What EMINEM Taught Me About Life

The difference between everything and nothing.

I was in fourth grade the first time I ever held an Eminem CD.

I remember the faded image on the front, a white guy with blonde hair sitting on the steps outside a house with a striped awning.

I don’t know how the Marshall Mathers LP landed in my hands (considering rap records rarely made their way to small Upstate New York towns in the 90s), but it did.

Two years before, I’d been playing GoldenEye 64 in a friend’s basement, listening to Blink-182.

And now here I was, all of 10 years old, listening to “The Real Slim Shady,” trying to figure out who these Pam and Tommy people were Em was rapping about.

Of course, they’re gonna know what intercourse is/

By the time they hit fourth grade/

They’ve got the Discovery Channel, don’t they?

Unfortunately, no, actually.

Because Dad was determined to live as far away from people as possible, our house was so deep in the woods T.V. channels weren’t receivable.

I wouldn’t fully understand the meaning of his lyrics for many, many years later.

That didn’t matter, though.

What mattered was how he made me feel.

Maybe because he was angry.

Maybe because he was white.

Maybe because it was different from SUM 41 and Limp Bizkit and the other music I was used to.

For whatever reason, I liked him.

The white country folks in my rural town of 1,000 people did too.

It was probably the poor white relatability.

You couldn’t go anywhere in the early 2000s without Em blasting out of one of the various trailer parks our town had to offer, their front lawns littered with rusted car parts and deflated Christmas ornaments still in July.

Red-faced white men wearing camouflage John Deer hats would pull up to our town’s only traffic light, driving a busted Pontiac or Ford F-150 with the windows rolled down, yelling the chorus to “Without Me.”

Biggie never made it upstate. Or Nas. And they were from NYC.

Pac was from a whole other coast; he never stood a chance.

Ye, Jay, and Wayne were all present, though; T.I. obviously had his run.

Riding to school, you’d hear “Live Your Life” and “Whatever You Like” on repeat so often that for a while, it seemed like those were the only two songs on the radio.

I never gave up on Em, though.

My entire vibe senior year was “Still Don’t Give A Fuck” and I knew every word.

I’m zonin’ off a one joint/

Hopped in the limo/

Shoppin’ the demo at gunpoint

I could recite most of that song right now on the spot, all these years later.

Now, I don’t want to date myself…but do you remember Limewire?

Before Spotify (yes, kids, there was a time before you had ALL THE MUSIC YOU EVER WANTED AT YOUR FINGERTIPS), you had to actually download music.

Because I was young, white, and angry, this was the type of music I gravitated toward (I’m getting to a point here, I promise).

Rappers and groups like Dead Prez, Cage, Aesop Rock, and Atmosphere.

A hip-hop head, I took pride in listening to sh*t that was underground.

Lyrical.

Those obsessed with backpack rap looked down on the “mainstream” artists.

We used the word as an insult.

Mainstream. 

It was like Muggle. 

It was dirty.

There were the sell-outs, and then there was us.

The die-hards.

The dedicated.

The real-ones.

We correlated commercial success with a lack of authenticity.

Around the time Eminem was blowing up, three other white rappers landed on my radar.

Cage, Aesop Rock, and Copywrite.

All three were dark and angsty and had unique styles that were lyric/punchline driven (and interestingly, for a while, they were all in a group together).

What I find fascinating about these three is that they surfaced around the same time as Em, had similar skills and styles to Em, but had nowhere even close to the same commercial success.

The whole setup of this essay is a trojan horse to talk about what I’m here for:

Timing.

I haven’t listened to Copywrite in, I don’t know…10 years?

For some reason, I was in the gym the other day thinking of good workout music, and he crossed my mind.

Music is one of the few powerful time machines that can warp you into moments, eras, and even minutes of your life.

In an instant, I was sitting in my grandma’s golden Toyota Corolla, the ergonomic padding wrapped around the steering wheel, driving to night classes at Community College in 2010.

Then I snapped back to the gym. Back to real life.

I put on my old favorite Copywrite album, “The High Exhaulted” and started drilling on the heavy bag.

As I worked out for the next 30 minutes, I couldn’t help but think how surprisingly well this album held up over the last two decades.

I also couldn’t shake the feeling that, in some parallel universe, this dude was as big as Em.

In another lifetime, where Em didn’t exist, this guy reigns supreme and has all the material success he ever wanted.

Instead, he’s relegated to a lifetime of “almosts” and “could have beens”, played for nostalgia’s sake once every ten years.

—

Do you know the “10,000” hour rule? The one made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers”?

In that book, Gladwell touches on this point of timing, and I can’t help but keep returning to it.

He talks about an expert watchmaker (or some other cool crafty job I can’t remember exactly) and how the man saw very little success in his life.

Then his son comes along, learns the profession, and simply because the times changed, goes on to be more successful than he could have ever imagined.

The medium stayed the same, the era changed, and the results multiplied.

If Copywrite is born a few years earlier, beats Eminem to the punch, and the timeline shifts forward five years, how different are their legacies?

We like to think that successful people would reach their heights of accomplishment regardless.

Their grit, determination, and work ethic would be unstoppable no matter the era.

But the older I get, the more I realize the moment is part of the game.

Supposedly Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime.

They say timing is everything.

And I’m starting to believe it.