Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [105]
In the Detroit music hall of fame, Eminem is less of an anomaly than he is in a more mainstream view of pop-music history. Detroit artists from Diana Ross to Iggy Pop have cross-pollinated black and white music and performed across cultural stereotypes in order to express themselves. Like pop performers Diana Ross and the Supremes did, Eminem is the hip-hop artist who has best infiltrated middle America, essentially putting Detroit hip-hop on the map. In 2003, Eminem resembled Diana Ross in another way; the Supremes’ runaway success in the sixties appealed to teenagers as much as it did to adults. But Eminem has more in common with the rebel faction of Detroit music, the vibrant rock and roll that informs his swagger and flavors his music, from his anthemic cadence to his burgeoning production sensibility. Of the icons of Detroit rock, Eminem is symbolically most like punk godfather Iggy Pop. Like the Stooges, Eminem defied the hip-hop mainstream he entered in 1999 in every way, from his content to his color, and was equally infamous before he was famous. Iggy and the Stooges, in all of their smutty glory, defied the prevailing mythology of rock-and-roll rebellion in the late sixties. Iggy eschewed the Dionysian love-god imagery of rock stars such as Jim Morrison of the Doors, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, and Roger Daltrey of the Who, instead smearing himself with peanut butter and blood and diving into the audience rather than remaining above them, enthroned on the stage. Iggy Pop baited his audience; he was reviled and was an anti-role model; he was a punk rock Slim Shady who distilled the paranoia, rage, and angst of his darkest recesses into lyrics and exorcised them onstage.
“It doesn’t come so much out of the black music tradition in Detroit, but there’s this business of attitude and in that respect, Eminem, whether he knows it, is inheriting Iggy Pop and the MC5,” Dave Marsh says. “He is inheriting the whole ‘fuck you’ culture built here in the sixties.” Eminem as Slim Shady embodies the angry-white man stereotype, but in a manner very unlike Ted Nugent, the other Detroit musician who made a career of the same. Nugent, both with and without the Amboy Dukes, was one of the top live acts in the arena-rock days of the seventies and is now infamous for his right-wing politics and his progun and prohunting advocacy. Unlike Eminem, Nugent is entirely devoid of irony or satire. “Both Ted Nugent and Eminem are angry white men,” Marsh says. “Only one of them is the angry-white man stereotype. It’s not a generational difference, which some people might imagine it to be, it is a class difference. Ted Nugent is much more middle class. Ted don’t come from factory workers, he don’t come from poor people. Ted has pretty bourgeois political attitudes, probably as a direct result of his upbringing—there’s a reason he acts like that. I’d say the most bourgeois rocker from Detroit after Ted is Iggy Pop, whose parents were both teachers and still live in a trailer park.”
There is another, unlikely element of Detroit music history that Eminem embodies, and it may explain his brilliance at constructing narrative raps such as “Stan,” from The Marshall Mathers LP, or “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” from The Slim Shady LP. “Eminem is a great storyteller,” Marsh says. “I think Eminem relates back to the best of the Detroit songwriters. There is Bob Seger, Del Shannon when he wanted to, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Smokey Robinson—that really puts him up there with the giants. But it is there, you can hear it in the way he