Craig Taylor – on an Eminem clone.

Toronto, Ontario
July 18, 2000

Hello, Scott, you wily old man, with your high-lighted hair and your little digital files. I finally received those audio clips, after about an hour of pacing around the attic watching my computer slowly download, waiting for the whole thing to crash. But yes, they all made it through, even the Eminem tracks, which is what I was most worried about. The only time I’m ever going to hear his album is on my computer. There’s no way I can actually walk into an HMV and buy it without feeling extremely dirty. But what would you know? You’re the one who wanted to send me that song where he’s killing his ex-wife. I can’t get past that. I’ll listen, but I won’t listen to track sixteen.

I feel like I’ve crossed some sort of Eminem threshold, though. When the first album was breaking out I had no idea who he was except for the posters on the walls of construction sites downtown. I heard the “Hi My Name Is” single at Cora’s Pizza over on Spadina once while I was ordering, but that was it. Now I’m talking about him all the time – to Sean and Bill, and even to J., who admitted she didn’t know too much about the guy and was more worried about the violence in Cypress Hill albums. I’m not holding it against her, but those guys were mild potheads with a couple bad samples, cartoony like Hammer. Any violence there was incidental. There’s something different about Em.

Did you read that little blurb about him by Ben Greenman in the New Yorker? He said that Eminem’s raps retain “a certain charm in part because of his indisputable poetic abilities and in part because his horrific imaginations seems so patently fictional.” Which is fine to say if you’re Ben Greenman, but I don’t think all of Eminem’s fan base agrees that it’s fiction. Not to say that I’m scared of everyone who listens to the disc. Greenman will probably be fine. I’m more worried about the white kid who doesn’t give a fuck, who isn’t aware of Slim Shady’s poetic meter or his place in a canon that goes back, way back, past Kool Moe Dee even. I’m not pulling a Tipper Gore and getting scared of an entire genre, but I am feeling a little wary.

The other day there was a kid on the bus that I take to work. When I got on, he was squatting down low inside his Ecko pants – the kind with the white reflective strips down the side. His headphones were like yours: those sleek, well-designed flashes of purple plastic, bent around the back of his head. To go over the top like headphones used to would mean he’d have to take off the Yankees hat. Not a black cap like the ones the clean-living pros wear, but light blue, identical to the real Slim Shady’s. He was on the bus with a friend he liked well enough to let her stand near his squat. (“Shut up, bitch” was the first thing I heard him say to her, and at that point it was so outrageously misplaced that I laughed to myself). One of his hands was holding onto the chrome bus pole while the other was busy pulling and pushing on the crotch of his pants in that loose-limbed, bored style that someone’s always using in the background of hip-hop videos.

The bus was packed. The racial breakdown was all over the map. Lots of dark skin, dark eyes. The Ecko kid and I were about the whitest: I’m pastier than usual now from working indoors all the time, and I was wearing an unfortunate blue dress shirt, untucked, and wet hair. We were all on our way to Don Mills, over the viaduct and out beyond the Jack Astor’s restaurant.

All of a sudden, as we’re passing over the Don Valley bridge, the crouching kid said, loudly, “People always trying to fuck me around,” ostensibly to the girl beside him. But he was staring at me while he said it, and then at the man next to me, and then the man next to him. “Motherfuckers always trying to fuck me around.” Someone turned the page of a paper, but no one else made a move. He lifted his face toward the two older black men who were sitting in the back seat. They both had high cheekbones and short buzz cuts, and were dressed in golf shirts, and were staring at their hands. “A nigga like me can’t get any respect,” he called out. “Ain’t nobody giving it up.” There was an absolute silence in the bus. I could hear the hydraulics of the wheels, and then the light “ting” of someone pulling the Next Stop cord, but nothing else. The two black men kept staring at their fingernails.

I have been trained, since becoming a Torontonian, to do what everyone else does in a situation like this: keep reading the free newspaper in my hands. I tried to catch a reaction from my fellow riders, especially from the other black man beside me, who was engrossed in his Sheridan College textbook. Nothing.

“What are you talking about?” said the girl standing beside Eminem. She was dressed in a light blue pull-over that matched the colour of his cap. And here’s where it got truly scary for me. He acknowledged her in a way, nodding his head as if to say, “Shut the fuck up,” and then put his two fingers together to form a gun, which he pointed at each of the passengers in the back. First at me, then at the Sheridan College man, until he had gone down the entire row. He started singing and moving to his song. It was a strange, menacing squat dance. “You don’t. Want to fuck. With Shady. Cause Shady. Will fuckin’ kill you. And you. And you.”

I didn’t know whether he was singing along to his walkman or if it was just a fitting lyric for the situation. I was probably the only one on the bus who recognized that it was Eminem – maybe not, who can say? – but it didn’t matter. The words were his, and whatever fictional context they might have had on the album had been dropped. “I’ll fucking kill you,” he continued. “You don’t. Want to fuck with Shady. Cause Shady. Will fucking kill you. And you, nigga.” The man with the Sheridan textbook closed it and rang the Next Stop bell.

I read in Spin where Eminem described his triple-threat persona. Eminem is the rapper, Marshall Mathers is the man himself, and Slim Shady is the attitude that he assumes. It’s an attitude that could just as easily be grafted on to boys in identical blue Yankees caps.

The boy and his girl spotted a McDonald’s on Pape Avenue, and that was that. He pulled out of his squat, hitched his pants up, and said to her, “Ring the fucking ringer.” She did. And when the bus stopped at the intersection and the doors swung open, the two of them stepped off.

Your brother,
in Toronto,
in the attic,

Craig