Waits
Speciality: vagrants, bums and raving lunatics (See Ironweed, The Fisher King and Bram Stoker’s Dracula). [Stole the show as Lily Tomlin’s trailerpark beloved in Short Cuts, too – Ed]

J-Lo
When not simultaneously behaving like a dictator’s daughter and insisting that she’s still good old "Jenny from the Block", Ms Lo (below) has graced many furlongs of celluloid with her comely aspect. Some were passable (U-Turn, The Cell). Some were utter muck (everything else).

Hanson boy modelling school

To say that the pop cash-in flick is a notoriously unreliable genre is an understatement to rank alongside ‘Real Madrid have one or two decent footballers’ or ‘Russell Crowe is a bit of a wanker’. Indeed, for every minor music movie triumph like A Hard Day’s Night there are a dozen or more artless, witless exercises in cynicism of the Cool As Ice or Honest variety. Small wonder then, that so many eyebrows were raised at the announcement that the Oscar nominated director Curtis Hanson had attached himself to the Eminem movie 8 Mile.

This one time contributor to and editor of respected film buff oracle Cinema had first broken into the film business as a screenwriter and workaday director of derivative yet slick thrillers such as The Bedroom Window, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and The River Wild. It was only with the release of his Chinatown-inspired 1997 adaptation of the sprawling James Ellroy novel LA Confidential that Hanson demonstrated his true potential as a Hollywood helmsman, and his follow-up film, the acclaimed but little-seen gem Wonder Boys, did much to cement his newfound reputation.

Hanson was adamant though, on a recent visit to London, that he never felt his credibility was in jeopardy with 8 Mile. "Everyone said I was crazy, but I was really excited about the opportunity to go into this world, the world that hip-hop happens to come from, but I wasn’t looking at it as a hip-hop story in any way, I was looking at it as a story of people, trying to figure out how to lead their lives in a society where the signposts are somewhat illegible."

A huge contributory factor to Hanson’s faith in the project was the attitude of Eminem himself. "In spending time with Marshall, prior to committing to the project, both of us were checking each other out. I was always really impressed with his seriousness. I was convinced by him, that he would bring all of the dedication and discipline that he brings to his music to this job of acting. I think he was very impressed that it was clear that I was not there because of him, I was there because I wanted to tell a story, and that in fact, he was a question mark in my mind. Odd as it sounds, I think that gave him comfort, because he made it very clear to me that he was not interested in being in, and I quote, ‘an Eminem movie’, meaning a vanity project or a two hour video. He wanted to be part of a really good movie.

So I spent time with him and got to know him, and during that time I became aware of his watchability, for lack of a better word. He has charisma, you know. He’d never acted before and it was a real challenge for him, and a difficult journey for me, but what he has is that thing that movie stars have – where you look into their eyes and you feel you’re seeing their emotions and you want to invest emotionally in them. No director can give that to a performer. You either have it or you don’t."

And how did Mr. Mathers feel about the finished product? "Well, when he saw the film for the first time, he was pleased at its veracity. He was just really happy that the film felt as truthful as it does. He saw it in Detroit with a lot of friends and they were impressed too. But he’s extremely self-critical and extremely serious and one can only imagine what it’s like if you’ve never done this before, and suddenly, you are watching yourself up on the big screen for two hours. I can’t even begin to imagine the emotions that he felt. I know that now he’s seen it several times, and with different audiences in different places, he seems happier each time he sees it, because I think he has a little bit more distance on it, so he can actually sit back and enjoy it."