Detroit rapper Obie Trice is the growling thug whose songs on the 8 Mile soundtrack ("Adrenaline Rush" and a verse on "Love Me") mark him as one of hip-hop's angriest new MCs. Like Eminem -- and Rabbit, Em's character in the movie -- Trice got his start battling other MCs at Detroit's Hip-Hop Shop. He didn't get to know Eminem until 2000, when Bizarre, from Em's D12 posse, set up a meeting. "Em was in a rush," Trice recalls. "He was in a car. I just stuck my head in the window and spit, and it was the shit. It's been smiles and handshakes since then."

Last summer, Trice signed to Eminem's Shady Records, which will release Trice's full-length debut early next year.

Trice, 24, started rhyming at age eleven. His mom bought him a karaoke machine, and he'd spend hours in his room writing his rhymes. "I always did good in writing in school," he says. He also spent time hustling. "I been through the hood hustle, nickel-and-diming. I wasn't no major drug dealer. I was the little guy on the corner." When Trice started at the Hip-Hop Shop, he went by the name Obie-Wan. "Some 'May the force be with you'-type shit," he says. D12's Proof suggested he go back to his birth name, and "it just stuck with me," Trice says.

Eventually, Trice took his small profits and invested them in his skills. "A studio session is forty-five dollars an hour," he says, "and we used to go in with fifty dollars and punch out a song in less than an hour." Nowadays, there's no penny-counting. "Eminem is a perfectionist," Trice says. "I can spend the night in that motherfucker if I want to."

His success is also helping to show that the talent in Detroit runs deep. "The hip-hop scene is definitely evolving here," Trice says. "It's been here, it just was unnoticed -- we gotta go to New York or Cali to get recognized. But now that this movie is showing the level of hip-hop here, I think a lot of people will start checking for Detroit."

TOURE
(December 4, 2002)