Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [45]
There were, of course, the critics who just got Eminem from day one. Robert Christgau, the music critic laureate of the Village Voice who sits alongside legends such as Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, and Dave Marsh (who all popularized music criticism as we know it today), hit it on the head as usual: “Anybody who believes kids are naive enough to take this record literally is right to fear them, because that’s the kind of adult teenagers hate,” he wrote in March 1999. Christgau’s only critique was that toward the end of The Slim Shady LP Eminem “turns provocation into the dull sensationalism fools think is his whole story.”
Yet there were plenty of those “fools.” Chicago writer and devout contrarian Jim DeRogatis has attacked Eminem on all fronts and has never swayed. “He’s a charlatan and a fraud,” DeRogatis says, “who is as bad musically as he is content-wise. There is talent there, but he could be doing so much more with it. I cannot forgive him the rampant misogyny or the homophobia. There is Psycho, which is one of the best films ever made about a serial killer, and then there’s Friday the 13th, Part 8.” Kevin M. Williams, one of DeRogatis’s peers at the Chicago Sun-Times, referred to Eminem in a review of a 1999 concert as a “rap-impaired mediocrity” and proclaimed that his “meager skills … gain greater impetus simply because of his skin color,” naming him a rapper “propelled to dizzying heights by an irresistible song and major label backing.”
“The most dishonest observer of the hip-hop scene I know could not listen to Eminem and say ‘He’s really not shit, musically,’” says rock critic Dave Marsh. “A common assumption among critics is that the people making this music are not quite as bright as they are or at least not as intellectual, analytical, or well informed about what it is that they do. People think the manipulation of an image is an accident. My assumption is that there are no accidents. Anyone who reaches the level of fame of Floetry, let alone Eminem, wants it, they want it bad. Their job is creating a complete package that starts with the performance of the music. You have to be a performer and you have to have desire. People are taught in media theory that the creation of the image is the foundation of the art. I think the creation of the image is the byproduct of others seeing somebody who has set up a foundation for their art.”
The release of The Marshall Mathers LP is certainly the defining moment in the history of Marshall Mathers and his media perception. Eminem’s character-juggling defense of his most graphic lyrics to date stirred listeners into a froth over what he did and didn’t do—and what that did and did not mean. Eminem may have played characters on The Slim Shady LP, but like those of the best comedians—Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Chris Rock—his imitations (nerdy devil, violent burnout, pathologically alienated baby-daddy) were permeable masks demarcated by a lighthearted delivery, interspersed with enough comedic flourishes to reveal the joke. On The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem loosed a slew of obvious yet confusing contradictions, typically within the same song, that America, for the most part, got lost in. The word fag was tossed around generously. There was homophobia, but there were also the lines “if we can hump dead animals and antelopes / then there’s no reason a man and another man can’t elope” (“The Real Slim Shady”), as well as graphic descriptions of gay sex, complete with sound effects, to rival the lyrics of gay punk rockers Pansy Division. For every “Bleed! Bitch bleed!” (“Kim”), there were sweet nothings to Eminem’s daughter, Hailie Jade: “Baby, you’re so precious / Daddy’s so proud of you” (also “Kim”). For “Bitch, you just a girl to me” (“Kill You”), there was “I’m just playin’, ladies” (also “Kill You”). For all the moral fire alarms Eminem