|
Last Updated: Friday 18-May-2001 16:54
Biography- By: Mike Gee - Music
Editor
This is made by -Mike Gee-
Music Editor
This story is offensive.
Or is it? This story is about drawing lines and not
drawing lines. It's about judging and the right to judge. It's about what's
right
and what's wrong. It's about Eminem, the hottest rapper in the world;
a protege
of the notorious Dr Dre and the first white rapper blessed to enter that
gangsta-rap enclave and all it may or may not stand for. And it's about
his album
The Slim Shady LP which debuted a couple of months back at No 2 on the
Billboard 200 albums chart and is still riding high in the top 10.
What's the problem? Very simply that on The Slim Shady LP, Eminem has
committed to disc some of the most brutal, sexist and confrontational
lyrics this or
any decade has seen.
So shocked was iconic American
music writer and Billboard chief, Timothy
White, that he devoted his entire Music To My Ears column of March 6 to
a savage
condemnation of Eminem and his "misogynistic" album. But not
everybody agrees
with White. The Los Angeles Times gave the album a rave review saying
in part "
his [Eminem's] lyrics are so clever that he makes murder sound as if it's
a funny act
he may indulge in simply to pass time" while the similarly respected
Boston Globe
dismissed Eminem's 'hateful rhetoric' by focusing on his embrace by the
black rap
community. Similarly, other publications have found him humorous, smart,
original
and explosive.
So how bad is it? Try the
track Guilty Conscience in which Eminem's 21-year-old
'Stan' persona enters into a dialogue with Dr Dre who represents his conscience.
Eminem/Stan tells Dre he wants to surreptitiously drug and rape a girl
he's picked
up at rave party. Dre/conscience replies, "This girl's only 15 years
old/You
shouldn't take advantage of her/It's not fair".
Eminem/Stan replies with
an observation relating to her having pubic hair, then
continues, "Fuck this bitch right on the spot there/ 'Til she passes
out/And she
forgot how she got here". Finally, in the last scene, a construction
worker named
Grady (played by Eminem) decides to kill his unfaithful wife and her lover.
"Maybe he's right,"
says Dre/conscience but "think about the baby before you get
crazy". "OK," says Eminem/Grady, "thought about that.
Still I want to stab her, grab
her by the throat, get her daughter and kidnap her!" As White observed,
"Then
Eminem breaks character to confront Dre in his real-life as an ex-N.W.A.
member with
his own history of aggression. 'Aw fuck , what am I saying?' Dre concedes.
'Shoot
'em both'." Grady does.
The cover of The Slim Shady
LP takes that notion a step further depicting the
Grady-type character on a boardwalk, surrounded by the sea, a full moon
behind him
large on the horizon, his young daughter at his side, the body of his
dead wife
hanging from the boot of his car. The story is told in '97 Bonnie And
Clyde which
reveals that the husband has long abused his wife, got sick and tired
of restraining
orders and eventually killed her and dumped her body in the sea.
Elsewhere Eminem or Slim
Shady brags about taking copious amounts of drugs and
rambles his way in a high-pitched voice over sparse backing through tracks
with titles
such as Cum On Everybody, Just Don't Give A Fuck, Bad Meets Evil, Brain
Damage ...
you get the picture.
Indefensible? You'd think
so. But that's where Marshall Mathers, a fairly average
looking 24-year-old with dyed blond short hair, a darker crown, the usual
line of culturally
accepted clothing, and 10 years as a rapper, comes in.
Mathers is Eminem, and Eminem
is Slim Shady, or is he?
Eminem is on a tour bus
approaching the next show on his current US tour. It has taken
a lot to get this interview. The cell phone he's using has cut out all
the way through the
only other interview, forcing five reconnects. Nearly two hours later
than scheduled,
DT - his tour manager - puts Eminem on. DT, incidentally, sounds totally
wired and
stressed - and so is Eminem. He's strung out, a bird on a high-tension
wire, seemingly
fearing when the shock is going to hit. He doesn't seem like some monster.
He does seem
like somebody drowning in a sea of overkill. He seems scared.
He talks in the long-established
affected way of black rappers, even though he's just a
white kid from Detroit who Dre took under his wing and signed to the Aftermath
label
after he found Eminem's tape on the floor of Interscope Records boss Jimmy
Iovine's
garage. Dre says he liked Eminem's voice and what he was saying, concluded
that
people needed to hear him.
Like it or not Dre was right.
And Eminem's life changed, literally overnight.
The conversation goes like
this:
-How are things?
-"Things are things.
Good and bad all the time."
-It must be pretty hectic.
-"Is so."
-Where are you?
-To the voices, mostly female,
that are shrieking and laughing in the background
[Eminem asks]: "Where are we?" Pause, long pause.
"I'm near San Diego
on the tour bus. We've been touring for a few months, like off
and on."
-Your life must have been
turned upside down in that time.
-"I've gone from nobody to somebody in the last year. That's some
change. It's
changed my life totally. I don't know my old life anymore."
To the voices: "Are we outside the venue? Is this it?"
-The album's been in the
top 10 a long time. Did you expect all this when you
finished it?
-"I'd be lying to say
I'm not happy but it's a lot more work than I imagined. The bigger
your album, the bigger you get, the more work you gotta do. I gotta do
a lot now.
When I finished the record I didn't think it would go like this. I didn't
think that there
were that many people like me or who would think like me."
-The lyrics are radical.
-"I'm a pretty radical
guy. People get offended by my lyrics but I don't give a shit.
I don't care. You see, my comical stuff is political stuff. I'm making
fun of the world.
But there's a deeper meaning in there. While I got a chance to say what
I think,
I'm gonna take it. I've said that to a lot of people."
To the voices: "Can they see us in here? Are the windows darkened
so they can't?"
-So Slim Shady is a character,
an alter ego?
-"No. Slim Shady is another name I go by."
-So you are Slim Shady?
-"It's the dark side
of me. He's not some cartoon character running round on the screen,
shrieking and screaming."
-So you are him?
-"He's part of me.
But I'm not some maniac out there. I'm not like that. If I was I wouldn't
be sitting on this fucking bus, I'd be locked away. He's my dark, evil
side."
The phone line then drops
out. Constant attempts by the record company and myself
over the next hour to regain contact end up with DT's mailbox message.
Yo.
To round the picture out,
Eminem recently told online music zine Addicted To Noise
that he actually has a plan. The first part is to throw his stuff out
there and let people
know there's something wrong with Slim Shady. The next album will explain
why there's
something wrong with him.
Elsewhere, he confuses the
issue and perhaps himself by saying, Slim Shady had
"killed" Eminem , resulting in an album that "chronicled
death after death". This killing
of himself by what could be himself occurred on the earlier Slim Shady
EP in which Slim
Shady came to haunt him.
Eminem even says his mother's
"a bitch". She never had a job, she never had anything.
He never met his father. He's seen one picture of him.
He repeats in many of his
interviews that his aim is to shock. At that he has succeeded.
So the bottom line is if Slim Shady represents Eminem's dark side, but
not his whole
personality, can a case be made for the expression of that dark side as
genuine
artistic statement.
Think about it? Is a book
that's loaded with rape, violent sex, murder, torture, all in
graphic detail, or a film that features ultra-violence, rape, mindless
drug abuse,
with no redeeming message, the same statement just expressed in a different
way?
Is a piece of art like the dead foetuses or carved up animal bodies that
have been
displayed - and in one case won a major prize - any less a statement of
the same dark side
of the artist.
In a world where teenage
kids walk into high schools and blow away their fellow
students and teachers, where papers are full of stories of teens and pre-teens
being
raped and murdered, where an 11-year-old boy goes on a US TV talk show
to say he's
been having sex with his 13-year-old girlfriend since he was nine and
she was 11, where
people pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for the latest snuff or sado-masochistic
ultra-violence porn flick, where in the US alone the Department Of Justice
estimated that
there were 960,000 incidents of violence against a current or former spouse
or partner in
1998, is it enough to say that these are the acts of, the expressions
of, the dark side?
Is it enough to justify
Eminem declaring "I'll fuck anything that walks" and asking
kids
whether they want to copy him, in all his violent and sexually degrading
ways? Is it
enough to accept Eminem and not feel sickened to the core? Your call.
----- / Mike Gee- Music Editor
---- http://www.shadyfactory.cjb.net
--
|
