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White American: Eminem Makes His Rock Move
The Eminem song of the year is now and will forever remain the Pet
Shop Boys' "The Night I Fell in Love," where a certainly fictional,
probably underage male spends a night with a performer who tells Stan
and Dre jokes and shrugs off those homophobia rumors. In bed, said
performer is a nine. Next morning, he "couldn't have been a nicer
bloke."
The Eminem moment of the year, however, is where you'd hope it would
be, on The Eminem Show, rush-released nine days early on
Sunday, May 26--UniMoth-Vivendi's defense against downloaders, together
with the bonus DVD included in the first two million
copies. Unfortunately, the moment isn't situated where you'd hope it
would be on the CD itself. Not until the very last of the 15 songs on
the 77-minute album (there are also five skits, all but one dead on
their feet) does The Eminem Show recapture what was so
irresistible about Eminem from the first seconds of "My Name Is," with
its turf-claiming scratches, catchy-funny chorus, and
he-fuck-da-police-in-three-different-voices. "My Name Is" had a spirit
that popped up continually and irrepressibly on The Slim Shady
LP and The Marshall Mathers LP: a lightness, a
delightedness, a formal mastery whose sense of absolute entitlement
never dampens its astonishment that so many CD buyers get the joke.
What's amazing about "My Dad's Gone Crazy" is only secondarily a
message. Bottom line, it's a sound. But it's no coincidence that the
brashest track on the album sonically is also the deepest
thematically. It's the track where Eminem answers the Pet Shop Boys by
admitting that he and Dre have been fucking for years. The one where
he identifies first with the WTC bombers and then with the bombers'
victims. The one where he comes out and explains his aesthetic in
terms only a member of Congress or daily rock critic could fail to
understand: "My songs can make you cry, take you by surprise at the
same time, can make you dry your eyes with the same rhyme/See what
you're seeing is a genius at work, which to me isn't work, so it's
easy to misinterpret it at first/Cus when I speak, it's
tongue-in-cheek, I'd yank my fuckin' teeth before I'd ever bite my
tongue." And that's just the beginning.
It's also the one where he admits--a tongue-in-cheek verb for which you
may substitute "claims" or "posits" or "pretends"--that "there's no one
on earth can save me, not even Hailie." That would be his six-year-old
daughter Hailie Jade, joint-custody prize of a 2001 divorce agreement,
who on this album represents everything that makes life worth living
and sanity worth pursuing. Suitably, crucially, it's Hailie who
provides the sonic stroke, a supreme moment among several. She cuts
off coke-snorting sounds with a childish "Daddy, what are you doing?"
and punctuates a whiny rationalization for homophobia with the
older-sounding admonishment "Dad!"; she imitates a chain saw and gets
the party started by doubling her father's "OK then, everybody listen
up." But most important on an album that proves Eminem's sanity, she
utters the words "I think my dad gone crazy" over and over, the
perfect take of that phrase looped as a beat. The voice is a child's
and yet isn't--overwhelming its little-girl drawl is a guttural gusto
that evokes Mercedes McCambridge speaking through Linda Blair, or
maybe just the young Brenda Lee. The beat is a celebration, and an
exploitation, of Hailie's six-year-old capacity for delight and all
the painful experience and threatened entitlement that lurks beyond
it. That is the nearest Eminem can come to the 26-year-old amalgam of
pain and delight that makes The Marshall Mathers LP a stone
classic.
I'm not saying The Eminem Show isn't a good album. I like it
and I enjoy it; I think it represents an articulate, coherent,
formally appropriate response to Eminem's changing position and role,
one that acknowledges the privileges and alienations that accrue to
all fame as well as the resolution of Marshall Mathers's worst traumas
and the specifics of his success. It states its business exactly where
it should, on the first song, which is one of the good ones: "White
America." Some terrific lyrics here. Rather than complaining about his
oppression by the media--a wheeze that comes up briefly on only two
tracks--he accentuates the positive: "so many motherfuckin' people who
feel like me," "a fuckin' army marchin' in back of me." He observes,
realistically, that when he was an unknown MC his skin color worked
against him, that he was probably as good for Dre's stalled career as
Dre was for his potential one. But he also recognizes that at his
level of stardom whiteness is an advantage: "Let's do the math, If I
was black I would've sold half." Eminem's audience is no longer an
expanded version of the hip hop audience. It's bigger and whiter--a
"rock" audience. His musical conclusion: to cut back his involvement
in the genre he's explored with such brilliance, passion, wit,
fidelity, and respect.
There's no such thing as a beat that isn't hip hop--"Walk This Way"
proved that long ago. Nevertheless, the music of The Eminem
Show--12 of its songs produced by Eminem, mostly with longtime beat
provider Jeff Bass--owes more to '70s rock than to any strain of black
music. Eminem makes no bones about this; in an interview in The
Face, he asserts it. The rhythms march, stride, and vaunt; they
stomp when they're able-bodied and plod when they're lame. The Nate
Dogg feature " 'Till I Collapse" is a "We Will Rock You" rip; the one
now listed as "Sing for the Moment" used to be called "Dream On," like
the old Aerosmith hit it rewrites; for a change, the debut single
"Without Me" moves like the most mechanical kind of '70s disco over a
simplistic synth hook. Not all of Eminem's grooves are like this;
"Cleanin' Out My Closet" and "Soldier" are much jumpier, and "Square
Dance," done without Bass, sets Eminem's do-si-do over ominous
soundtrack-symphony metal chords, a weird conjunction almost as
arresting musically as Hailie's dybbuk voice. Nevertheless, the
contrast with the three Dre tracks--which happen to include "My Dad's
Gone Crazy"--is pretty stark. The off-kilter shape the Dre beats share,
hardly the man's specialty, sticks out in part because it comes as a
relief. Especially on the Batman-themed "Business," where among other
things Eminem finds a rhyme for "oranges," Dre's funk hints at the
lost lightness too often buried underneath the rock self-importance
that threatens to sink this album.
Unfortunately, Dre's dull-ass "Hell, yeah"s compromise the effect, a
failing that typifies what's saddest about The Eminem
Show--insofar as it's hip hop, it ain't exactly, how they say it,
fresh. It's not funny enough, for one thing. None of the first-rate
rhymes are up to the standard of, for example, "The Way I Am," and
although Eminem has never been the "storyteller" lazy defenders
pretend he is, the few tracks you could call narratives never think to
try for the complexity of "Stan" or "My Fault." Sadder still is that
his greatest formal gift--his knack for persona play in which Marshall
Mathers, Slim Shady, and Eminem joust over patches of psychic and
semiotic territory whose borders no surveyor will ever lay out--only
resurfaces with "My Dad's Gone Crazy." When his mom and his ex-wife
make their brief appearances, the tone is rock-confessional no matter
how extreme or cruel the conceits; the insults leveled at Moby and
Jermaine Dupri have no madness in them. Moreover, neither do the much
worse insults marshalled at women--"Drips," a vile
skank-as-AIDS-carrier vehicle that he shares with his asshole buddies
D-12, is even more pro forma than the hackneyed rockboy/rapboy
fuck-'em-and-forget-'em of the Dina Rae duet "Superman." It's a
depressing testimony to the acuity and diminished expectations of
today's sexual discourse that neither of these songs will excite a
tenth of the vituperation aimed at "Kim," an agonized working critique
of the misogynist mindset both voice so stupidly and regressively.
The self-involved follow-up to a star-time breakthrough is a tale rock
has told countless times without enough happy endings, though they
certainly happen: Highway 61 Revisited and Rumours
raising, Fear of a Black Planet and In Utero
holding. Maybe we could make The Slim Shady LP the breakthrough
and The Marshall Mathers LP its untoppable culmination. But if
it's hope for the future you want, you'll have to seek it out in
Eminem's capacity for stupidity and regression. "The Night I Fell in
Love" is a great Eminem song because it assumes the standard argument
that hip hop's songs of mayhem are "just stories," daring Eminem to
take offense at a skillful fable that insults his pathetic manhood
while calling him a nice bloke. Where ordinarily the Pet Shop Boys are
masters of narrative distance, what's missing in their gibe is persona
play--the possibility that the schoolboy protagonist could be Neil
Tennant or Chris Lowe. The reason Eminem means more than the Pet Shop
Boys at his best is how provocatively and passionately he leaves such
questions open, testing the tension between representation and
authenticity that's given rock and roll fans that funny feeling in
their stomachs for nearly half a century. Because he can be such a
jerk, he can also be such a genius. Whether the failure of this album
to sell like the last one will drive him to such heights again remains
to be heard.
Village Voice, Jun. 11, 2002
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