Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [42]
Major-label publicity folk receive a pile of clippings every morning; faxes of the press their artists have garnered overnight. Dennehy has watched Eminem’s pile grow rapidly in the last year alone; at the height of the hype, it reached two inches daily, then leveled out at around an inch.
“If you look at the press he’s done, in terms of the quantity,” he says, “it’s been fairly static, album to album to album. He always does about the same number of real interviews—it’s the stuff around him that’s grown. It’s gone from press interest to press fervor on the Marshall Mathers LP, when he was public enemy number one, to a long and heated debate that’s still going on, about whether it’s okay to like him or not. When this started, I had friends giving me crap for working with him at all.”
The debate in music and traditional media outlets about whether or not to like Eminem can be tracked to the start of his national career. In the (white) rock music press, even reviews that praised Eminem were tempered with conscience and pause for his more violent rhymes. Many critics also exposed their ignorance of the terrain. More traditional outlets such as USA Today redundantly labeled him a “foul-mouthed shock-rapper,” a category which could potentially include everyone from Sir Mix-a-Lot to Public Enemy. Entertainment Weekly’s review of The Slim Shady LP—a negative one, by David Browne—portrayed Eminem as a backlash against the hip-hop soul positivity championed by Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, and the Roots. Browne must not have noticed that 1998, the year of Lauryn, was also the year of ascension for DMX and Master P, two artists who celebrate thug life to the fullest. Browne’s conclusion was a ludicrous assertion that Eminem was a product of “the post-gangsta era of hip-hop,” which hadn’t truly died, and a reaction to the “anti-macho, almost asexual world of alt-rock,” as well as a victory for the “millennial-caveman mentality bumrushing the culture,” via the WWF and men’s magazines such as Maxim. On the last point, Browne was on to something (and mentioning the rising popularity of the frat-rock band Limp Bizkit would have strengthened his argument)—the culture at large was then and has continued to grow even more comfortable with casual sexism and misogyny. Eminem didn’t do that to our culture’s values, nor can it be said that his albums alone increased it, but he certainly wasn’t hurt by the trend. Yet timing alone did not define The Slim Shady LP’s success; America’s love of controversy did. Eminem had it all: He rapped better than most MCs on MTV at the time, he upset the color hierarchy in rap, he lambasted every norm and accepted celebrity in sight, and did it to a melody you couldn’t forget.
What is lacking in Browne’s review and plenty of others is the assumption that Eminem should be judged first and foremost in a hip-hop context, which belies a supposition that he isn’t a real rapper, that he must be a white artist coopting the style, or that since he is white, this must not be real rap. It isn’t natural to see a white MC, and memory of white rappers past only serves to make the image stranger. In fact, a number of Slim Shady LP reviews read like a review of a punk-rock band. Perhaps these writers saw Eminem as an alternative act, a novelty act, or a hybrid of rap and rock, black and white. It was a strange discrimination by those paid to analyze pop culture. The “My Name Is” video made Eminem an MTV darling, while the song’s lyrics lampooned his peers on that medium the way Beck’s “Loser” trumped macho rock with slack beats and surreal sarcasm. But anyone who missed that Eminem is a card-carrying member of the