Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [51]
Blue-collar balladeers: Eminem and his fan Bruce Springsteen backstage at the 45th annual Grammy Awards on February 23, 2003.
The Eminem Show received accolades across the board for Eminem’s production work, his more confessional lyrical content, and his improved rhyme skills this time around. The great Eminem question here was mapping his personalities—the bait dangled in the title. “On earlier albums,” wrote Kelefa Sanneh in The New Yorker, “he turned his life into a cartoon, starring ‘regular guy’ Marshall Mathers and his ‘crazy’ alter ego, Slim Shady.… Now he seems to be trying to turn the cartoon into a life.”
“For all the raw hip-hop confessionals that line his body of work, this is perhaps the most emotionally naked he’s allowed himself to appear in public,” wrote Brian McCollum in the Detroit Free Press, referring to “Hailie’s Song,” the ode to his daughter that appears on this record. “One of the many aspects differentiating Eminem from other best-selling, vulgar pop stars is that there is so much pathos and honesty in his lyrics, especially on ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet.’” wrote Neil Strauss in the New York Times. It’s “a third album that avoids all the pitfalls of third albums: introspective without being self-pitying, expansive in scope without being pompous, exploring new directions without disappearing up it’s own arse,” according to England’s New Musical Express. Q, another British magazine, lamented Shady’s early sabbatical: “As Eminem outgrows his old alter-id, so the obligatory pantomime villainy, skits, and crass cameos by Shady Records signings become a hindrance.” “On The Eminem Show,” wrote Entertainment Weekly, “he’s still raging against the machine, while admitting that he’s a deeply flawed part of that machine himself.”
“His profile now is that he’s obviously here to stay, he’s obviously an artist with something to say,” Interscope Records head of publicity Dennis Dennehy says. “There’s no longer a debate about whether he is viable, or appropriate. The cultural argument, in this new world, is whether there’s any point in getting wound up about this stuff anymore—obviously America’s got more serious problems. Then it was the movie and more people talking about him. I wouldn’t say he’s a media darling, though. People, of course, want to talk to him, because who wouldn’t tune in to see it. Even the people who hate him all want him on the show. The people who spend hours deriding him in the media? They all want him on the show.”
Despite across-the-board praise, there are still two critics of stature in America who have not altered their stance against Eminem. Music critic Jim DeRogatis doesn’t see the voice of a generation in Eminem; he sees a packaged product—a rebel yell manipulated by Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre, and Interscope Records, as he said in an interview for this book.
“We’re talking about Generation Y, the second largest generation of teenagers in American history. There are seventy-two million kids in Generation Y, after seventy-six million of their parents, who are the Baby Boom generation. There’s a mere seventeen million of us Generation Xers sandwiched in between them. This is a consumerist generation so far, and the vast majority of Generation Y has yet to wake out of its consumerist slumber. I think of the pod people in The Matrix, everybody plugged into the machine. It’s a video game, television society, and everything