Whatever You Say I Am: The Life and Times of Eminem by Anthony Bozza

Home truths from the trailer-park boy

Looking at itself through the Hollywood mirror, America in the early Nineties gazed at a repellent image. Everything seemed dumb or dumber. Music was, for white Americans at least, little better. When Kurt Cobain's death robbed grunge of its most earnest spokesman, the industry had only rap on offer, which even in its gangsta form had a vibrancy and wit that tired mainstream rock could not match. Rap was dominated by African Americans; a few whites were hyped, and failed.

Enter Eminem. A wised-up white rapper in a dumbed-down world, Eminem is everything America needs him to be, as even would-be censors will see after reading Anthony Bozza's book. Persevere: this is a slow starter. One breathless account of the star-struck author in a limo with Eminem dissing everyone would be enough. We get too many. The important thing about Eminem is that he turns this unpleasant normality into beats and rhymes which appeal to millions.

We also don't need the American Dream narrative in which the boy genius emerges from trailer-trash origins. The movie 8 Mile, and Eminem's lyrics, tell that tale, however mythologised. Bozza soon begins to work at the why and how of the story, discussing the origins and development of hip-hop culture, examining Detroit's place in American music history, and looking at race and ethnicity in the US before getting back to the nitty-gritty of those lyrics and what Eminem "means".

Always shifting but never approaching equality, race relations in the US are key to Eminem's success. Eminem has achieved a level of performed blackness indicating a shift away from skin and to culture as the centre of identity.

His first two albums found success among black followers as well as white teenagers looking beyond punk rock for doses of anger management. Many reviewers, and an odd coalition of family-values and gay pressure groups, were hostile, although the controversy proved again that in pop there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

So far, yet not so far from Elvis, or even Mick Jagger. Whatever the differences, whites performing blackness can easily be written as a story of theft - as Eminem acknowledges. So to the third album, The Eminem Show, which in "White America" contains the widest-selling critique of the white US in popular music since Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA. It was widely reviewed even in middle America as an artistic triumph. Post 9/11, America has realised that lyrics are not the world's biggest problem, and that music is a greatest cultural resource.

So Eminem has become the Fool at the rich man's table by providing home truths from the trailer-park boy who once lived in a poor, culturally black environment. Eminem is the Fool; but not an idiot. In embracing him, middle America has turned away from the dumb, and for that we should be thankful.