Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [112]
The pre-litigation family tree: Debbie Nelson-Mathers-Briggs, her son Marshall, and her grandaughter Hailie Jade Scott, June 1999.
The embrace and celebration of women as sex objects in mainstream media did not fully express, however, male anger and power in the face of female equality. Nowhere was it more apparent than in the change in popular rock music starting around 1997. In the absence—by death, breakup, or breakdown—of alternative-rock talents such as Nirvana, Soundgarden, Rage Against the Machine, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Pearl Jam, a host of watered-down copycats and dull, introspective substitutes such as Bush, Matchbox 20, and Creed held sway until a new wave of hard-rock jocks drowned them out. Bands such as Limp Bizkit, Korn, and the Deftones ushered in an aggressive, testosterone-addled soundtrack of frustrated male nihilism. It was self-loathing in the guise of directionless, unilateral destruction, driven by, to cull from Fred Durst’s vocabulary, a love of “the nookie” and the need to “break stuff” when you’re “just having one of those days.” Sexuality in the Korn–Limp Bizkit view was male-dominated service sex, best summed up by the line “I don’t know your fucking name / So what? Let’s fuck,” from Korn’s “A.D.I.D.A.S.,” an ode not to the clothing company but to the schoolboy acronym for “All Day I Dream About Sex.”
The apex of male aggression and ritualized domination of women was reached in the music world in a new incarnation of Woodstock, the hippie generation’s greatest communal achievement. At the 1999 festival, love wasn’t free, it was forcefully seized. Held on a former military base, one hundred miles away from the original site, Woodstock ’99 featured Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and many other acts. In a poorly organized, painfully overpriced event in the blistering July heat, young men sexually harassed hundreds of females, according to the reports filed (let alone those unfiled), and four rapes were reported, one of which occurred when a female fan who was crowd-surfing over the audience was pulled down and gang-raped while Limp Bizkit played. In the days following the festival, more victims came forward, many claiming they were raped in the campgrounds, others in the mosh pit, and one woman claimed that a state trooper whom she approached for help after an assault demanded that she first show him her breasts. Hundreds of stories eventually surfaced, from assaults and rapes in Porta-Johns to the encouragement by police officers for women to remove their tops for photos, some of which were posted, briefly, on a government-run law-enforcement website. But few allegations could be proven and were given little exposure in the mainstream media. Limp Bizkit front-man Fred Durst, who had encouraged the crowd into a frenzy during his set, later apologized in light of pending prosecution for the charge that he incited a riot. The three-day festival ended in flames, as crowds burned trash and pulled down light rigging. In the media follow-up to the events at Woodstock ’99, more ink would be spilled over property damage, the capitalistic greed of the concert’s vendors, the promoters’ ineptitude, and the irony of peace, love, and rioting than on discussion or investigation of the incidents of sexual assault.
Eminem certainly profited from the angry male, antifemale mood of American music fans in 1999. Though he was initially lumped in with one-dimensional testosterone-rockers such as Limp Bizkit and Korn (again signalling a bias that white rap must really be rock), Eminem proved to be a more complex entity, one who is far more talented and insightful than those one-trick ponies. Eminem rode the macho wave, for sure, but not only was it much more common to his genre, he also superseded it with a deeper, multifaceted portrayal of the male psyche in a more compelling and communicable form than the abused-animal vocals of Korn, the knuckleheaded rebellion of Limp Bizkit, or