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By Root 638 0

wasn’t saying it as much). Either they’d been seduced by the magic of the big screen, where they were won over by the familiar Hollywood outsider-makes-good template, or maybe seeing Eminem act convincingly on the screen convinced them that he acted on his records, too, that all of his statement-antistatement somersaults really were the fun of it. Andrew Sarris, in an article in the New York Observer titled “Guess Who Thinks Eminem Is a Genius? Middle-aged Me,” stated that Marshall Mathers is today’s James Dean. Paul Slansky, a Los Angeles writer, theorized in the same paper that middle-aged suburbanites identified with Eminem’s anger and frustration, brought on not by hard times but the pressures of child rearing. The New York Times’s celebrated theater-critic-turned-cultural-analyst Frank Rich covered Eminem in a Sunday magazine cover story, comparing him to Elvis (a tag Eminem predicted in “Without Me” from The Eminem Show) and equating the violence in his lyrics to nothing more threatening than that of Hollywood fare.

“Chiming in on Eminem gives older critics a sense of vitality,” says Village Voice executive editor Richard Goldstein, a political and cultural critic since the sixties. “Discussing Eminem makes them feel connected with their young. It’s kind of a testosterone producer, which is a big issue for middle-aged people.”

The pick of that litter was New York Times political reporter Maureen Dowd’s piece, “The Boomer’s Crooner,” a Sunday editorial in late November of 2002, brimming with tales of her middle-aged friends dropping the kids off at school, then rolling down their SUVs’ windows, childproof locks be damned, and rapping along with Eminem as he lyrically rapes his mother. Dowd reported that a friend’s eleven-year-old daughter called her mother “psychotic and weird” because parents should not like people who talk about “drugs and sex and hard lives.” Dowd collected the juiciest bits of her fellow fogies’ Eminem praise and expressed disdain for her peers, who, “frantic to be hip, eager to be young,” she asserted, were doing no more than “trying to rob their children of their toys.” The thesis that seemed to emerge from her stream-of-consciousness piece was that her crowd’s “suffocating yuppie love” rendered Eminem as cuddly as Beaver Cleaver. Like long-standing anti-Eminem critics such as Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago-Sun Times, Dowd claimed that acceptance among the demographic he loved to annoy signaled the end of Eminem. Like her friends who only “got” Eminem when the parody was removed, Dowd still missed the point. Her piece’s punch line claimed that Eminem’s jacket and tie on the cover of his latest album, a trade-off for his “do-rag and baggy Nikes” (baggy Nikes?), were a surefire sign of a sellout and that if Eminem weren’t very smart and wicked, he’d soon hear his music in elevators. If Dowd had taken the time to leaf through the CD booklet, she might have followed the story told in the photos. Laid out as simply as an AOL news report, the inner sleeve of The Eminem Show is a photo essay of Eminem being stalked by paparazzi bent on making his life a show, while, in reality, the rapper is seated in a control room, reading a newspaper in a suit and tie, watching the action on monitors, collecting footage for a show of his own. If Dowd thinks the positive praise being currently heaped on Eminem won’t annoy him more, she obviously hasn’t been listening.

Of course, if Eminem’s new “older” fans were wondering why they had missed the joke before, they should have asked their children. The Kids, the group Eminem shouts out most often in his records, seem to have known the difference from the beginning. It also seems that only after older eyes realized that Eminem wasn’t going away, he was examined, a process made easier with the printed lyrics provided, as they were for the first time with The Eminem Show. The music is equally large-type: Though thematically as disturbed as the other two, Eminem relied less on bizarre imagery than precise explanation to make his point, allowing for literal-minded access.