Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [41]
In 2002, there were other op-ed columns about Eminem in regional and national papers such as USA Today—that great barometer of the middle—by middle-aged writers. Most of these scribes, the type who usually devote their columns to musings on the raking of leaves or that crazy Christmas shopping season, suddenly waxed on about family bonding after seeing 8 Mile: how they related to America’s bad boy and then happily head-bobbed to Eminem with their kids. It was a reaction that record-company marketing and sales execs dream of but couldn’t plan for; a reaction more overtly subversive than Eminem would ever have predicted. At the time, I wondered if these new fans weren’t offended by the words bitch and ho, or Eminem’s critique of the Bush administration in “White America,” or his comparison of his pain to that of a little girl inside one of the planes heading for the World Trade Center on “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” the same song that features the voice of his then seven-year-old daughter, Hailie, and simulated sounds of Eminem doing cocaine. It was just weird; it felt like a PMRC conspiracy to declaw Eminem by manipulating his acceptance; sterilizing him with an injection of parental approval.
Image reconfiguration, phase one: Elton John and Eminem flip the script at the 43rd annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on February 21, 2001.
The widespread embrace by the Boomer generation was a prediction Eminem didn’t make, and one that freaked him out. Looking back on 2002 in December, he told the Detroit Free Press that he may be getting too big for his own good and that he never really asked for that, just a chance to make a living in rap. Shortly after, Eminem retreated from the public eye. He dove into production work for artists on his label, and passed on award shows, while his publicist turned away never-ending interview requests and his booker started planning a limited summer tour that included just two American appearances: consecutive nights in Detroit. With The Eminem Show, the rapper had released his most self-absorbed, least funny, most detailed vision of himself. The album is Eminem for Dummies, for those who can’t take a joke or differentiate fiction from reality. The content isn’t much softer, as some reviews of it suggested. The homophobia—and its converse, graphic descriptions of gay sex—are lessened but intact, and though there aren’t as many uses of the word fag, they are there, referenced as censor bait, and labeled as such, for example in these lines from “My Dad’s Gone Crazy”: “If y’all leave me alone, this wouldn’t be my M.O. / I wouldn’t have to go ’eenee meenee meini mo, catch a homo by his toe.” There are no murder ballads about his wife, but the album still gives Kim and all women plenty of jabs. Yet, strangely, no one has criticized The Eminem Show on moral grounds, not even the factions who attacked him just one album ago. As his list of fans grows, his list of obvious “muses” for his next album grows smaller.
Eminem’s nonmusic press profile has evolved in three stages: from nonexistent to begrudgingly acknowledged, from a problematic titilation to a blight on society, from surprised enlightenment to rabid, irrational, illogical, unprecedented love.
It is strange, but it hasn’t always been that way. “No one will admit to it,” Interscope Records president of publicity Dennis Dennehy said in early 2003, “but when I started doing the press on The Slim Shady album, Eminem had done a few big interviews, and at the tail end of it we tried to get him higher profile press and some TV spots. He’d sold two million records and people didn