A knowledgeable hiphop lover’s list of the best rap artists would not include Eminem, the 30-year-old white rapper (born Marshall Mathers III) from Detroit. Lacking Scarface’s sonority, Chuck D’s vision, Biggie’s fluency, L.L. Cool J’s flair, Slick Rick’s humor, Jay Z’s brilliance, Ice Cube’s astuteness, Rakim’s flow, Ice-T’s roguishness, Flavor Flav’s ingenuity, Snoop Dogg’s slyness, Eminem’s critical acclaim is due not to vocal virtuosity or verbal mastery. Instead his endorsement by the mainstream media has everything to do with the spectacle of whiteness. Even some black rap fans participate in this adoration; they’re grateful for white attention to a black cultural form, even when the goal is to expropriate it. Eminem’s assertion of underdog status — imitating the black rapper’s stereotyped vitriol — actually works to reinforce racial myths that separate whites from blacks. That’s why Emimen — and not the rappers mentioned above — has been acclaimed a genius.
Eminem appropriates styles of speaking and behaving that white pop audiences have coveted since Norman Mailer’s 1958 essay “The White Negro” brought race-envy out of the closet. This was confirmed last summer when The New York Observer asked oldster journalists Paul Slansky and Janet Maslin for testimonies to the white rapper. Soon after, the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau raged against a colleague, Richard Goldstein, for calling Eminem homophobic. Goldstein dared to challenge Christgau’s (and the media industry’s) coronation of Eminem as “a genius.”
Eminem’s songs deflect attention from the inequalities that derive from racial oppression. Never identifying with blacks, he avoids expressing solidarity with the frustrations black rappers feel. And that’s not simply because his experience as a white suburbanite is different; his industry triumph depends on asserting the privilege of being white in America — the prerogative to whine about petty shit while leaving one’s “brothers” behind.
It is this malcontent’s style of white rap — as opposed to the good-time rapping of Vanilla Ice, Beastie Boys, 3rd Base, Kid Rock — that reinforces racial polarization. Eminem limits hiphop’s usual themes (songs that variously recall the tradition of social protest from Negro spirituals and Civil Rights era agitation) to mere juvenile griping, trashing rap’s political potential while connecting to the triviality of corporate pop. This has been praised as Eminem’s “rock move,” an assessment that (in its very reliance on rockist attitude) only mystifies social and cultural difference. Anthropologists agree that race is an unscientific concept, but rock critics won’t admit that Eminem’s swaggering racial identity satisfies their own need for advantage over other people, citizens, artists.
Eminem has to be proclaimed a “genius” (the same way Christgau ordained P.J. Harvey a genius while never so honoring Mary J. Blige’s musical expression of personal female dilemma) in order to sustain the group-esteem of whites. This mindset rules the major institutions of pop journalism (Eminem’s Vibe and Rolling Stone and New York Times cover stories) and now the film industry (with the release of Eminem’s mediocre movie 8 Mile). Indifferent whites always thought rap was a sociopathetic art and Eminem’s aberrant imitation seems to confirm their misperception. His belligerence is respected as if it came from a deeper hurt, a smarter head than those squabbling Negroes. None of this indicates the arrival of a great or innovative artist; it’s the old story of racial aggrandizement — the pressure to distinguish one mischievous white from hiphop’s horde.
Behind this white-as-genius charade is the notion that black artists live through their bodies not their minds — a prejudice that bebop fought against in the 50s and that hiphop should have countered definitively. In the 80s, it was explicitly disputed by the r&b-inspired postmodernism of white artists like Green Gartside, whose group Scritti Politti put an academic gloss on the musical structures and vocal expressions that were taken-for-granted (that is, considered un-intellectual) when employed by Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson or Debarge. (Green’s interviews, cover-art and studio collaborations with Miles Davis, Chaka Kahn, Marcus Miller were veritable footnotes citing black genius.) Despite the creative deconstruction and reflexivity in innumerable hiphop compositions, artists from Public Enemy to De La Soul, Son of Bazerk to Jay-Z have never received the commendations immediately heaped upon Eminem. Denying them praise is fundamental to racist hegemony. It implies that before Eminem there was no genius in hiphop.
This is how pop media works: There were too many Beastie Boys to focus the same white-media admiration — plus, the over-celebrated Beasties weren’t much interested in playing out the separatist overtones (after all, they’re Reform Jews and Buddhists). But Eminem reaps the benefits of playing to white nationism. (“I never would have dreamed in a million years I’d see/So many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me/ Who share the same views and the same exact beliefs …”) He emphasizes grievance without inquiring into its social/political roots — a method of rabble rousing as old as Dixie.
Love will bring us together, as fellow Detroiter Kid Rock knows, rising out of the Motor City’s white working class with loud, funny tales of ambition and lust and black-white awareness. But the anger shtick keeps Eminem singular — a lightning rod not just for gay and feminist groups offended by the epithets and taunts in his lyrics but also for the subconscious resentments of empowered, “liberal” whites. Eminem’s bitterness connects with their sense of entitlement and his rap venom unloads their hidden fear of losing power; giving them leverage (pop cred) against all those highly vocal, aggrieved young blacks who have previously commanded the cultural stage.
Thus Maslin’s approbation: “A lot of what [Eminem] says makes me uncomfortable but the bottom line is if it’s good you have to acknowledge that. And it is. It’s very cathartic to listen to him.” One wonders if Maslin felt catharsis from Geto Boys’ “Still,” Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us,” Public Enemy’s “Nighttrain,” Morrissey’s “Nobody Loves Us”? Similarly uninformed, Paul Slansky says: “There should be no stigma attached to being an Adult who loves Eminem.” Desperate to appear with-it, these middle-aged writers outdo the embarrassments of naïve young record-buyers who confuse Eminem’s belligerence with brave truth.
No artist can be blamed for being what he is not, but when Eminem’s unenlightened tirades are over-praised, his specious stance must be closely criticized. Rather than a figure of cultural resistance, he’s the most egregious symbol of our era’s selfish trends. With his bootstrap crap and references to rugged individualism reminiscent of the 80s, he’s a heartless Reagan-baby — but without the old man’s politesse. Unlike most black rappers, Eminem rejects fraternity and his hostility toward women (his mother and babymama in particular on the songs “Kim” and “Cleaning Out My Closet”) betrays rap’s usual call for social unity. His first single, “My Name Is” confessed a carefully calculated psychosis; Eminem’s multiple personalities (including Slim Shady) conveyed the bewilderment of reactionary youth. His three albums of obstinate rants culminate in the egocentric track “Without Me,” making him the Ayn Rand of rap — a pop hack who refuses to look beyond himself. On the song “White America,” he asks “Have you ever been discriminated?” insulting blacks but shrewdly alerting his white-flight constituency. It suggests that Eminem speaks the feelings of poor, disenfranchised whites but that’s mostly a marketing myth. I observed at an 8 Mile screening that his most enthusiastic audience are those middle-class, middle-aged whites reveling in the peculiar animus they feel towards Americans who might be gaining on them.
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Eminem has become a star for exactly the reasons the media excoriates black rappers — his enmity and anger. Saying it’s white folks’ turn to vent, however, isn’t the same as acclaiming this rapper — out of all rappers — a genius. That belittles rap as mere aggression. But minus righteousness, angry rap is dismissible. Rap is exciting when it voices desire for social redress; the urge toward public and personal justice is what made it progressive. Eminem’s resurrected Great White Hope disempowers hiphop’s cultural movement by debasing it. His “Soldier” gloms on to black rap’s rebel posturing but its “controversy” and “playa hating” are clichés. It makes no original statement like Biggie’s “Mo Money, Mo Problems” or Willie D’s “I’m Goin’ Out Like a Soldier.” And nothing’s duller than a pop star calling himself radical or complaining about being rich. “This is not a game this fame…No one ever puts a grasp on the fact that I sacrificed everything I had,” Eminem says in “Say Goodbye Hollywood” (a tune more like Billy Joel’s lugubrious ballad than L.L. Cool J’s funny-rueful “Goin’ Back to Cali.”). How spoiled, how appalling!
“Cleaning Out My Closet” is even more petulant, with its draggy, flat final accent — a dull, mean flip of Tupac’s “Dear Mama.” There’s no emotional development here, no compassion; it’s a thoughtless, ponderous song. (As a black female BET comic said, “How you gonna teach your daughter to love by refusing to let her grandmother ever see her?”) But reviewers overlook the pettiness of Eminem’s attitude. “Imagine witnessing your mama poppin’ pills in the kitchen,” he raps. Less sympathetic than the Stone’s “Mother’s Little Helper” or “19th Nervous Breakdown,” its cock-rock arrogance sets a new low in hiphop sexism. Malcolm McLaren’s pioneering ‘80s Buffalo Gals project offered an affectionate example of cultural borrowing with ebullient female metaphors (and featuring ersatz do-si-dos sampled on “Without Me” and “Square Dance”) but Eminem simply steals from McLaren and rejects his cross-cultural positivity. Even “Square Dance’s” lyrical climax is lame and repetitive: “Nothing moves me more than a groove that soothes me/ Nothing soothes me more than a groove that boosts me/ Nothing boosts me more suits me beautifully/ There’s nothing you can do to me/ Stab me shoot me/ Psychotic hypnotic product/ I gotta take antibiotic/ Ain’t no body hotta and so on/ And yada yada gotta talk a lotta/ Humm de le le lada/ Oochee walla walla/ Hmm de dada dada/ But ya gotta gotta.” Fact is, you gotta be ignorant of the past year of hiphop to think this is anything but derivative. And his threat “to ambush this Bush generation” never rises to the level of the stinging political commentary in PE’s cogent jibe “Son of a Bush.” “Square Dance’s” politics aren’t radical or genuinely subversive — just a fretful rejection of any American authority. Not biting the hand that feeds him. It’s mere spite. The sputum of a Ritalin kid.
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When Eminem invites Dr. Dre, Nas, Busta Rhymes, to “come square dance with me,” he inadvertently exposes white pettiness, inviting black rappers to join his pity party. Eminem’s meanness overcomes no social obstacles and so must be heard differently from marginal voices that express exhaustion, effort, justified opposition. Boasting “I could be one of your kids. Little Eric looks just like this/ Erica loves my shit/I go to TRL/ Look at how many hugs I get,” he enjoys both the censure and the money the white majority gives him. But he foolishly presumes he’s the first pop star to fight for his right to be dirty/arty — “The ring leader of the circus of worthless pawns/ March right up to the steps of Congress and piss on the lawns of the White House/ To burn the flag and replace it with an advisory sticker/ To spit liquor in the face of this democracy of hypocrisy/ Fuck you Ms. Cheney/ Fuck you Tipper Gore/ Fuck you with the freedom of speech this United States of Embarrassment would allow me to have.” Ice-T and Luther Campbell already made this argument. So did Twisted Sister. Yet Eminem’s trite puns are supposed to pass for profundity.
He raps, “We sing for these kids who don’t have a thing/ Except for a dream and a fucking rap magazine” as if pledging fidelity (keeping it real). But if he thinks capitalism works that simply — or answers generational despair so easily — then he’s a worthless, deluded folk fraud, shilling for the industry instead of thinking his way through desperation. When Eminem shouts in “White America” about “a fucking army marching in back of me,” the reference is to that stunning MTV Awards moment when scores of peroxide-blond white boys in t-shirts marched behind Marshall Mathers into Radio City Music Hall — a processional toward media coronation that was political as well as fashionable. A kid from militia Michigan should know such a “rebellion” humiliates democracy, rather than demonstrating its radical fulfillment.
It’s awful to celebrate Eminem’s juvenile manner, his inability to work through personal/political issues. On “Without Me” the line “This looks like a job for me” comes from superhero comic books but really just describes a money-making opportunity. Eminem’s carpe diem lacks any feeling for the complex legacy of working class struggles, which should be familiar to any Detroit area resident. Springsteen did much more with work-life on Darkness on the Edge of Town. For Eminem, factory town life, trailer park life, white working class economic stress never even inspire a good, resonant couplet.
Speed rapping and over-rhyming instead, Eminem simply plays back music critics’ praise: “Everybody only wants to discuss me/ But this must mean I’m disgusting/ But it’s just me/ I’m just obscene/ Though I’m not the first king of controversy/ I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/ To do black music so and use it to get myself wealthy/ Hey, here’s a concept that works/ 20 million white rappers emerge/ But no matter how many fish in the sea/ It’ll be so empty without me.” Obviously, Eminem never heard Chuck D’s caveat, “Don’t rhyme for the sake of riddling.” At least the song’s la-la-la-la-la chorus is funny, blending with his whiney voice into a bratty update of early Beastie Boys. White critics love the mischievousness; it’s a bourgie outlet. But let’s be unfair for a bit and compare “Without Me” to an Hypnotic Biggie boast: “My car goes 160/ Swiftly/ Wreck and buy a new one/ Ya crew run run run/ Da doo run run” Biggie adopts the history of pop to portray his largesse, not squeezing rhymes into one pinched scheme but expanding the rhyme and rhythmic pattern. This is true genius rap and it gets better when Biggie slides into a fantasy pimp scherzo:
Tell them hos,
Take they clothes off slowly
Hit em with a force like Obi
Big black like Toby
Watch me roam like Romey
Lucky they don’t owe me
When they say show me
Homie
The awesome, pop modernist range of Biggie’s references cohere with the brevity and plausibility of the rhyme sources — Star Wars, Roots, Frank Sinatra, the street — without ever explicitly defining what comprises his fantasy world. It’s sexual, criminal, historical, musical and, in the end, what Eminem never is: affirmative.
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Isn’t it time we stopped calling Dr. Dre a great producer and overlooking the odious content of his material? (“I lit a flame up under his ass,” Eminem raps, making no mistake who the star is.) Anyone who’s heard the production that Jay-Z, R. Kelly and Tone got on the dazzling but neglected The Best of Both Worlds cd (or recalls how Hank Shocklee, Prince Paul and Easy Mo Be redefined the art song and brought new vision to the concept-and-party album) would know that Dr. Dre has competition — if not superiors — in the game of beats, flow and thrills. He’s done no production for Eminem that matches his work for Snoop Dogg, Blackstreet or Tupac and that fact underscores Eminem’s lack of originality. Taking behavior lessons from drug-glamorizing, woman-beating Dr. Dre is bad business. Eminen conspires with Dre to promote the worst kind of cynicism in the 50 years of rock and roll’s existence. You hear it most clearly in “Stan.” Unlike the M&Ms candy from which Marshall Mathers took his stage name, this song is not sweet and it melts in your hands upon examination:
“Stan,” Eminem’s most celebrated track, folds an epistolary rap into a horrorcore scenario. Eminem begins by portraying an adoring but troubled fan whose letters get angrier when Eminem doesn’t answer. (The fan locks his pregnant girlfriend in a car trunk and commits suicide.) Critics impressed by the song’s turgid O’Henry coda had already fallen for Eminem’s political con, his pretense of embodying the anxieties of white working class youth. Metal groups have told similar tales with more panache. There’s merely self-pity in Eminem’s version. (When he answers his fan with corny advice, it’s too late). Dre gives Eminem a doomy soundscape, paced by samples of Dido’s “Angel” that schmaltzes-up the fan/star relationship. There is plausible pathology here (“Sometimes I even cut myself to see how much it bleeds!”) but the solipsistic, defensive braying has the same disingenuousness as Eminem’s trailer-park demagoguery. In “Paint a Vulgar Picture” (1987) singer-lyricist Morrissey of The Smiths evoked the lonely working-class yearning that Eminem exploits by dangling the carrot of pop fame. Eminem distorts hiphop fans’ enthusiasm whereas Morrissey understands the classic star/fan dynamic — his song is, by far, the greatest pop treatment of the way private desire becomes public and obsession turns into critique. Trivial in comparison, “Stan” appeals to American music critics (who were apathetic to The Smiths’ ambisexual Brit pop) because it flows with their sense that male vanity is sacrosanct. Suckers for “Stan’s” false drama, their readiness to cling to Eminem’s machismo was an early sign that enthusiasm for him would be regressive
Here, in “Stan’s” quandary and desperation, we find the conventional power mechanism behind Eminem’s straight white male spectacle. “Stan” coddles male insecurities that Morrissey queered by daring to offer a sensitive (romantic) insight that challenged rock’s heterosexual hegemony (“In my bedroom in those ugly new houses, I danced my legs down to the knees”) as well as record-industry greed (“Reissue, repackage…slip them into different sleeves/ Buy both and feel deceived”). Morrissey detailed heartbreakingly mundane pop experience while Eminem only sensationalizes and sentimentalizes it — a double-whammy which suggests he’s cramped by a fear that empathy is weak, unmasculine. But that’s precisely what makes Morrissey’s perspective transcendent, subversive, humane.
The Pet Shop Boys’ disappointing answer to “Stan” and Eminem’s homophobia, “The Night I Fell in Love,” also falls for Eminem’s spectacle — unhelpfully eroticizing it as rough trade, a negotiation with conventional (and hostile) masculine symbolism. While their one-night tryst with Eminem can be heard to offer an embrace instead of censure, it’s really a rare moment of The Pets painting a vulgar picture, succumbing to hegemony. Their song may be an object lesson in teaching-by-example, but Eminem, a revanchist cultural figure, represents a stubborn ideology. Christgau excused him by saying “The reason Eminem means more than the Pet Shop Boys at his best is how provocatively and passionately he [tests] the tension between representation and authenticity that’s given rock and roll fans that funny feeling in their stomachs for nearly half a century.” For some of us, that funny feeling is nausea.
The best hiphop narrates the journey of boys into emotional maturity. Goldstein’s essay decrying Eminem’s homophobia pointed to the acceptance of hiphop’s backward turn. Eminem’s tracks — unlike Morrissey’s or The Pets’ — pander to juvenile bad-boyness (“I write fight music for high school kids”) in ways that anyone over 13-years old should see through. Hateful or ironic, his white Negro parody is not a purposeful ruse. In the silly “The Night I Fell in Love” The Pets are being pitifully forgiving — sissies — to ignore that real art is about sincerity. They endorse Eminem, wanting to be hip. Christgau and his ilk want to be young again and irresponsibly free to hate.
Eminem has started something more twisted and complex than ordinary ignorant behavior. He has perverted the way we perceive hiphop’s history and promise through his degradation of everything the culture previously stood for. Randomly choose any pre-Chronic rap track — say, Ice-T’s “Somebody’s Gotta Do It” — and, despite the crass pimpology, the record exudes pleasure. Listen to the sounds, beats to wordplay; there’s an expansive generosity you never hear in Eminem. (“‘Yo, Ice, your homeboy Adnan Khashoggi called up; wanted to borrow some more money.’ ‘No problem! Small thing to a giant!’”) For three minutes hiphop joyously redeems sexism, materialism, the whole rotten world. Eminem (screaming from his little cell in “hell”) traduces hiphop’s oppositional and affirmative roots — as did Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. But this time the pop media makes sure that all benefits accrue to the standard figure of American power: a hateful, selfish, childish white male. The status quo, yo! When you hear Eminem get personal on “Hailie’s Song” (dedicated to his daughter) it’s hair-raising to realize how much enmity and pettiness he passes on — bequeathing emotional death to his own child, and marketing it to all America’s children.
From December, 2002