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

• Author: Rich, Frank
• Position: 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...