Hip-Hop and Eminem in Detroit

Hip-hop music is a type of music that became largely popular in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, mostly among African-American youth. In the streets of big cities that were inhabited by these African-Americans is where the music really began to take off and diversify into a large part of the music industry. In the city of Detroit, Michigan, there are many poor and underprivileged people struggling to get by and many of them tried to channel their troubles into music.  Detroit had a large hip-hop following and there were many young and aspiring artists that wanted to try to get famous and be the next big sensation, coming out of Detroit’s underground hip-hop and rap scene. Arguably the most notorious of these is Marshall Mathers, better known by his stage name Eminem. Eminem had to take an unusual path to his success and it was not the easiest or smartest pathway for him to take. He was an aspiring white rapper growing up in mostly black neighborhoods where he was bullied and made fun of because he simply did not fit into the typically black hip-hop culture and he was seen as a joke to most of his peers. However hard is journey was, Eminem made it out of Detroit’s underground scene, he got out of Detroit’s poor and dangerous neighborhoods, and he became an international rap icon and one of the most beloved Michigan artists, because of his loyalty to his home town.

Growing up in Lower Class Detroit

          

  Eminem was raised mostly in suburban Detroit and had to relocate homes very frequently because his young, poor, uneducated mother could not keep a job for more than a few months and they were really struggling to get by. He describes frequently that he and his mother did not really get along that well because she was too young perhaps to have a child, and she couldn’t afford to raise him on her own. Suburban Detroit wasn’t exactly a perfect place to raise a child either for a single mother. Where Eminem lived mainly were poor black neighborhoods with a few poor white families mixed in as well. He did not exactly fit in with many of these people and he was bullied a lot by them. To go along with all of the bullying from the other kids, his mother was not exactly treating him like a child should be treated. She allegedly was addicted to prescription drugs and was verbally and physically abusive to Eminem when he was younger. This caused him to become very reserved and he kept to himself and had very few friends. Having few friends and growing up in the ghetto and getting picked on at school is hard for anybody to endure, let alone somebody who had nothing to cling on to.

             Rap Battling in Detroit

Eminem was a very poor student and he did not end up graduating high.  The only subject that he liked was English, but that was not enough to keep him from dropping out of school at the age of 17 after failing 9^th grade three times. In order to make some kind of money, he had to look for little jobs at little food joints. On the side though, he would enter in Detroit’s growing underground rap battles. A rap battle is when two rappers take turns insulting each other by means of rap lyrics that they create on the spot. Rap battling in Detroit was mainly dominated by young black men and when he first came on the scene, Eminem was looked at as just some nerdy white guy that was lost in the wrong place. However, he proved to everybody that saw him that he was a very skilled lyricist and that he could hang around with the best of them in the battles. This was when he first realized that he had a gift and that the poor kid from Detroit finally had something to hold onto; something that he was actually good at, and better than others at. There was an event in Los Angeles called the rap Olympics that he entered and ended up coming in second place. However, he won the ultimate prize because somebody in the crowd new somebody from Interscope Records and Eminem’s demo tape got sent along to Dr. Dre out in Los Angeles. The Detroit rap scene was notorious enough that people from all over the country were taking an interest in it.

 Eminem and 8 Mile

   Eminem’s early rap career and the struggles that he had to endure at that time in his life are also depicted in the movie “8 Mile” fairly accurately. Eminem has said that he grew up “on the wrong side of 8 mile road,” meaning the Detroit side. In the movie, the character Jimmy Smith Jr. is an aspiring rapper that has to move into a trailer with his mom when his girlfriend says that she is pregnant, because he cannot afford to pay for a child and pay for studio time simultaneously. In real life Eminem did have a child when he was fairly young with a woman named Kim Scott, and he was forced to work odd jobs to make a little bit of money so that he could raise her child the best that he could for an undereducated dad in Detroit. In the movie, the location that Jimmy Smith Jr. did most of his battling was referred to as “The Shelter” which is where his friend Future was the host of the battling. When Eminem was growing up, he did not have many friends except for one that he met in Detroit that wen by the name Proof. Eminem and Proof would go down to The Shelter in Detroit and that is really where Eminem got started with battling and that is how he improved is skills and learned what it took to become a successful rapper.

         

   Making the movie 8 mile and playing as the main character was one of Eminem’s ways of giving back to the community that molded him and helped him achieve his superstar status. It really showed the culture of the poorer, lower-class families and how essential it was for people like him to go to those battles at the shelter and at other venues so that they could practice honing their skills and becoming the first big rapper out of Detroit. Making this movie showed that there was a huge hip-hop following and it allows for everybody else in Detroit that aspires to be a rapper to keep trying and it gives them a sense of hope because even a poor kid from the trailer parks can make it out and become successful with the right drive. Another notable thing for Eminem to do was that he played a concert at Detroit’s Ford Field in front of fifty thousand fans. The fans in this crowd ranged from age 7, to men well in to their 40s. His loyalty to the city that raised him and his enormous fame allowed for him to sell fifty thousand tickets to people of all ages and every single one of them was there because of him. His effect on the Detroit area and his influence on the state of Michigan will certainly not be forgotten or looked past for any time in the near future.