Chilling Out -- for Him

The tension during Eminem’s performance at an RFK Stadium concert is escalating as thousands of young rock and rap fans slam against each other with such force that you sense bones are about to snap.

Police huddle anxiously during a 15-minute break in the music to see if they should let the concert resume. This isn’t Bono, the friend of popes and presidents, performing on stage. It’s Eminem, the rapper who once wrote a song about killing his wife and who cusses out the vice president’s wife on his latest CD.

Rebellion and outrage are Eminem’s trademarks, so it’s anybody’s guess what he might do if he returns to the stage. What if he tries to fuel his angry image on stage by attacking the police for interfering with the concert?

Eminem finally picks up a microphone and addresses the crowd. “OK, I’m going to count to three and then everybody take one step back. One, two, three ... take one step back.”

The crowd begins to respond. He repeats the instruction two more times and the tension eases. Eminem resumes his performance.

The Detroit rapper came to this all-day, radio-sponsored concert last weekend to promote his new album, “The Eminem Show,” and to use the capital setting to showcase “White America,” a song on the album that decries the FCC and others for threatening to censor his music.

But he made another kind of statement. Ever since his arrival on the pop scene in 1999, Eminem--Marshall Bruce Mathers III--has been seen as a virtual madman by many anxious parents, a hero who challenges authority by millions of young fans, and a complex but major artist by critics and enough members of the recording academy for “The Marshall Mathers LP” to be nominated for best album in 2000.

It’s as if there are three faces of Eminem.

On this humid spring day, there was only one way Eminem looked--responsible.

In an interview here hours before taking the stage, Eminem--as soft-spoken offstage as he is bratty and confrontational on it--suggested he is emerging from a personal darkness that fueled not only his lyrics, but also his private life.

“I feel good about myself ... and there have been times in my life, including not that long ago, that I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to say that again. I can’t tell you that I had a clear head a couple of years ago because of all the stuff that was going on around me.

“Ending up on probation was almost a blessing in disguise ... not being able to do drugs and stuff. I needed to do that anyway because I’m a father, and the worst thing I could ever do was come home off tour and be [messed up], me going through withdrawals or something. It’s cool to go out and have fun every now and then, but I’d rather be a father before anything.”

The most alarming thing about Eminem earlier in the day as he sits in hotel room just around the corner from the Capitol building is the mound of bacon and eggs on the plate in front of him. It’s 2 p.m., but he’s just starting his day.

“Want some bacon?” he asks.

Instinctively, I say something about not wanting all that cholesterol, and he smiles. “I try not to eat too much of this either, but I just get a craving sometimes.”

Eminem, 29, is wearing the loose-fitting sports gear that rappers have turned into a fashion statement for young America. It’s pretty much the same outfit he had on when I first met him two years ago. The main difference is the pricey Rolex watch on his arm.

“Oh, that,” he says, playfully. “That’s my Jimmy Iovine watch”--a gift from Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine for selling 30 million albums.

Three things stood out in that 2000 interview with Eminem: He was courteous, smart and oh-so-tightly wound. The first two qualities were surprising given the startling, X-rated nature of his music.

The tension made sense though, because his first album had sold 3.5 million copies in the U.S., and he was under a lot of pressure to match that amount at a time in pop music when fan loyalty has been an elusive quality.

Still, it was hard to believe the polite young man in the studio was the same one who was charged two weeks later with using a gun to hit a man who had kissed Eminem’s then-wife in a nightclub. Two days later, he was arrested again and charged with wielding a gun in an altercation with an associate of the rap group Insane Clown Posse.

“I believe in temporary insanity,” he says now in the hotel room, referring to the Michigan incidents. “I believe that somebody can do something to you that can make you so mad that you literally can’t control yourself.”

Still, the insanity of the moment he saw the man kissing his wife is mirrored on the album when he raps, “What I did was stupid, no doubt it was dumb, but the smartest [thing] I did was take them bullets out of that gun / Cause I’da killed ‘em.”

“I was going crazy,” he adds about that period. “Fame was hitting me. I wasn’t even two years into all this when we talked. I had just bought a house. To show you how naive I was, I bought it on the main road. I had no idea how famous I really was, especially in Detroit, and people were coming by there day and night. Plus, I had the pressure of my relationship with a certain female in my life [his ex-wife] that was falling apart.

“The difference now is that I came through all that and I’ve still got the things I love. In this album, I spoke about a lot of that journey. There are a lot of the same people in the songs, my mom, my ex-wife, my daughter, but it’s not just the same story. If you look at the songs closely, you can see there’s some closure there. I have things in order.”

That closure is most obvious in “Cleaning Out My Closet,” a savage message to his father, who split when Eminem was just a few months old, and his mother, whom he has blamed for his largely dysfunctional childhood.

Most of his rage is directed at his mother, “Remember when [my uncle] Ronnie died and you said you wished it was me?/Well guess what, I am dead./Dead to you as can be.”

“I wrote that for my mother and people can see it for whatever it is, mean or not, maybe just me venting,” he says. “But I’m just getting a lot of stuff off my chest. It’s like closing a chapter in my life. I’m not thinking of anyone else hearing this when I’m making the record. I’m just writing it for her and thinking how she’s going to feel because of how she made me feel.”

Parents have been worried about the effect of pop and rock rebellion on their youngsters ever since the sexual energy of Elvis Presley in the ‘50s. But Eminem seems to evoke unusually deep fears. The two things adults normally ask about Eminem is why does the music have to be so violent and doesn’t he feel any responsibility to young people.

Eminem admits he’s trying to provoke in his music, because that’s what he liked about music when he was a teen. But he maintains his young listeners get the humor and exaggeration in the songs, and that they can draw strength from the darker moments.

“If you listen to the album as a whole, you’ll see a lot of different mood swings,” he says, pushing the breakfast tray away and leaving half of the eggs untouched. “With each song, I try to make it fall into three categories. Is it happy? Is it sad? Or is it anger? If it’s not one of those, then there’s no feel to the song and I’ll throw it out.”

There are a lot of other possible emotions, but songwriters are often drawn to particular themes again and again because it hits an emotional nerve in them. When asked why he wrote so many sad love songs, Leonard Cohen responded, “The question presumes I have a choice in the matter.”

Eminem thinks his only responsibility to his audience is to make the most honest and entertaining music he can.

“I’m not a baby-sitter for anyone else’s kids,” he says matter-of-factly, a line he’s probably used before to explain himself. “I have one seed and that’s all I need and that’s all I’m responsible for raising. That’s why there is an advisory sticker on the albums. If you are a parent, you should watch what your kids are listening to.”

There are plenty of moments on the new album that will give parents pause, moments ugly and troubling. One reason Eminem is such a complex artist is that he can be seductive musically when he’s simply trying to be a mainstream entertainer or when he’s dealing with topics that seem more suited for a therapist’s couch.

Most noticeably, Eminem continues to show a discouraging lack of respect for women, which seems strange given his devotion to his 6-year-old daughter, Hailie. The youngster spends lots of time with the rapper under a joint-custody agreement with his ex-wife.

Eminem has one of the most dynamic, motormouth deliveries ever in rap, but his talent goes deeper than his words. While Dr. Dre is the executive producer on “The Eminem Show,” Eminem did the production work on most of the album’s tracks himself.

His most revolutionary contribution to rap, however, has been his ability as a storyteller to step past the gangsta cliches of hard-core rap to give us personalized stories of anguish and desire that have a greater universality and depth.

At one place on his album, Eminem taunts parents by saying he doesn’t blame them for getting upset about his music. “I wouldn’t let Hailie listen to me neither.”

Eminem laughs when the line is mentioned.

“I was kidding with that line,” he says. “The irony of it is she’s on that song with me. That’s her going, ‘I think my dad’s gone crazy.’ I’m doing that just to push people’s buttons ... to push the envelope as far as it will go. I’m a pretty liberal parent, but if there are too many cuss words in a row, I’ll make sure Hailie hears the clean version.

“If there is an [expletive] here and there, that’s fine. I would rather her hear that this way than hear it at school or behind my back. Me and Hailie have a little understanding. When she hears those words, she knows they are bad and she knows not to repeat them. She’s pretty good at that. Believe it or not, she is a happy little girl. She’s always got a smile on her face, always upbeat. She’s the most important thing in my life, and I want to make sure she has everything I never did in life.”

But he knows there’s a world of fans trying to combat the same low self-esteem and struggle that he went through.

“If someone came to me and said nothing was working for him at school or at home, I’d say, ‘Find an outlet, something you’re good at and believe in and lock in on that.’ For me, it was music. Early, early on, it was comic books and drawing. I used to draw a lot. I used to be able to escape into those things and I had certain relatives that I could go visit and try to get away from that because I hated school and I hated being at home. It was like I had nothing to look forward to, but music changed that.”

It’s not just his themes that are evolving in the new album, but his sound too. There are traces of ‘70s rock guitars and even a sample of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” in one track.

“I listened to a bit of rock in the late ‘70s,” Eminem explains. “There was some Aerosmith, some Queen, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin. If hip-hop had never come along, I may have gone that way.”

Once he heard hip-hop, while still in grade school, he knew he found his future. He loved the wordplay and the competition of rap contests around Detroit. Although he struggled in school, he studied the dictionary to improve his vocabulary.

Interscope’s Iovine played a key role in launching Eminem when he was so impressed by the rapper’s demo tape four years ago that he passed it along to producer Dr. Dre, who also loved the clever wordplay and machine-gun delivery on the tape. At the time, the idea of a quality, best-selling white rapper in black hip-hop seemed absurd.

But Dre’s endorsement and production work, along with the steady support of manager Paul Rosenberg, helped establish Eminem as the best-selling artist in rap history. His first two albums have sold more than 30 million copies worldwide.

The new one wasn’t scheduled to be released until Tuesday, but it was moved up to May 28 because of widespread downloading and piracy. With Interscope’s permission, some stores began selling it as soon as it arrived May 24. Its three-day total of 285,000 copies was enough to make it enter the sales chart Wednesday at No. 1.

While Eminem hopes his success opens a door for other white rappers, he seems humble about his place in the rap hierarchy.

“Sometimes I feel like people just couldn’t believe there was a white guy who was good at rap, so they made me seem like I was more incredible than the next man, when the truth is I don’t even put myself in the same league as people like Jay-Z and Redman and Biggie,” Eminem says, his bleached blond hair covered by a Nike skullcap.

“Lots of people also don’t understand the skill that is involved in rap. They’ll just look at the last rhyme in a line. The challenge in hip-hop is to do compound syllable rhymes so that you have a flow to the sentence that carries the words along. That’s the secret of what makes rap so cool.”

Eminem may seem like he’s always on television or in magazines, but he does far fewer interviews than most stars of his stature. He thinks mystique is important, plus one senses that he, like a lot of performers who grew up with low self-esteem, wonders if he’s really all that interesting.

His big gamble is starring in an upcoming film based loosely on his life. Titled “8 Mile,” a reference to the dividing line between economic classes in Detroit, the film was directed by Curtis Hanson, whose credits include “L.A. Confidential” and “Wonder Boys.” It’s due in November.

“The script was great,” Eminem says, when asked why he would agree to act in a film, given the history of so many pop acting embarrassments. “I felt like even if I’m halfway decent in it, it’s going to be great. Besides, I enjoyed making videos. But this was a lot different. One of the hardest things was stripping myself of whatever ego and confidence I have to play this character, Jimmy.

“I had to go back to when I was just Marshall and I was reserved and shy and nobody cared much about me, and I didn’t know if I could ever reach my dreams. It’s weird when you think I only had to go back about four years to find that point in my life.”

Eminem will tour this summer, but don’t expect him to be on the road indefinitely. “There’s part of me that loves being on stage, but I don’t want to be on the road 200 days a year or anything,” he says at the hotel. “That’s no life for my little girl.”

After the RFK concert that evening, Eminem doesn’t stick around for the usual post-show parties. He’s soon on the way to the airport for the flight back to Detroit. You can guess who he’s eager to see.

*

Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com