They cannot be serious. "Rap hero Eminem is the most shocking and controversial singer in the world today," they write in the papers and say on the television. Sitting in front of me though, is a puny-looking kid who looks like he's 18, sipping mineral water and fussing over the undone laces on his brand-new trainers. He proudly shows off his new video, in which he parodies Britney Spears and Christine Aguilera. When it's over, he draws a breath, opens his mouth and says: "All those boy/girl bands are fake, trash, horrible no-talents.
They're little watered-down pop groups which somebody sticks together and they are so fuckin' phoney. You can only rhyme "fire" and "desire" and "heart" and "fall apart" so many times and I'm sick of seeing it and sick of hearing it. F*** N Sync, f*** Backstreet Boys, f*** Britney Spears, f*** Christina Aguilera. That shit is trash to me."
The 25-year-old Eminem (real name Marshall Mathers - hence his nickname) has built a side-line career on "telling it like it is". Primarily though, he's a multi-million-selling hip-hop who has done the near impossible - proved that white kids can rap (remember Vanilla Ice?) and managed to upset just about everybody in the music industry because of his "earthy" approach. This is a man who sings about which Spice Girl he wants to impregnate; about feeding his girlfriend magic mushrooms so she can recover memories of child abuse; a man who has a song called Just Don't Give A F*** and another called Still Don't Give A F***.
He has been described as someone only a mother could love - only his mother is currently suing him for $10 million after Eminem remarked in a US magazine that "my mom does more drugs than I do".
What pulls Eminem apart from the ranks of common or garden gangsta rappers, is not just his skin colour but his introduction of trailer trash concerns into his music. Part Jerry Springer, part South Park, he sings about getting thrown out of school, having nowhere to live and working minimum-wage jobs. But there's a lot more to him than that. First, he can actually write rap lyrics: take "My thesis will smash a stereo to pieces/My a capella releases plastic masterpieces through telekinesis/and eases you mentally, gently, sentimentally, instrumentally/With entity, dementedly meant to be an infinite". Second, he's clever: "You know, there are kids out there who, believe it or believe it not, want to be have-nots," he says. "The kids who come from wealthy backgrounds and listen to my music sometimes do it to say, `fuck you mom and dad, this is what I wanna do, I wanna listen to hip-hop and wear my hat backwards' ".
Born in Detroit, Eminem's mother was 15 when she had him - he doesn't know his father. He grew up in tough areas where he was regularly beaten up by gangs and hadguns pulled on him. "I was always getting jumped, dog," he says. "On the way to school, at school, on the way back from school. Why? I was puny and timid and I lived in a fucked-up neighbourhood where there was always some kind of drama going on."
After going to a hip-hop gig when he was 13, he began to make up his own rap rhyming schemes and would practice with the orders he was given as a short-order cook. It was abundantly clear he was talented but his skin colour just didn't fit with the sort of music he wanted to do. "All the black kids were going `you're a white boy, what are you rapping for, why don't you go into rock 'n' roll' but I knew what I wanted," he says.
After an appearance at the Los Angeles Rap Olympics (a major showcase for new hip-hop talent) in 1997, Dr Dre formerly of rap band Niggaz With Attitude, and one of the biggest players in the rap world, offered to produce his debut album. "All of these people were saying to me `but he's white, he's not going to make it', " says Dr Dre, "but I didn't care if he was purple. When I went into the studio with him that first day, I thought that one day he would be bigger than Michael Jackson."
Eminem's first album, The Slim Shady LP, released two years ago, has now sold five million copies and been subject to scrutiny by all manner of groups who are opposed to his apparent celebration of drug taking and apparent attitude towards women. A song on the album, '97 Bonnie and Clyde was about how Eminem and his young daughter teamed up to kill his girlfriend. "Here, you wanna help Dada tie a rope around this rock?/Then we'll tie it to her footsie, then we'll roll her off the dock/Here we go, count of three. One, two, three, wee!/There goes Mama, splashing in the water/No more fighting with Dad, no more restraining order".
"It's not meant to be taken literally, the way some people have done," says Eminem. "I wrote that after a row I had with my girlfriend, I felt that she was making it difficult for me to see my daughter." Now reunited, the couple's on-off relationship forms the basis of many of Eminem's lyrics. Love, though is a taboo subject when it comes to his rapping: "No, I don't do all that mushy shit," he says.
What about all the "bitching" and "hoing" in your lyrics? "I bitch, yeah," he says, "I have a fairly salty relationship with women and it's always been like that. But most of the time when I'm saying shit about women, when I'm saying "bitches" and "ho's", it's so ridiculous. It's just me taking the stereotypical rapper to the extreme. No, I don't hate women - in general. What I do is really just a witty version of what all rappers do, that is create a fictional character to play out a drama. All the critics and all the people complaining about me, you know, they just don't realise. The world is a fucked-up place, I might as well laugh about it. That's all it is".
Eminem - pretty fly for a white guy.
The new Eminem album, Marshall Mathers is out on the Aftermath label.
