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By Root 598 0

debates, however. The reaction to Manson and Eminem was a moral uproar; much different than the warning letter sent by the FBI to Priority Records after N.W.A’s gun-blazing Straight Outta Compton went gold without radio support, or the campaign led by the NRA and police-support groups against the Ice-T-led Body Count’s “Cop Killer” in 1992. Those artists were treated as rebel leaders encouraging inner-city chaos and racial revolution. Manson and Eminem were viewed as deviants who would lead God-fearing children into mass moral decline. Manson had shocked and titillated with self-immolation, gory imagery, and substance worship. Slim Shady farted his way onto the pop charts in 1999 and stole the show with jokes and whip-smart, wiseassed rhymes that taught the kids all the wrong (very wrong) nursery rhymes. Manson, for all the evildoing his denigrators believed he enacted upon the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, was still easy to marginalize. With his praying mantis frame, Roswellian complexion, and buttless PVC wardrobe, Manson was the freakiest guy ever to be named Brian, an alien on the outskirts. Eminem was more subversive and ultimately more influential. With his bottle-blond hair and twin hoop earrings, he looks like a member of the pop system—the devil’s Backstreet Boy. He’s not from some Gothic underworld, he’s from your neighborhood. A pill-popping metal monster like Marilyn Manson who lives in a drug-addled rock hell is just a guy with a bad case of Halloween. Eminem, the former dishwasher from the local grill who pops his mom’s pills, dreams of killing his wife, and encourages robbery, date rape, and double homicide, is scarier. He looks like an average American young man and counts millions of them among his biggest fans.

The truth of the matter is that no crimes have come to light that were allegedly incited by Eminem’s music. Perhaps because he’s easier to hear and has more than a few controversial songs, Eminem was also not afforded the same artistic license as the great pop icons Nirvana, whose “Polly” from Nevermind recounted an actual kidnapping and rape from the rapist’s detached perspective. On their next album, In Utero, “Rape Me” was written from the perspective of the angry victim in “Polly,” whose recourse is to urge her attacker on. Though women’s groups voiced opposition to “Rape Me,” there were no picket lines outside of Nirvana concerts. “I’ve gone back and forth between regretting it and trying to defend myself,” Kurt Cobain told Rolling Stone about the song in 1994. “Basically I was trying to write a song that supported women and dealt with the issue of rape. Over the last few years, people have had such a hard time understanding what our message is, what we’re trying to convey, that I just decided to be as bold as possible.… I’m a big believer in karma and that that motherfucker [who rapes] is going to get what he deserves, eventually.”

The first time I met Eminem, I asked him about the effect of his music on kids who may be too young to tell when he’s joking and when he’s not. He answered me then as he has everyone who has asked since. “My music is not for younger kids to hear,” he said. “That’s why there’s an advisory sticker on it. You must be eighteen to get it. That doesn’t mean that kids won’t. I got 2 Live Crew tapes when I was twelve. I’m not responsible for every child out there. I’m not a role model and I don’t claim to be. It’s what the song ‘Role Model’ says. I say that I do everything in the song, but it’s all fucking sarcasm. How can people not get it? … That’s fucking ridiculous. It’s obviously saying, ‘You wanna grow up to be just like me? Fuck no, you don’t!’ The message is: Whatever I say, do the opposite. You do that, you’ll be good, because my whole life is the opposite of good.”

As soon as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) announced that The Marshall Mathers LP was nominated for the Record of the Year Grammy for 2000 (as well as four Eminem nominations in the hip-hop categories), a letter-writing campaign was organized by the Family Violence