was simply wrecked. “I didn’t talk for days,” he told
Q
. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral.” His uncle’s name was one of the tattoos of key people in his life with which he would later ink his body.
Ronnie’s suicide then burst to the surface again, during another fierce row between his sister and nephew. “I wish it was you who died,” Mathers-Briggs screamed, “and Ronnie was still here!” It’s not an unknown thing for a mother to wish on an adolescent son when at snapping point; she needn’t mean it for more than the second she says it, and we don’t know the provocation. Her own upset at her brother’s death should also be remembered. But for Marshall, emotionally fragile and already resentful, something broke with those words. “It got quiet,” he remembered to
The Source
. “I could see in my friends’ faces. Even they kinda looked at me like, ‘Damn, that’s fucked up.’” He focused on his mother’s furious sentence with the same intensity as he had that Lincoln teacher’s dismissal of his hopes. He would not forget, or forgive. “She said that,” he said this year, then paused. “So I’m gonna be as dead to her as I can get.”
No one has said when this happened. But, with friends round, and after he and Ronnie were 19, it cannot have been far from the night of his twentieth birthday. He had his second brush with the law then, and it was very different from his first. His mother called the police to accuse him of assault and battery. The once-puny Marshall had been lifting weights since he was 17, after coming so close to violent death the year before. In photos of him with his mother as an adult, he towers above her, with muscular arms. The thought of him attacking her is not pleasant. But perhaps, like her savage words to him, it just shows how oppressive their life together had become. Both had now been driven to lash out without restraint. Their future lives would move towards open battle.
Ronnie had done one more pivotal thing for his nephew, while he was still alive. Mathers-Briggs might remember their musical differences. All Marshall knew was that his uncle left him the gift which let him hang on to sanity, without which his life would have shaken apart. Age 11, Ronnie played him his first rap record.
3
THE WHITE NEGRO
“The first hip-hop shit I ever heard was that song ‘Reckless’ from the
Breakin’
soundtrack,” Marshall told
Spin
in 1999. “My cousin played me the tape when I was, like, 9. Then there was this mixed school I went to in fifth grade, one with lots of Asian and black kids, and everybody was into breakdancing. They always had the latest rap tapes – the Fat Boys, L.L. Cool J’s
Radio
. I thought it was the most incredible shit I’d ever heard.”
The element of calculation in Marshall’s first public appearances as Eminem is underscored in that statement’s inaccuracies. He certainly could have been nine when the early hip-hop exploitation movie
Breakin’
(
Breakdance
in the UK) came out in 1984, if he’d been born in 1974. As we know, though, he was born two years earlier. The mental readjustment of each key event of his life into different parts of his youth every time a question was asked in his hundreds of early interviews, so that the odd deception would hold, must have done strange things to his mind. All the time he was Eminem to the world, he had to think as if he really was two years younger. Calling Uncle Ronnie his cousin shows how mutable his floating, fractious family unit could become in his head, too, thanks to such initial, contradictory recountings.
At any rate, Marshall was not a precocious little boy when hip-hop first seized him, but nearing adolescence, with its extra dose of frustrated anger. The music’s almost mystical answering of every need in his insecure young life was remembered in one of his most nakedly autobiographical verses, in D12’s 2000 rap, ‘Revelation’. After
Q
. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral.” His uncle’s name was one of the tattoos of key people in his life with which he would later ink his body.
Ronnie’s suicide then burst to the surface again, during another fierce row between his sister and nephew. “I wish it was you who died,” Mathers-Briggs screamed, “and Ronnie was still here!” It’s not an unknown thing for a mother to wish on an adolescent son when at snapping point; she needn’t mean it for more than the second she says it, and we don’t know the provocation. Her own upset at her brother’s death should also be remembered. But for Marshall, emotionally fragile and already resentful, something broke with those words. “It got quiet,” he remembered to
The Source
. “I could see in my friends’ faces. Even they kinda looked at me like, ‘Damn, that’s fucked up.’” He focused on his mother’s furious sentence with the same intensity as he had that Lincoln teacher’s dismissal of his hopes. He would not forget, or forgive. “She said that,” he said this year, then paused. “So I’m gonna be as dead to her as I can get.”
No one has said when this happened. But, with friends round, and after he and Ronnie were 19, it cannot have been far from the night of his twentieth birthday. He had his second brush with the law then, and it was very different from his first. His mother called the police to accuse him of assault and battery. The once-puny Marshall had been lifting weights since he was 17, after coming so close to violent death the year before. In photos of him with his mother as an adult, he towers above her, with muscular arms. The thought of him attacking her is not pleasant. But perhaps, like her savage words to him, it just shows how oppressive their life together had become. Both had now been driven to lash out without restraint. Their future lives would move towards open battle.
Ronnie had done one more pivotal thing for his nephew, while he was still alive. Mathers-Briggs might remember their musical differences. All Marshall knew was that his uncle left him the gift which let him hang on to sanity, without which his life would have shaken apart. Age 11, Ronnie played him his first rap record.
3
THE WHITE NEGRO
“The first hip-hop shit I ever heard was that song ‘Reckless’ from the
Breakin’
soundtrack,” Marshall told
Spin
in 1999. “My cousin played me the tape when I was, like, 9. Then there was this mixed school I went to in fifth grade, one with lots of Asian and black kids, and everybody was into breakdancing. They always had the latest rap tapes – the Fat Boys, L.L. Cool J’s
Radio
. I thought it was the most incredible shit I’d ever heard.”
The element of calculation in Marshall’s first public appearances as Eminem is underscored in that statement’s inaccuracies. He certainly could have been nine when the early hip-hop exploitation movie
Breakin’
(
Breakdance
in the UK) came out in 1984, if he’d been born in 1974. As we know, though, he was born two years earlier. The mental readjustment of each key event of his life into different parts of his youth every time a question was asked in his hundreds of early interviews, so that the odd deception would hold, must have done strange things to his mind. All the time he was Eminem to the world, he had to think as if he really was two years younger. Calling Uncle Ronnie his cousin shows how mutable his floating, fractious family unit could become in his head, too, thanks to such initial, contradictory recountings.
At any rate, Marshall was not a precocious little boy when hip-hop first seized him, but nearing adolescence, with its extra dose of frustrated anger. The music’s almost mystical answering of every need in his insecure young life was remembered in one of his most nakedly autobiographical verses, in D12’s 2000 rap, ‘Revelation’. After
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