The New Elvis? From Cultural Enemy to mainstream megastar: Eminem takes rap into America's living rooms and onto the big screen. (arts).

Flashback: It is the year 2000, and Public Cultural Enemy No. 1 is a Detroit rapper named Eminem (real name: Marshall Mathers III). His abundant use of coarse language and slurs deriding gays and women has aroused the full spectrum of Political Correctness police, liberal and conservative. The violence in his songs is echoed by headlines of his own arrest on gun charges in two consecutive public brawls. And since he is white, his music is saturating the suburbs at a faster rate than that of black hip-hop artists. Congress, inflamed by the shootings at Columbine High School and looking for scapegoats, targets his music in hearings.

But now it is two years later, and on a muggy late summer evening, Eminem is performing before his fans in the Detroit suburbs, the last stop of his 2002 Anger Management Tour. A high point of the show is a song in which he touts his role as universally despised spokesman for alienated Middle American youth. "White America! I could be one of your kids!" goes its refrain, insistently gaining in malevolence as if a furious mob were gearing up for a rampage.

But the roaring throng of 16,000 at the Palace of Auburn Hills is not angry. It's a happy crowd, mixed in race and sex, that might just as well have congregated to cheer the Detroit Pistons basketball team (who also play at the Palace) or at a huge church or a mall. Even some older adults are on hand, as well as a few smiling pre-PG-13 kids perched on their dads' shoulders. "It's kind of strange," Eminem tells me when I ask later if he was noticing any difference in his audience of late. "It used to range from 10 years old to 25. Now it seems to be from 5 years old to 55."

MELTING THE CRITICS

Could it be that in just two years the scourge of middle-of-the-road values is now entering the American mainstream?

Should Eminem make that leap, he will hardly be the first pop rebel to do so. Moralists can condemn each new rock phenomenon--as they have been doing since the 1950s--but the music is just too contagious and the money too dizzying for anyone in authority to counter the power of a roaring market. It's why Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones became both a British knight and a corporate franchise and Ozzy Osbourne is a lovable TV star.

If there's a particular template for Eminem's career at this early point, it's that of the young Elvis (a comparison that Eminem hates). Both men took a musical form invented by African-Americans and gave it a popular white face. But Eminem has advantages Elvis did not. He writes his own material rather than singing anyone else's songs. His mentor isn't a white impressario like Elvis's manager Colonel Parker, but the legendary hip-hop producer Dr. Dre, whose endorsement gave him instant credibility with black and white audiences alike and shielded him from accusations of cultural theft.

That Eminem is also showing Elvis-esque potential to bust out of the youth market is not entirely a surprise. Any listener with open ears and some affinity for the musical vocabulary of hip-hop can easily become hooked on his music. Violence is merely one of the many notes he sounds in a range that stretches from schoolyard slapstick to compassion, and the mayhem is so intentionally over-the-top that it seems no more or less offensive than typical movie fare.

UNEXPECTED TRUCE

In a country in which broken homes, absentee parents, and latchkey kids are common to every social class, Eminem can touch some of the hottest emotional buttons. He can be juvenile too, but what else is new in pop music?

It's an open question just how Middle America he will go. Certainly some sort of transition is under way for Eminem, who turned 30 last month. Though in "White America" he brags about being "in trouble with the government," neither the song nor the video has aroused any new protests from Washington. "It's something that we've blatantly noticed," says Mathers, who is known by his associates as either Marshall or Em, when asked about this unexpected truce.

EARNEST, NOT SULLEN

Brian Grazer is the producer of Eminem's debut film, 8 Mile (Both the movie and its star have received generally good reviews). Grazer told me that when they met, Mathers initially threw him off guard by sitting in glowering silence for minutes on end. The Mathers I met recently on the afternoon of the MTV Video Music Awards was neither sullen nor wired but straightforward, earnest almost to a fault, always in direct eye contact.

I asked him to square the present Mathers with the shady Eminem who barely escaped jail (he got three years' probation) for his gun-toting misbehavior two years ago. "I was just being pulled in every direction, doing everything under the sun, two shows a day, touring constantly, nonstop radio interviews," he says, "and I just got caught up in the drinking and the drugs and fighting and just wilding out and doing dumb things I shouldn't have been doing."

SITTING AN EXAMPLE

This summer, People magazine celebrated him as an ideal joint-custody father to his daughter, Hailie, 6, who is the one angelic female subject (and occasional vocal participant) in his music, and as a model neighbor who attends community meetings no less, in his gated community in the northern Detroit suburbs.

"My daughter is growing up, and I'm trying to set an example for her," Mathers says.

But that's not the whole story. Hip-hop has become so big that it is now the cultural norm, not the rebellious exception to it. "People are accepting Eminem because he's a superstar," says Grazer, the 8 Mile producer.

Asked why his audience is broadening, Mathers cites his own growth.

"I'm always going to be me no matter what," he adds. "There's always going to be a part of me that's going to be as raw as when I first came out. There's always going to be that part that I can revert to if I want to go back and be that battle M.C. and say those funny punch lines and stuff to make people laugh or make people angry. But as I grow as a person and as I get older I've got to mature."

For now, though, he seems more in demand as a star than ever. As 8 Mile was awaiting its premiere, every establishment TV show from Today to 60 Minutes was approaching Marshall Mathers. Congressional critics aside, even the U.S. government has joined the Eminem bandwagon: This summer it started broadcasting his songs in the Middle East as part of its propaganda campaign to enhance America's image to young radio listeners in the Arab world.