Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [48]
Elton John’s jump from outspoken gay activist to Eminem supporter disparaged Mrs. Cheney and GLAAD. “Elton John has been good in the past about speaking out on issues of equality for gay people,” Cheney said in a press release just after the Grammys, “on issues of being against violent language against gay people. I am quite amazed and dismayed that he would choose to perform with Eminem.” Elton John, in my opinion, understood what the moral gatekeepers didn’t: If Eminem was smart enough to push the buttons he had, he was smart enough not to hate homosexuals and to know that anyone who took his songs as a mission statement were the extremists one really needed to be worried about. In post-Columbine America, having been honored by the Grammys and hounded by the PC watchdogs, Eminem found himself the world’s new pop monster.
“Eminem wasn’t even as extreme as some stuff that had existed in hardcore rap before him,” says Sia Michel. “But he said it and wrote about it in such a crazily, amazingly cinematic way that it made it seem even more graphic. He said it over these friendly kind of singsong riffs, too, so you really heard the lyrics in a different way. But part of the controversy was the fact that for a while there, hip-hop was the mainstream but it wasn’t treated as the mainstream in the media. R. Kelly was one of the biggest stars around but you weren’t reading about him in the Star or the white mainstream press at all. When Dr. Dre came out with The Chronic, it was huge, but it wasn’t on the mainstream radar. It passed by the kind of people who would pick it up and make complaints. Then Eminem came out and here is this really photogenic white guy plastered all over MTV. He’s just massive, as soon as his first single came out, and I think those same people took notice. And they saw him singing these singsong, fun songs and he’s saying these things that are really going to get to the young kids, now. But they didn’t know that those young kids were already listening to Dr. Dre and Snoop before Eminem.”
When the mainstream tuned in to extreme rock music, they came up with a scapegoat. Now it was time to change the beat. “The Greeks and Romans used to put their monsters on stage for everyone to see and fear—they are what the society needs to see of itself but can’t face,” David Bowie said about Marilyn Manson in 1997. “Marilyn is exactly that. He’s our most compelling monster right at the moment.” He certainly was. Manson had been shoveling sludge Goth since the early nineties and finally hit his career apex in the same year of the Oklahoma City bombing, Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, the death of Princess Di, and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. Manson held the indecency throne in PC America.
After the tragedy at Columbine High School, Manson became a household effigy. The two teen murderers who allegedly liked his music reopened the discussion on the detrimental effects of “devil’s music” on youth deemed too unsophisticated to distinguish performance from reality, a discourse that began with rock and roll in the fifties and was blown open by Elvis’s gyrating hips. Manson’s guff was closer to the flack Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne received thirty-something years earlier when two teenagers, in separate incidents, took their own lives. Those parents blamed Osbourne’s “Suicide Solution” and the allegedly embedded backward messages (“do it, do it”) in Judas Priest’s “Stained Class.”
Manson, and Eminem after him, raised issues of the limits of free speech and the effects of music over other forms of entertainment on youth. Both performers challenge the ideals of the traditional American family held dear by so many, Manson by parodying gender and notions of beauty and organized religion, Eminem by parodying mass media and celebrity culture and white family dysfunction. Both harp on drugs. These artists and record label-mates sparked controversies different from other free-speech