Frank Rich profiles Eminem in some great detail in this Sunday's NY Times Magazine:

Flashback: It is the year 2000, and Public Cultural Enemy No. 1 is a rapper named Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers III), who has ascended from America's closest approximation of hell (aka his hometown, Detroit). His abundant use of the words ''bitch'' and ''faggot'' has aroused the full spectrum of P.C. police, left and right. 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, he can't be ghettoized: his music is saturating the suburbs at a faster clip than that of black hip-hop artists. Congress, inflamed by Columbine and looking for scapegoats, rounds up the usual suspects for 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 exults in his role as universally despised spokesman for alienated Middle American youth. ''White America! I could be one of your kids!'' goes its hectoring refrain, insistently gaining in malevolence as if a furious mob were gearing up for a rampage. At its climax he vows to urinate on the White House lawn and hurls expletives at Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore. But the roaring throng of 16,000 at the Palace of Auburn Hills is not angry. There is barely a whiff of pot in the air, let alone violence. It's a happy crowd, mixed in race and sex, that might just as well have congregated to cheer the Pistons, who also play at the Palace, or at a megachurch or a mall. Even some boomers are on hand (me among them), as well as a few smiling pre-PG-13 kids perched on their dads' shoulders. ''It's kind of strange,'' Eminem would tell me when I asked 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.''

Could it be that in just two years the scourge of bourgeois values is now entering the American mainstream? We may find out next weekend, when the country is blanketed with Eminem's debut as a movie star in ''8 Mile,'' a film loosely based on his life. Unlike, say, Prince's ''Purple Rain,'' which always put the musical needs of its star's fan base first, this is a big-studio effort to tap into the national jugular, and it's produced by Brian Grazer, of last year's glossily heart-tugging Oscar champ, ''A Beautiful Mind.'' Grazer is betting that his movie will confirm that Eminem, far from being a public peril, has now ''crossed over to the larger demographic.''

Should Eminem make that leap, he will hardly be the first pop rebel to do so. When you are the No. 1 act in music, no matter how provocative your songs or how ugly your rap sheet, the culture industry has a vested interest not merely in protecting the franchise but also in expanding it. Moral scolds can condemn each new rock phenomenon as loudly as they like — as they have been doing since the 1950's — but the music is just too contagious and the money too dizzying for anyone in authority to counter the power of a roaring market. Thus has Mick Jagger, the antichrist of Altamont, become both a knight and an establishment corporate franchise, celebrated as a C.E.O. on the cover of Fortune. Ozzy Osbourne is a lovable TV star. Yesterday's ''Revolution'' can always be tomorrow's Nike commercial.

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