Free The Dark Story of Eminem by Nick Hasted

segregated pop nation. His first album duly sold 18 million. To add to the insult of each sale to far better black rappers, listeners not only clearly bought him in such unprecedented numbers because he was white, but were not bothered that he looked like a Nazi. In fact, this deliberate styling must have been a selling point. Though Vanilla Ice vanished as swiftly as he had appeared (after being allegedly dangled off a 15th floor balcony by infamous Death Row label boss and Dre associate Suge Knight, over disputed credits for his black songwriter), his spectre would rise to haunt Eminem’s early success. “Vanilla Twice,” critics would sneer. Ice himself would reappear to taunt this rival white face. He, like Eminem, had as a boy been a genuine hip-hop fan. But, sucked into the mainstream music machine, encouraged to fake a gangsta past while being as Caucasian as Pat Boone, his success a pure product of racist avarice, he made the idea of white rappers again seem an offensive joke. Watching in Detroit, Marshall was mortified.
     
    “That crushed me,” he told
Newsweek
, of first hearing ‘Ice Ice Baby’. At first, I felt like I didn’t want to rap any more. I was so mad, because he was making it real hard for me. But then 3rd Bass restored some credibility, and I realised that it really depends on the individual. Vanilla Ice was just fake. 3rd Bass was real.”
     
    New York Jews like the Beasties, 3rd Bass were the last white rappers of substance before Eminem. Their
Cactus Album
(1991) was a more media-literate, serious and sly work than
Licensed To Ill
, addressing hip-hop culture from their own position, not impersonating blacks like the Beasties and Ice. ‘Product of the Environment’ in particular addressed the racial loneliness and pitfalls of Marshall’s decision to rap, but also indicated why he might survive.
“His reward was almost a bullet in the chest,”
as MC Serch rapped of his early days.
“… ‘Cos I’m a product of the environment/ there it is, black and white.”
But as he recalled an early performance, the tone was almost of a vision, of race ceasing to matter, of rapping skill and true street knowledge saving him:
“Never had static, ‘cos everybody knew me/ … I’m protected and respected for my own self/ ‘cos of talent, no shame or nothin’ else/ In a time of tension, racially fenced in/ I came off, and all the others blessed me.”
     
    The teenage Marshall must have ached for such acceptance. The journey he had started by listening to such records so reverently, though, and by choosing to make hip-hop his life, was unavoidably one of racial transgression, with its history of hostility and risk. Norman Mailer’s epochal essay
The White Negro
(1957) had first sketched the opportunities and dangers that becoming lost in black culture could give to whites: once jazz (rap’s first ancestor) had entered white society as “a communication of art because it said, ‘I feel this, and now you do too’ “, Mailer’s hipster “White Negroes” swapped middle-class repression for the swifter, riskier, nerve-end reactions of life on the edge, where poor black Americans had to live. Shrugging off restraint, they would value “the naked truths of what each observer feels at each instance of his existence”, a prophetic definition of rap’s uncensored, individual’s art. The essay’s predictions were erupting in underground America as Mailer wrote, in the musical miscegenation of rock’n’roll, as poor white Southerners like Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley learned from the black musicians around them. But somehow, as everyone in Nineties Detroit could attest, America’s racial walls had never truly tumbled. So rap had to breach them again.
     
    The cover of Ice-T’s
Home Invasion
LP (1993) showed the music’s intent. It pictured a white suburban teenage boy with Iceberg Slim and Malcolm X books by his side, headphones clamped to his ears as he listened to Ices T and Cube