The rapper’s personal battles didn’t help. The late Billboard editor Timothy White dedicated one of his influential music columns to excoriating Eminem. He was the first white rapper since the Beastie Boys to enjoy street credibility and admiration from both blacks and whites.īut there was anger over his lyrics, which included violent fantasies about his estranged mother and his wife and anti-gay slurs. His first disc, 1999’s “The Slim Shady LP,” was praised by critics for its twisted, demented but humorous wit, and earned him the first two of his five Grammys. “They’re going to see that he’s clearly a talented guy.” “I think he’s just going to earn a lot of respect from people,” said Sia Michel, editor in chief at Spin magazine, which has Eminem on its December cover. Confidential’s” Curtis Hanson, and Eminem’s performance in it have received early critical acclaim. Interest in Eminem, whose real name is Marshall Mathers, should grow even more with the release next Friday of “8 Mile,” loosely based on his own troubled youth. Universal Studios, lives in hopes of getting
Whether the 30-year-old rapper has softened or America has just grown more accepting, “he has started to interest serious, grownup audiences that would have dismissed him as a teenage hip-hop phenomenon,” said New York Times critic Janet Maslin, who spent time with Eminem on the set of his upcoming movie, “8 Mile,” for Premiere magazine.Įminem, portraying Jimmy Smith Jr. Writer Paul Slansky, a self-described middle-aged white guy, penned a New York Observer column titled, “Guess Who Thinks Eminem’s a Genius? Middle-Aged Me.” (He recently sounded the same theme in an essay on NPR.) Randy Newman called Eminem a “kindred spirit.” “Those are all things I look for in rock and roll.” “The guy is funny, smart and sometimes shocking,” author Stephen King gushed on his Web site. But some of the vitriol directed at Eminem has diminished replaced not just by grudging respect, but by downright enthusiasm from some unlikely quarters. Well, he’s still not America’s sweetheart. The Grammy-winning Detroit rapper had millions in album sales, but little love from mainstream America. Gay and women’s groups blasted him as a homophobe and misogynist. Politicians condemned his obscenity-laced and violent lyrics. The characters, incidents and locations portrayed and the names herein are fictitious, and any similarity to or identification with the location, name, character or history of any person, product or entity is entirely coincidental.New York ? Until recently, it seemed only kids and music critics could love Eminem. One could arrive at this conclusion through various aspects of the movie’s plot (e.g., the tabloid show Skylark Tonight doesn’t exist, Kim Jong-Un was not assassinated by Seth Rogen and James Franco), but one could also discern the truth simply by watching the film’s end credits, which noted:
The Interview was written by Evan Goldberg, Dan Sterling, and Seth Rogen, and while the movie did include cameos from celebrities such Eminem and Guy Fieri playing themselves, the events that took place in the film were completely fictional. The interview sequence in which he appeared was a scripted scene acted out for a movie, not a real off-the-cuff interview. Whatever he might personally feel, however, Eminem is not shown in that film making frank admissions about his lyrics, his feelings towards old people, or his sexuality. This headline, coupled with the fact that many people had yet to see the controversial Seth Rogen movie, led some to question whether Eminem’s comments about his sexuality made in that film were real. Websites such as the Huffington Post, Billboard and the Advocate published a clip from the film along with headlines similar to “Eminem Comes Out as Gay in The Interview“: Shortly after moviegoers witnessed Eminem’s cameo in the movie The Interview (released in late 2014), rumors began circulating about the authenticity of comments the rap star made during the course of an interview included in that film.