Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [121]
Anyone who doesn’t think that media of all kinds affects us is naive. At the same time, anyone who thinks the media directs us is equally naive. In his monthly column, “Terrordome,” on the Public Enemy website, Chuck D addressed the same issue in regard to the negative image of African-Americans presented in the persistently thuggish imagery of mainstream rap videos. “When I was a kid, watching a great football game would send us in the streets afterwards trying to replay what we just saw. Bruce Lee movies had us kids kicking Coke machines in the theater afterwards. A love song made you call your girl. Now, how the hell can a negative image not do the same, especially when that adult stereotype looks so familiar?” Of course, only the truly disenfranchised will make art imitate life, like the fictitious stalker “Stan” on The Marshall Mathers LP. Eminem, of course, said it all in his song, “Role Model,” from The Slim Shady LP, warning the world not to follow Shady’s lead. But he’s also told the world that there are a million kids who act, dress, and feel just like him—and there are. His avowal of all things he is and is not is the stance of a deft battle MC, making him untouchable. He leaves it to everyone else to make what they will of him.
“Eminem is a cultural phenomenon,” says Shelby Steele. “That’s why we like him. So much of rap is cover-up, cover up all that pain, and here’s a guy—he’s sort of marching through it. It’s very much, in a larger sense, like the blues. The blues are when the singer fingers the jagged grain of his worst pain. The singer came home and the house was completely empty. So he makes a kind of clown of himself, and you identify with him. And looking at the pain, there’s a certain transcendence. He’s a compelling figure. The vulgarity and the homophobia and the sexism and so forth, I see those in a context of his life. In black culture, and he was very close to that, there was a lot of homophobia. With a mother like that, you might be a little sexist. Shrinks would say he’s working something out there.”
Conclusion
watch me, ’cause you thinkin’ you got me in the hot seat from a sinner to a saint
I decided to write this book because of a dinner I had in Connecticut three summers ago (2000). We sat outside, on the porch, not many of us. I was the stranger among two families who shared a long history. One of the critics interviewed in this book was there, and as the night grew later, we occupied an end of the table and spoke furiously about music, agreeing to interrupt Van Morrison’s stately tenor to play “Stan” for the others, who were predominantly unversed in hip-hop and Eminem, outside of knowing his infamy. They needed to hear it.
Listening to the song, twice, with them, sitting in the near dark, I watched the curious, engaged, rapt faces, taking in this night’s campfire folk tale, though differently than they enjoyed the troubadours in their record collections. Eminem’s literary storytelling impressed me anew; it was universal enough to capture the interest of a very discerning, musically savvy test group of the populus. I saw the future that night, a microcosm of the generation gap that Eminem would soon hop.
I did not foresee the degree of admiration from unlikely sources awaiting Eminem in 2003. As 8 Mile fever infected the country, a motley crew of new fans gathered around Eminem, singing his praises from the Today show to TRL. Daniel Day-Lewis reported that he blasted Eminem in his trailer to rev himself up for his scenes in Gangs of New York, and even Queen Barbra Streisand “saw herself” in Eminem, one of the many hip-hop-illiterate adults who found hope and heroism amid the remains of the American dream in Eminem’s film debut. Eminem’s new audience became the focus of his story, as he once again uncannily predicted in the art and music of his albums. The new fans related to the elements of Eminem that suited them and held