But his music has also been hailed as groundbreaking and bold, and, while selling 12 million albums in the U.S., it has bridged a cultural chasm between whites and blacks. His four Grammy nominations have caused great shudders of indignation and disgust because of the content of his work, which some see as vile and violently twisted. To the world, he’s known as Eminem, the best-selling rapper who will step onto the global stage of the Grammys tonight in Los Angeles and perhaps walk off with the coveted trophy for best album. Growing up in a tough black neighborhood, his path was to embrace-not run from-music that sprang from the anger and violence of the black urban experience. Everybody here knows that, like rungs on the social ladder, you go up to get out.īut it was here on the lower rungs a decade ago that a young white kid named Marshall Bruce Mathers III found a different escape from urban poverty. Eight Mile Road is the city limits, followed by Nine Mile Road and so on. In the small neighborhoods of aging brick houses on this city’s east side, the streets stretching into the suburbs are intersected by roads marking the distance from the downtown core.
