Why Eminem loves Detroit: “Everyone looks down on our city”
Eminem was an unusual figure to emerge on the rap scene when he did. Not only was he white, but he wasn’t even from any of hip-hop’s traditional centres.
Em wasn’t from New York or Atlanta or Los Angeles, although his career would, of course, come to be entwined with the West Coast’s Dr Dre. But the man himself was proudly from Detroit, Michigan, which, in the days when Eminem was developing as a rapper, was hardly the most celebrated place for its hip-hop.
Detroit has gotten a lot of bad press through the last number of decades, driven largely by major economic and demographic changes that occurred throughout the second half of the 20th century into the first decades of the 21st. Deindustrialisation hit the city very hard indeed.
In 1950, Detroit was among America’s most highly inhabited cities, with a recorded population of nearly 1,850,000. This dropped dramatically over the course of the following seven decades, with the 2020 population seeing it down about a million from that mid-20th century height.
In addition to the population decline, the crime rate in Detroit is believed to be one of the highest in all of the US. The city in 2013 filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in American history, while the city is almost synonymous with the very idea of urban decay. While many of these grim trends have somewhat begun to ease and even reverse in recent years, the city’s image is a long way from being rehabilitated in the minds of many.
This negative way of looking at Detroit is very widespread, but Eminem is frustrated by it, as he expressed on his Shade 45 hip-hop radio station in 2013. In spite of “all the bad shit that you hear in the press” about his home city, he loves it. The city, and its proud music heritage, has “helped” and “shaped” him.
Detroit may not have been widely known as a hip-hop city until Eminem blew up, but it is certainly known for its role in hosting other scenes. The development of Motown soul, proto-punk, and techno can all be traced back to the city, while several other scenes have thrived there, too.
Em noted how inspired he was by Detroit, highlighting especially how much he loved its inhabitants. “I kind of feel like coming from Detroit,” he said on air, “we’re the underdogs and everyone looks down on our city. And I want to be there to say, ‘What the fuck?’”
Thanks to its people, Eminem loves his home city and he’s proud of it. “It made me,” he insisted. “It shaped me in every which way possible.”