Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [23]
“I love you!” screams a different girl, directly in front of him, with her arms outstretched.
“I love you, too,” he says, and in a moment of ecstasy-fueled affection and poor judgment bends over to give her a hug. She lays a kiss on his lips, and instantly the girl next to her clasps his head with talon-tipped hands and pries his face away. She kisses him, completely, with opened mouth and tongue. A forest of arms reaches out and nearly pulls Eminem forward into the crowd.
“Ohhh, shit!” he says, pulling free and falling back on his ass. “I’m going to jail tonight!”
As promised, after the last song, “My Name Is,” we’re immediately escorted into an alley where the limousines await. Some of the fans break through the security and chase us out the door where those who didn’t get into the oversold show are already waiting. We pile into the car, flushed with the adrenaline rush of our exit. As we wait for the police to clear a drivable path, a sexy young girl who looks no more than fifteen taps on the window, inches from Eminem.
“I want to fuck you,” we see her say. She pulls down the front of her halter top, exposing all of her cleavage. She flicks her pierced tongue at the window.
“I want to fuck you, too,” Eminem says. “But I won’t.” He looks at her a moment longer and then sits back, his head deep in the corner of the seat, his eyes darting about, taking us in.
“Hey, you fuckin’ fucks! Why is everybody so quiet, you fuckin’ fat skinny fucks! Fuck you, you fuckin’ fucks! You’re so quiet, you’re tired, you’re so boring you’re snoring, you’re so garbage, your life is over!”
WHETHER WE ADMIT IT OR NOT, Slim Shady is this millennium’s jester, the pop-culture punk come to piss us all off, the underachieving class clown bent on disturbing the peace. He’d be a bright student if he applied himself, but Slim Shady spends his mind on jokes. Slim Shady is a cracked-out crack-up who boasts in “Role Model” that he gets so high because he hits the trees (i.e., pot buds) harder than Sonny Bono. But Slim Shady claimed victory in defeat. He is Eminem with exhausted options, a victorious last stand, gleeful and amoralistic, a demidemon with nothing to lose but his bad mood.
Slim Shady transformed Eminem’s life and troubles into popculture iconography. The character’s nihilism defied all that was superficial and polite in popular entertainment with a smile as fake and unsettling as the testimonials on late-night infomercials. Slim Shady embodies the angry young white misanthrope who feels marginalized by society and feminized by feminism and who rejoices in the freedom of his uselessness. The sheer bitterness at the heart of Slim Shady’s extremity is presented in a cartoonish excess that waltzed into the mainstream like a Trojan horse, subverting societal norms rather than defying them as Eminem’s labelmate, the Goth shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, had done. Manson manipulated perceptions of gender and organized government and religion to upset convention in the midnineties, but his image as an androgynous space alien is too easy to relegate to the freakish outskirts of popular culture, rendering his message, as it were, easy to ignore. Manson became a two-dimensional effigy for disaffection and was burned as such in the wake of Columbine: Marilyn Manson was the perfect scapegoat god for teens so disenfranchised that they would shoot up their school.
Eminem’s lyrical instigation left less room for misinterpretation than Marilyn Manson’s artier facade. The rapper’s neatly cropped blond hair, blue eyes, cute earrings, and boy-band good looks were too normal to ignore. On the strength of his outsider alter ego with nothing to lose, Eminem’s wit and dark humor entertained or repulsed casual observers, sometimes achieving both at once. He used Slim Shady to voice the deepest evil in his mind and make an example of bad behavior, then hid behind Slim when critics asked him to explain. Slim Shady did the deeds and thought the thoughts, not Eminem. This stance both criticized the importance of entertainment and acted as a convenient,