Eminem: as multiplexes rake in the dough this month with Eminem's big-screen debut, will the spirit of Elvis be buttering the popcorn?

Interview, Nov, 2002 by Greil Marcus

Last year the great basketball player and famed uncensored mouth Charles Barkley addressed himself to the Eminem question. "You know this world is fucked up when the best rapper's white and the best golfer's black," he said. Unless he said, as another of the countless printed versions of his statement had it, "America is crazy. The best ..." You could just as well claim that if lines meant to keep certain people in their places have not only been crossed but erased, it's proof that America is anything but crazy--and it's interesting that Eminem, another famed uncensored mouth, has never made a claim like Barkley's. In The Eminem Show (Interscope), his solipsistic extravaganza of this year, you can find him comparing himself to Elvis Presley--not to proclaim himself the new king of anything, but to denigrate both Elvis and himself. He's the "fake" king, Eminem says, just like Elvis: No matter what the talent or drive, without that white skin, forget it.

Eminem may make a fool of himself in his first 2002 hit, "Without Me"--the world very nearly dried up and blew away from boredom in the time between The Marshall Mathers LP and The Erninem Show, he says (as we all know it's not as if anything else happened between the summer of 2000 and the summer of 2002)--but no one as smart as he is plays with Elvis Presley casually. Elvis is a bomb. By defusing it, Eminem gets to inhabit that fabled body without, perhaps, catching its disease.

Much separates Eminem from Elvis. Eminem, as Charles Barkley says, can rap, and Elvis probably could not have. Elvis could sing, and Eminem, as he proves conclusively on The Eminem Show, cannot. Elvis was beautiful, Eminem is not. Elvis is dead, and Eminem is alive. Most of all, Eminem has the example--the disaster--of Elvis behind him, and Elvis didn't.

In her story "Nineteen Fifty-five," Alice Walker tells the tale of an Elvis-like singer and the song that made his career--the song of a black woman much like Willie Mae Thornton, who first recorded a song much like "Hound Dog." The Elvis figure's guilty knowledge that the song can never be his, and that, worse, he can never truly understand it, destroys him. Eminem opens this month in 8 Mile, directed by Curtis Hanson, who has already made two movies, L.A. Confidential (1997) and Wonder Boys (2000), better than the good books they were based on. As Eminem moves off into a film career that it might be glibly tempting to compare in advance to that of Elvis Presley's, it's a safe bet that whatever folly might yet befall Eminem, payback for not understanding the rules that have been broken and the lines that have been crossed will not be part of it. Though he may for the moment be too modest or too smart to say it, Eminem is much more like Bob Dylan than Elvis Presley--which is to say that he is in love with th e momentum of language itself, that when his words are ringing, their momentum becomes his--and that when that happens he is likely to find himself at least one step ahead of anybody else.

Greil Marcus is Interview's Music Writer at Large.