On re-read

Going through Eminem and Rap, Poetry, Race: Essays again
Because this is becoming more relevant
Because I'm in the zone right now
Because reading helped me when I went abroad the very first time for an extended period (and it feels like I need some self-soothing and help at this moment)

Much of the moral panic here involves a disturbing sort of scapegoating, where Eminem is made into a bogeyman for social ills that are far larger and far older than any damage that he might have been able to do in a mere five years or so of musical stardom. Reading Eminem’s critics (from both the left and the right), one gets the impression that he has single-handedly opened up a previously untapped well of bigotry and violence, and that the very novelty and uniqueness of his brand of poison has somehow overwhelmed the aura of peace-loving tolerance that otherwise characterizes the day-to-day life of U.S. culture.

In the case at hand, it’s worth noting that mainstream U.S. culture is already rife with misogyny and homophobia, and was so long before Eminem was born: enough so that his hypermasculine lyrical excesses may actually be the least transgressive, most normative thing about him. This doesn’t get Eminem off the hook when it comes to his particular renditions of these problematic cultural norms—not at all—but it does suggest that the real stakes in this particular discursive struggle are not those visible on the surface: that Eminem is being taken to task for transgressions that are too disturbing, too unsettling, and too threatening to mainstream U.S. culture to be openly acknowledged.

John Lennon—while still a lovable mop-top, no less—could sing about preferring a woman

to her being with another man (“Run for Your Life”).15 Johnny Cash could boast that he’d “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die” (“Folsom Prison Blues”). Bob Shane (of the Kingston Trio) could stab a woman to death for unspecified reasons and regret nothing other than that he was caught before he could escape to Tennessee (“Tom Dooley”). Eric Clapton could gun down a sheriff in the street without audible remorse or regret (“I Shot the Sheriff”). And Bruce Springsteen could undertake a murderous rampage across Nebraska in which he killed “ten innocent people” with a sawed-off shotgun (“Nebraska”). All of these musical crimes were generally understood to be acceptable forms of dramatic musical fiction —or, at least, none of them sparked any significant wave of moral outrage from the public at large... The musicians cited above are all understood to be “authors” in Foucault’s sense of the term (even when, as in Clapton’s case, they’re singing other people’s songs), and so their most violent musical narratives are readily interpreted as artistic fictions. Musicians who “fail” to be white, straight, economically privileged, and/or male, however, are frequently and forcefully denied comparable artistic license, even when (or perhaps especially when) they’re working within artistically valorized musical genres such as rock. For instance, when Madonna or Prince

sing about sexual escapades in the first person, they’re made into poster children for why CDs need

parental warning labels—with “critics” such as Tipper Gore leading the charge to police the musical

soundscape.17 When Alanis Morissette hurls bitter musical invective at a duplicitous ex-lover (“You

Oughta Know”), rock critics are quick to accuse her of being an “angry woman” and a “man hater”—

whereas male rock stars who offer venomous musical kiss-offs to former girlfriends (e.g., Bob Dylan,

Elvis Costello) are lauded as visionary poets. When Ice-T or N.W.A. use music to narrate revenge

fantasies about firing back at criminally violent police officers, they’re met with public outrage forceful enough to cancel national concert tours and expunge the offending songs from already released albums— and in Ice-T’s case, the backlash’s racism is underscored by the public framing of his offending song (“Cop Killer”) as an example of (everything that’s wrong with) gangsta rap, even though it came from an album released by his speed metal band, Body Count. In cases like these, the possibility that these musicians are invoking the fictional “I” is one that the dominant public discourse largely refuses to recognize or accept. “Common sense,” it seems, tells us that John Lennon didn’t really want to kill his first wife when he wrote “Run for Your Life,” but that “Cop Killer” must be taken as a literal expression of the truth about Ice-T’s felonious desires.

Part of Eminem’s musical brilliance, then, is his ability to recognize this double standard and to use the tension between the fictional and the autobiographical “I” to fuel his art.