Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [28]
As with every other pop star who comments about or otherwise irks Eminem, Wahlberg showed up in a lyric soon afterward (in “Drug Ballad” on The Marshall Mathers LP). The reference to Wahlberg was minor because his slight wasn’t too serious. Christina Aguilera, on the other hand, revealed Eminem’s marriage to Kim Scott on MTV before the couple made it public knowledge. The comment landed her in “The Real Slim Shady” from The Marshall Mathers LP, complete with accusations that she gave Eminem a venereal disease and oral sex to both Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst and MTV’s Carson Daly. Moby’s later intellectual dissection of Eminem at the 2000 Grammys and MTV Video Music Awards landed him a mention on “Without Me” from The Eminem Show, and a simulated beating in the video and live show. Former House of Pain rapper-turned-would-be-bluesman Everlast’s attack on Eminem in the song “Ear Drums Pop” by Dilated Peoples warranted “Quitter,” an entire unreleased song complete with a death threat. Eminem’s response to Wahlberg was minor, merely reminding the public that the now-serious actor was once a cheesy rapper. But it started what is now a tradition in Eminem’s music of skewering, for the benefit of his audience, anyone who insults him—a fitting outlet for a sarcastic and entertaining battle MC.
At a time in American history when the president was on televised trial for intern-management worthy of Larry Flynt, Eminem voiced the lunacy of the day and the pent-up male psychology beneath it. “Eminem’s style is incredible,” Dr. Dre said a few months after finishing up The Slim Shady LP. “He has his own thing and he sounds like nothing else out there. He’s saying some shit your average MC isn’t even going to think about. He has this one line on ‘Role Model’ that sticks out for me, it’s kind of grotesque: ‘Me and Marcus Allen were buttfucking Nicole, when we heard a knock at the door, must have been Ron Gold [sic].’ You know what I mean? It’s dope, it’s entertaining, it’s just bad taste.”
While Puffy and company sipped champagne and documented hip-hop’s Great Gatsby era, Slim Shady got high on model-airplane glue, his mom’s pills, and other people’s hallucinogens. His lyrics were often such exercises in uselessness, carelessness, failed suicide, and self-immolation that the crew of MTV’s show Jackass wouldn’t even try, like hanging from a tree by your penis. Slim Shady got off ripping Pamela Lee’s tits off. He soothed Hillary Clinton with sherbet after ripping her tonsils out, and killed a fat girl who taunted him in gym class by having sex with her, using his mortally expandable go-go-gadget dick. The character inverted Eminem’s handicaps as a man and a rapper, from his color, to his mother, his temper, and his taste for drugs, into his greatest advantage; his frustration turned to fuel. Slim Shady is inappropriately funny, like a Ritalin kid off his meds or a scatological joke at a funeral, inspiring irrepressible laughter. Eminem fused the crazy white boy and angry young man stereotypes, playing both to their fullest with ironic, unmerciful insight into white, dysfunctional family values, all the more real for the self-loathing present throughout. “Nobody is excluded from my poking at,” Eminem says. “Nobody. I don’t discriminate, I don’t exclude nobody. If you do something fucked up, you’re bound to be made fun of. If I do something fucked up, I’ll make fun of myself—I’m not excluded from this.”
Eminem was hesitant to flaunt his natural sense of humor earlier in his career for fear of seeming more ham than hardcore—a crazy white boy without a clue. On his independently released album Infinite, his wit was buried in wordplay, expressed in the rapper’s ability to wield complex mouthfuls: lamination, intimidator, telekenesis, unconditionally, cumbersome, and Christianity. But the jokes were there, and every bit as deft: “Cause you can be quick, jump the candlestick, burn your back / And fuck Jill on a hill but you still