The Time I met a Pre-Fame Eminem; Or, we’ll always have Scribble Jam

Cincinnati is only a midsized city. It’s polluted and mentioned only as a cursory waypoint in most fiction (when mentioned at all), but it always seemed to have a good music scene. At least, that was the way it was when I was a young man. I’m only in my thirties, but that’s ancient to be bothering with new music unless you’re a critic, a record store owner, a creep or industry sycophant of some kind, or you have kids, so I can’t vouch for how things are now.
Back in my day, though, there used to be some interesting local bands, a few of which made it on the national stage (Look up Over the Rhine) and some who were good even if they never took off above the local level. The hip-hop producer Hi-Tek is from here. I believe the Isley Brothers hail from here, and Atlanta music mogul powerhouse L.A. Reid got his start in an R & B band in Cincy.
It’s been years since I’ve been to a show, but I remember seeing a pre-fame Marilyn Manson at the local venue here, as well the Fugees (who were still pre-Score and had yet to do their fissiparous thing as solo artists); the Fugees, in fact, were so small at the time that they were the opening act for Queen Latifah (still on her show Living Single and endowed with a ginormous rack of chocolate breastisuses, as the character played by Living Color’s David Allen Grier would have had it).
Among all these shows, though, the most memorable experience (at least post-facto) was a meeting with a pre-fame Eminem (he may have still been styling himself M & M, before he had management savvy enough to protect him from a lawsuit). He had driven to Cincinnati in a shitty car, a Mercury Tracer or an old Ford Contour, and he was pulled into a gas station to refuel when I happened to be a passenger in the car on the other side of the pump. Even though I was only a teenager in mid-puberty, Eminem and I were already the same size.
I noticed he had incredibly small feet, and when he told me he was a rapper, I wouldn’t have believed him if I hadn’t seen all the flyers and hand-labeled jewel cases with CDs made at Disc Makers stacked in the poorly-upholstered backseat of his ride. You have to understand: Eminem was wearing a ballcap with a frayed bill that hid his eyes (he still had some baby-fat at this point, and was not gaunt) and he looked like an average lower-middle class white kid getting ready to go fishing or check in for his shift at Little Caesar’s.
The only thing, in fact, that stood out about him, was that his eyes had a hard staring quality, as if swimming in perpetual fear or panic, like a bullied kid waiting for more incoming from the local playground and lunchroom mob. I didn’t know his backstory at this time (nobody did), but he looked like a nervous wreck (the road trip from Detroit or wherever he was coming from could have accounted for this reddened-ringed quality around his eyes).
The girl I was with (also the first girl I kissed) was a bit of a scenester, and she knew everything that was happening in the city since her mom ran the most popular coffee shop in the neighborhood. She asked Eminem if he was going to be at Scribble Jam, a hip-hop show that celebrated all the elements of the culture (breakdancing, graffiti, deejaying, and emceeing). He nodded, rubbed sweat from his hands on his wrinkled t-shirt, and then clasped his palms together as if praying for a moment. It was just a tick, I saw, and not some kind of imprecation to the hip-hop gods to let him win the battle (which he lost).
Flash forward (maybe a year in time) and this same girl picked me up from my house in her car, and we drove to the local record shop (cassettes were still in at this point) in Rookwood, a neighborhood a little farther afield than usual.
“That kid we saw who was going to the hip-hop show,” she said, driving.
“The white boy?” I asked. I had forgotten about him.
“Yeah, I heard his new one is dope.”
I was only fourteen or fifteen years old, and I’d started smoking weed with this girl and also took all my musical and cultural cues from her. She introduced me to poetry (hers and that of famous poets) and showed me all the cool trip-hop and instrumental albums from groups like Massive Attack and DJ Shadow. She was a collage artist and a photographer (still is, I believe).
I was surprised to hear her talk up the M & M kid, who hadn’t left much of an impression on me. We drove to the CD store, at any rate, and parked near this redbrick clocktower thingy that I think is still there (I’ll check if I’m ever driving in that direction again; the store that sold cassettes is of course long-gone, consigned to the dustbin of history).
I waited in the car while this girl went inside to get the tape. She tore the plastic off eagerly when she came back. She’d once told me that if she had to make a choice between buying weed and buying a new album, she’d forego her herb and get her music. Some years later, while I was in the Army (and she’d no doubt forgotten me), she got strung out on heroin. That was years in the future, though, at least a decade and some change.
On this day, she popped the tape in the deck, and the song started. I was surprised by how high, whiny, adenoidal, and deliberately annoying Eminem’s voice sounded. It was like an intentional irritant at first, sort of the opposite of the white emcees I was used to, like Mike D and the rest of the Beasties, or the guys from Third Bass. Eminem sounded like a black comedian mocking the treble-rich and bass-deprived voice of a middle-class white guy.
It struck me that as annoying as it was, he sounded like himself, and didn’t sound like a white guy trying to sound black. The first track (it was only a single) was standard braggadocio, mostly the pose of someone with a lot of insecurities trying to act like they didn’t care about anything. The chorus, “I just don’t give a fuck,” seemed only a level or two above the stuff that would afflict us in a couple of years, the rap-rock wave of white guys with dreadlocks and guitars tuned down until they sounded like basses, tallying child abuse incidents and other psychic scars in their lives the way Too Short and other pimp rappers counted their Cadillacs and stable of bitches.
Still, a couple of Eminem’s lines got my attention, and since I was something of a connoisseur thanks to this girl who I wanted to date but who treated me like her puppy, that meant something.
Smell the Folger’s Crystals/
This is lyrical combat, Gentleman hold your pistols.
Once again, it struck me that he was not softening his consonants or rounding anything off. He was enunciating, and it was weirdly more compelling that way.
He was also capable of effortlessly spitting out four syllable rhymes. The progression of hip-hop can be roughly chronologized by counting how many syllable stacks were in rhyme schemes, at least until the regressions of the Dirty South years-excepting Outkast and associated Dungeon Family. The curse of crunk was quickly followed by the affliction of mumble rap. The crack epidemic hollowed out the core of the inner cities, but it also galvanized those who survived and focused their mental energies; promethazine, Mollies, and all this shit that used to be the provenance of white kids seems to be doing a different, tissue-and-sinew deep rending asunder of the young black collective unconscious. Send help, Wakanda.
That first Eminem track ended, and then an ill-advised acapella version of I just don’t give a fuck came on. I shook my head. His voice without that backing track wasn’t going to cut it, I thought. He might be a Midwest underground phenomenon, but he wouldn’t make it on the national stage. He would be like Miilkbone or E.C. Illa (look up On Ill on YouTube), a white dude who got one song on the charts and then disappeared into marginal status as hip-hop trivia.
Then Brain Damage came on. Eminem was playing multiple roles at the beginning of the song, as a doctor and as a nurse, operating on a dying patient. The beat kicked in, spare but effective, counterpointing Em’s tale of woe perfectly. It was maybe the first plaintive rap song I heard. That’s what got me about it. Hip-hop is such a social phenomenon, but this was the sound of someone isolated, enraged, helpless, and admitting his weakness and fear. This wasn’t just taboo in hip-hop. It was unheard-of. White emcees tried to play down their whiteness or tried to play it up for novelty effect. Eminem was rapping about being strangled in a bathroom in school by a black kid because he was white. As he rapped his voice grew louder, changing inflection based on whatever emotion he was trying to get across. I got goosebumps and my eyes watered a bit. What the hell was this? I didn’t want to like it this much.
I smiled nervously, trying to play off what I was feeling in front of the girl, with a lump in my throat. I looked over at her and saw she was also speechless. The song’s third verse was Eminem talking about staggering home after being beaten up at school, to his mother (he did her screeching, cigarette-scarred voice) who beats the crap out of him with a remote control.
Eminem’s mom sees that she’s beaten him too hard, apologizes, and he shouts, “Shut up, you cunt!” This was only a couple of years after Tupac had recorded Dear Mama, his paean to the black woman as matriarch and head of the family. This white kid had admitted to getting his ass kicked and pleading for his life, and then cursing the woman who gave birth to him, and he’d acted five or six roles and told a story with arc and pathos in the space of three minutes, bringing me to the brink of tears after I’d met him, forgotten him, and then written him off after hearing his empty boasts with a backing track and then again acapella.
I had to get that single for myself, and I had to play it again and again, and experience that wash of emotion at will and memorize the words.
Flash forward again (months? A year?) and I was at school (I believe Charles Manson, another Cincinnati native, had gone to my high-school). I stayed stoned during the days most of the time, but eked by with a C+ average.
The school was mixed, almost cut right down the middle between black kids from the local neighborhoods and upper-middle class mostly white and Jewish kids. The halls were lined with Greek statues, men with Caesars and fig leaves over their penises.
I remember walking down the hall one day and hearing Jerome (a mixed kid who was in my boy scout troop) rapping the lyrics to My Name Is. He’d never rapped Beastie Boy lyrics. The local black hip-hop and R&B station (the same station we tuned in to at school for the OJ verdict, which had the black kids dancing and moonwalking in between rows of desks) was playing Eminem nonstop.
He had not only passed the most important litmus test, the X-ray scrutiny of claiming pain in front of people accustomed to seeing whites as the source of all pain. He stood near the top of the heap of rappers at this time. Nas was maybe more respected, as was Jay-Z, but that was about it; Outkast were in their transitional period and hadn’t yet achieved their near Beatlemania level of crossover fame and Floydian ambition (when rap groups have progressive rock-caliber instrumental interludes on their albums, they have crossed some kind of Rubicon).
Eminem became a constantly-moving target for the commentariat in the culture wars for a few years, and I think Fox News’s Bernard Goldberg even included Eminem in his book about people who were screwing up America. The go-to alibi for artists, that they’re just holding up a mirror to society, worked well for Eminem partly because he was White America’s ragdoll left behind in the flight from the cities after desegregation and riots. He was an obvious example of “Chickens coming home to roost” or skeletons clacking their bones together in the closet, the failures of the Great Society and death of the Dream turned nightmare. White America had suburbia and the buffer of Reaganite nostalgia as a narcotic, but Eminem’s dad had ghosted without him, and left his wife and infant son in the trailer park flush against post-Coleman Young Detroit. He might as well have been living in the Gaza Strip.
It’s rarely discussed (maybe never) but the white power structure is inverted the further down the socioeconomic chain you go, so that once you get to the bottom (where Eminem was) being white is a liability, as much as being white in prison (or being a beleaguered minority anywhere) can be. You’re perceived as a symbol of power and yet have none of the intervening mechanisms by which power defends itself. Eminem used rap music to defend himself, the same way kids without dads use heavy bags to learn to throw jabs.
Eminem did actually try to send a positive message with his earlier works, as I later found out, just scouring YouTube for old Em ephemera. He did once try to present a less sensationalized, more naturalistic version of himself to the world, and the record bombed, selling I believe less than a thousand copies.
No one wanted to hear about how “Through Christianity I found my sanity” and so Eminem buried his true self and brought his alter-ego avenger to the fore. Slim Shady was crass, vulgar, a “rapist and repeated prison escapist,” and his dirty mouth and dirty mind paid the bills from Bat Mitzvahs (Rolling Stone’s Anthony Bozza wrote about this) to after-parties at clubs. To say that Eminem was screwing up America (as per Bernie Goldberg) was as redundant and asinine as saying something like America is screwing up America (which, if one factors in opioid-related overdoses, might be an accurate statement).
All that’s in the past, at any rate. These days I receive the news that Eminem has a new album out with the same enthusiasm I would at seeing my “Check Engine” light come on in the car. After he blew up, the My Name is video was unavoidable, in constant rotation, inescapable, and annoying as hell.
Em’s follow-up album was a massive success (the kid I saw at the gas station with the ratty hat and wrinkled shirt would become the most popular recording artist of the 21st century), and the song Stan, about a fan who becomes obsessed with Eminem, was another one of those genius curveballs that made me temporarily reassess him. The underground track he did for Rawkus, Any Man, was also hilarious and showed his skills hadn’t diminished and that he could still make good song when he wasn’t trying to craft hits.
But I didn’t buy any of his albums, and by the time he became not just a household name, but achieved that Michael Jackson level of stratospheric fame, I doubted my memory of ever meeting him. I heard some of The Eminem Show while I was in the Army since I had no choice but to listen to it while other soldiers played it, and noticed he was still a lyrical acrobat:
Psychotic, hypnotic, product, I got it, the antibiotic, etc.
He still wasn’t as good as Big Pun in my opinion, whose Dead in the middle of Little Italy verse I can still call to the tip of my tongue, despite the fact that I was blitzed on St. Ides Malt Liquor and B.C. weed from the bong when I first heard it:
Dead in the middle of Little Italy, little did we know that we riddled two little middle men who didn’t do diddly (Jesus Christ, say that ten times fast, or even once at combat speed).
Eminem eventually turned into a punchline in hip-hop (by his own admission), becoming a recluse, gaining a ton of weight, getting so strung out on pain meds that he had to get dialysis to stay alive. His previously wounded eyes now bulged from his skull, as if he was terrified of how he had cornered himself into this character he had created and from which he couldn’t escape. He no longer had that sallow, fry-cook working-class white boy complexion. He looked shiny, like a Caucasian Jermaine Jackson, or Patrick Bateman as played by Christian Bale in American Psycho, after one of his exfoliations.
His new albums were commercial hits and creative duds, aside from the one or two songs per CD that addressed the trap into which he’d maneuvered himself, getting to the point where he couldn’t leave his house without causing traffic jams and needing to be evacuated from public scenes (malls, public events) by private security.
He was a hip-hop Howard Hughes at this point, his ken dwindled to whatever he found on television, mostly celebrity and reality TV-show trash. He’d gone from being a young man credibly bemoaning “working at Builder’s Square/using plastic silverware” to empty lyrics about disposable pop stars. Even worse, the animus he had for his wife when he was younger and the ornery barbs he shot at fellow female pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera had now just devolved into a litany of violent acts he wanted to commit against girls half his age (girls, incidentally, the same age as his daughter).
At least when he was young his problems with girls seemed grounded in frustration at trying to make things work out and watching them collapse (who hasn’t felt that way?). Now he was just a pig, and (as James Howard Kunstler said) a sullen wretch, someone who had everything and complained incessantly about his life to people on the other side of the wall, who still had to contend with the daily struggles he used to rap about.
Even worse, he was screaming all the time. The Eminem whose voice could shift fluidly into six different tones and pitches in sixteen musical bars could now do nothing but shout, like a wannabe tough guy whose shrillness announces his fear and insecurity like a megaphone every time he opens his mouth. Eminem’s lyrical diatribes and over-the-top horrorcore shock-rap melted into the background for the same reason a Chihuahua’s bark is white noise. The louder he became, the easier he was to ignore.
It’s a weird cautionary tale, a Benjamin Button fable for hip-hop, about a young man who grew into an old boy. Try to imagine Eminem at the age of 70, with as much street credibility as a Cher statue at Madame Tussaud’s House of Wax, threatening to rape and sodomize a bright-eyed pop sensation in her school girl dress, releasing diss tracks in between treatments on his cancerous prostate gland.
Oh, well. We’ll always have Scribble Jam.