I want to say that I am talking and thinking and writing about Eminem lately because he’s released another album, and it’s blowing my fucking mind, but that isn’t it. As far as I know, Eminem is not recording a thing, and instead is painting his daughter’s toenails in a lawn chair somewhere outside of Detroit, sipping a mint julep as a hose snakes and slams across a well-manicured lawn. There are fountains there. There are guards and cameras and Porsches, probably.
But here I am writing and listening and channeling Eminem regardless from my one-bedroom apartment in the heart of the Midwest. Outside, the tornado siren is wailing, because it is the first Wednesday of the month, and inside, I am preparing this afternoon’s lesson plan and finalizing edits on my thesis dissertation. I will be a Master in four weeks, and I will frame this degree in something gold and beveled as a way to show that yes, I am proud of all I have accomplished. Look at my many achievements. Look at my long list of publications. Look at my awards and honors—not one but three honorable mentions.
And yet despite all of these things I tell myself when I have to—You are highly educated and cultured and reasonable and affable and you will find a job—it is Eminem I come back to, time and time again. He is what I covet in the deepest depths of my desperation. I turn my eyes up at the man who lives next door, the undergraduate in Ed Hardy T-shirts who engages constantly in demoralizing and degrading conversations with his girlfriend in the middle of our street in the wee hours of the night, or the stark brightness of daylight, yelling, “Bitch,” saying, “You’re such a fucking slut, Lorelei.” On some nights I have even thrown open my window, shouted back, called the police, screamed to his girlfriend, to sweet, sweet Lorelei, that she is smarter than this. And it is her job now to leave.
And yet I have never felt bothered by Eminem. He, writer of blatantly homophobic and sexist and needlessly violent lyrics, is untouchable. I am a woman, and I am a teacher, and I have spent months leading an after-school writing workshop that promotes creative expression in the community’s disadvantaged youth, and yet I adore Eminem. I channel his power. I do not think, nor have I ever, that I am uncivilized or uneducated or even capable of turning a blind eye to something that is blatantly wrong, and yet I am unapologetic about my feelings here.
I know everything you argue about him. I just really, also, like his music.
There was a time when I thought I might outgrow him. I was thirteen, or I was fourteen, and I assumed it wouldn’t take long until I no longer felt him. I was raised in an affluent neighborhood in the suburbs of Philadelphia by hard-working people, the daughter of a chemist and a French teacher, and from an early age, I was taught table etiquette and polite body language and the most pertinent and adorable French phrases.
“Bonne nuit,” my mother said each night. “Fais des beaux rêves.”
By eight I knew where to place the knife, and the fork, and the spoon when setting a table. I’d seen Paris. I’d seen Rome. I drank hot cocoa from a train car beneath the English Channel and I could fold napkins like nobody’s business.
“Like this,” I’d say to friends, folding old dishtowels my mother donated to our basement’s playroom.
And yet the first album I purchased was the Marshall Mathers LP, one where violence and degradation run rampant. “My words,” he raps, “are like a dagger with a jagged edge / that’ll stab you in the head / whether you’re a fag or lez / a homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest / pants or dress, hate fags? The answer’s “yes.”” I bought the album at Wal-Mart, and it was the corporation’s policy then to censor anything explicit, and so I tucked the disc in my pocket and walked all the way across town to my friend Mike’s house, swapping my version with his unedited copy while he peed or, more likely, masturbated in his bathroom. When finally he came out, I let Mike touch my thigh as we watched an old X Files, and then I called my brother and had him pick me up. I didn’t even like Mike. I just wanted to hear Em’s words out loud.
There was something about Eminem’s ability to rap I found mesmerizing, even before I knew lyrics could have a musical quality all their own. I was an adolescent just beginning to write poetry and read books for pleasure, but nothing felt as good as listening to Eminem in the privacy of my bedroom. Where I could hit the rewind button, again and again and again, listen carefully to each line and think about how it was formed.
My parents have a long history of trusting my decisions, and so my mother never took my Eminem album or cracked it in half or melted it on our driveway, like others mom I came to know. It was her belief, I think, that I would someday grow out of this phase, that it was one of many small rebellions I would go through—later dying my hair with Kool-Aid in the bathtub and insisting I didn’t eat anything with a face—and soon, someday soon, I would come to the realization that Eminem was nothing more than a disrespectful, uneducated, arrogant young man. He was detestable. And maybe my mother thought it would be better for all of us to get him out of my system now, through transference, rather than later in life through marriage.
But now I find myself wondering if my mother recognized then what I did all those years ago. If the reason my mother never slid pennies across that album’s glittering surface was because she knew, too, that Eminem was smart and capable and worked incredibly hard, that he fought for every song he produced and wrote, and that he had managed to access what was otherwise inaccessible, and maybe there was a lesson there.
The industry told him no, and so he rapped a very loud and capable, “Yes.”
It would be easy to build to even loftier notions of why my mother never confiscated that album, but the point is: she didn’t. She let me listen to Eminem. She let me blast him from my stereo and listen to his music through headphones as I ate the sliced apples she arranged delicately on a plate with cheese. She let me buy not one but two Eminem hoodies, and while I was never allowed to wear them to school—“Just think of what your teachers will think,”—I was allowed to wear them whenever I wanted in the privacy of our home, the one she kept clean and neat and nicely scented like pine.
And now I am twenty-five, an undergraduate instructor who teaches ways of interpreting anthologized short stories, essays, poems and plays. I tell my students, “Think about the intent, here.” I say, “What is the author really expressing?”
At night, in my dismal one-bedroom apartment, I work feverishly on what I hope will someday be my first book. And in my moments of despair—when I realize that not one of my thirty-four job applications has resulted in the possibility of promise—I turn to Eminem. I play “Not Afraid.” I play “Like Toy Soldiers.” I put on black and yellow spandex and work out in the student gym, beside my students, beside past students, and I sweat to “Renegade.”
Nothing has changed and, as far as I can tell, nothing will ever change about the way I feel for Eminem. He is brilliant. He is bold. His lyrics are in direct conflict of everything I think and feel and believe about society and the world we find ourselves in, but as an artist—as a writer and thinker—I can’t help but admire his persistence to pursue an identity outside of himself. To so create a character shaped by what he feels are problematic social norms.
“I’m sorry, there must be a mix-up,” he raps, “You want me to fix-up lyrics while our president gets his dick sucked? Fuck that, take drugs, rape sluts, make fun of gay clubs, men who wear make-up. Get a clue: wake up. Get a sense of humor. Quit trying to censor music; this is for your kids (the kids!). But don’t blame me when little Eric jumps off the terrace; you should have been watching him. Apparently, you ain’t parents.”
He is not a role model and has never attested to be. In the chorus of “Who Knew,” from The Marshall Mathers LP, he raps, “I never knew I would ever get this big / I never knew I’d affect this kid / I never knew I’d get him to slit his wrists / I never knew I would get him to hit this bitch.”
So distasteful, maybe, but Eminem is simply an artist making art. And my interest in him is the same as anyone’s: I wonder how he can be so skilled, and so confident, and what I can do to harness this same voice, though the words I have are different.
After three years in an intensive graduate writing program, I realize now that Eminem has the capacity to write stronger and cleaner prose than the vast majority of essayists I’ve studied. And while he appeals to a certain audience, and it may not be you, it is me.
And it is others.
He has sold more than ninety million albums worldwide, so much so that should these discs be lined up, mine and Mike’s and everyone, you could circle the globe four times.
India to China and back again and again and again.
Eminem will always succeed.
What I posit, I guess, is simple. That we take what we need from our mentors, that we discard the rest, that we are flawed but that so is everyone, and at the end of the day—as I grade papers in the library, as I write, “Explore this theme!” and underline ‘theme,’—I am listening to Recovery, because while not perfect, who, anymore, is?
31 responses
Good essay. “Who Knew” is not from his, “debut album, though.
Wonderful essay, Amy. I’m sure I am older than your parents, but I share your opinion of Eminem. I think he is brilliant and evolving.
Thanks for the catch Ubiquitous. You’re right … it’s from Marshall Mathers.
Interesting piece. I remember hearing My Name Is… on the radio for the first time and being somewhat blown away. He managed to couple a mastery of words and rhythm with making me laugh like a drain at the same time. Was never as taken with some of the slower and more serious stuff in later years but the cartoony high tempo stuff was sheer poetry.
Seamus Heaney (who won the nobel prize for literature) giving him his dues:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3033614.stm
Ditto BHYC…really well said. You have managed to capture my exact thoughts, “His lyrics are in direct conflict of everything I think and feel and believe about society and the world we find ourselves in, but as an artist—as a writer and thinker—I can’t help but admire his persistence to pursue an identity outside of himself.” Great job.
Maybe I’m missing the gems that don’t make it onto the radio, but all of his songs sound like this to me:
Bup-a-dup-a-DUH-duh
Bup-a-dup-a-DUH
Bup-a-dup-a-DUH-duh
Bup-a-dup-a-DUH
Over and over and over, without any vocal range. He sounds to me like an attention-starved nine-year-old shouting over the din of a large family to get noticed.
Record sales don’t reflect quality. McDonald’s isn’t selling the best burger. If you’re lazy, Eminem will make you “feel good”. But guilty pleasures are like any other guilty thing, like eating garbage or wasting paper. You really should feel guilty about them, and if you work a little harder, you might find more pleasure in things that require focus and effort.
As a woman and feminist who unabashedly loves stand-up comedy, a medium that is often overtly hostile to who I am in a way similar to Eminem’s lyrics, I’ve spent a lot of time these past few months thinking about how to walk the line between appreciating the “problematic” while honoring the ideas and ideals that I think are important. (Thanks, Daniel Tosh! Ugh.)
So far, I haven’t come to any real conclusions aside from “Sorry I’m not sorry?” but I loved reading this piece and knowing that I’m not the only one thinking about these things.
Plus, you’ve prompted me to revisit the Marshall Mathers LP, which is proving to be far more enjoyable than I’d remembered.
Feel the same way. Always have. Hate the content of the music. Think is boring musically. But he is an expressionist. The depth of personal emotion, pain, and his attempt to understand a world that if fundamentally un-understandable is brilliant. He is a better artist than 99 percent of the musicians out there. Lyrically he is on par with tom waits, & josh darnielle. It is too bad he is a complete dill hole.
every time i hear “space bound” or “no love,” i get goosebumps and a boner. the man’s a poet. does he have to be a good guy on top of it? what about bukowski? come on!
great perspective. i know eminem is a white guy, but do you think there’s a racial element for why rap music is treated differently with regards to the divide between the content of a message and the presentation of art?
in other words, do you think rap as black music has anything to do with why we chastize Snoop Dogg (a persona) for being a bad role model but not Mario Puzo’s Don Corleone?
@FMBANDIT: Generally speaking, if you have to ask if there’s “a racial element,” the answer is yes.
My dad and I were driving south from Mt. Shasta, CA, a few weeks ago, and one of the few radio stations to come in strong and clear during the long, flat stretches of I-5 is all “new” country, all the time. Listening to it, I was blown away by the rampant misogyny and general absurdity of so many of the lyrics—and yet, I can’t recall any national conversation about protecting our children from the harmful influence of country music.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this is because country music is predominantly white, both in creators and listeners, and because no white person is expected to be a flawless ~*role model*~ for their race in everything they say, do, consume, and appreciate.
I agree with you entirely, Anna. I decided to leave the racial component out of the piece only because there’s just too much to say about it–it’s not something to even try to fit into a web read, I think–but I do think his tone (what someone called a 9-year-old throwing a temper tantrum?) comes in, because I think for so long he felt the need (whether consciously or subconsciously) to live up to the identity we’ve imposed upon male rappers and black rappers in particular. It’s astonishing to me the things that were said when he first appeared on the scene by both white and black artists alike. I’ve never considered country music as contributing to that dynamic, either, but I think you’re right; it absolutely does.
I love Eminem! “8 Mile” kicked me into high gear in following my life goals. I don’t feel any guilt listening to him. He motivates me. Rap on!
Heaven help anyone for whom eminem is a mentor, and the unlucky students who find themselves being instructed by such.
@dino – why can’t he be a mentor? his rap is fantastic and he’s pulled himself out of a drug-addled hole to be a father to his daughter and niece and to hold onto his career. even kids are smart enough to know that what em throws down is not to be literally emulated. most mentors i had as a kid turned out to be as fucked up as i was, deep down.
Hi Amy,
I enjoyed your essay a great deal. Thank you.
In the past, I taught Eminem lyrics as poetry to creative writing students. Even when those students often felt offended by his lyrics, they almost always felt empowered by his fearlessness. Like, “I can write/say what I want too.” He gave them permission to write. I haven’t taught his lyrics lately though because I’ve come to this crossroads where I feel conflicted. Does Eminem flame the fires of hate crimes against women and homosexuals? Do teenagers know how to separate art from reality? Is there some adult there to discuss the difference with them? My son and I used to discuss Eminem all the time. That’s my job. I take it pretty seriously. But not everyone does. I’m aware Eminem writes about this, about how much power or influence he may or may not have, but I figure he has some influence. Art changes the world.
Alas, my I-Tunes list remains full of his stuff. Sometimes, I skip over a song when it comes on, sometimes I don’t. “Kill You” is so wickedly seductive. It scares me.
Anyway, I’m not teaching Eminem lyrics anymore, but I really think I want to read your essay to my creative writing students this semester.
Peace,
A
Hi Alana,
Thanks for your comments. It’s funny you mention this–I, too, teach his lyrics (as well as those to several other rappers’ songs)–and my students also share a similar reaction. In the greater discussion of poetry, in particular, it proves helpful with young readers; I had a good friend who once likened reading poetry without an understanding of the art to listening to a rap song in the backseat of your grandmother’s car. There’s a lot going on in a rap song–cultural references, jokes about celebrities, nods to politics and society–but your grandmother will only ever look down at it as if it’s tasteless, amateur and unsavory. Poetry, meanwhile, is often regarded in this same way by young students. They feel overwhelmed by elements within the poem or often think the theme is bigger than them, when in fact it just takes a little careful listening and the acquired tool set to make it happen.
Like you, I’ve also battled back and forth about the influence he exerts, whether directly or indirectly. There’s one song in particular–“3am”–that for some reason I just can’t listen to. The skits where women are being murdered, too. But the overwhelming sensation is still that he is incredibly talented and knowledgable; one can be a role model in many ways without being one in others.
Thanks for your note.
Loved that..I’m 64 and I LOVE Eminem!!!
I am always blown away by Eminem’s words, even as I am disgusted by them. I feel like the misogyny and homophobia are out there anyway, and we are much better able to combat it if we can understand where it comes from. Having a representative voice that communicates that experience so well is key to that.
A flat and uninteresting read. Nowhere in your essay did you say anything new or perceptive about Eminem except how strange it is that you liked him considering you’re well-off? It could be that I’m entirely missing the point, but if the point is that Eminem’s not perfect and so we should still be able to appreciate his art, how unoriginal. A majority of the writers and artists we admire are racist, misogynists.
My wife works at an agency for survivors of domestic violence and can’t get behind my admiration for Eminem. I see him as a poet portraying characters. The characters are not Eminem himself, but a channel for his emotions about events in his personal life and the state of society. I can see how this could look like he’s condoning violence against women and other disenfranchised groups. But if anything, I think he brings about more awareness of these issues by discussing them in a frank and realistic way.
has anyone yet mentioned the comedic aspect of his songs? i think eminem and his raps are so much more complex than anyone is giving him credit for. sometimes he’s just fucking with us/being funny. sometimes he’s dead serious. most of the time probably a little of both. i think of a song like “3 am” in the same way i think of a horror movie. my mother is a survivor of domestic violence and i admire eminem for numerous reasons. mainly this: he is an original.
I’m curious to know, Amy, if your female students respond differently than your male students to Eminem’s lyrics — or if you have any out gay or queer students, how they respond.
It’s important to note I never condone the message he’s sending; I remind my students he’s granted the same right to free speech we are, as intellectuals who clearly know better, and yes, certainly (@Katie), these are sentiments shared by other writers. I do think it’s interesting, however, that because he’s not writing books, poems, articles, that because he’s not anthologized in any academic way, his message is portrayed as much simpler and rudimentary and therefore becomes easier to shrug off. Especially when he’s likely reaching more young minds than writers. In any case, my students are quick to point out that really no one is above his glare–he criticizes nearly everyone, from celebrities to the average citizen, men, women, children, gay students and heterosexuals alike. This is what I like most about Louis C.K., too, who I also find frankly brilliant. No one is above his criticism, and he makes a point to push boundaries through his jokes. In an interview, Louis C.K. once said he designs his jokes around inappropriate and inflammatory remarks simply to get people talking, that this is the most important thing he can do. And that’s what Eminem does, as well, I think–and he does it effectively, if you ask me.
I don’t agree that excoriating a person who has a bunch of power, institutional or personal, is the same as excoriating someone who lacks that institutional or personal power.
This was great, I know exactly what you mean. There are some massive talents such as Saul Williams that have amazing prose. At Uni we have been discussing Jonny Gibbings ‘Malice in Blunderland’ it is similar in it’s outward and deliberate shock value. But it is amazing how it makes you laugh at things that are so politically incorrect. But you can see there is a lot of genius in there that the author has tried to hide. He is, I feel the Eminem of literature. I have admire Eminem though, for using his hast as fuel.
Amy, absolutely loved your article bout Eminem. Almost got teared up, I alays new he was a lerical genious! I spent my first 30 yrs being on the east side of Detroit. Being a very pale white boy in the hood wasn’t alwsys easy, but like Em I always toughed it out. I remember the first time I heard “Stan” I was blown away! I am a 54 yr old recovering heroinatic, Recovery CD helps me through the tough days. I blast his music in my car and some of my friends make fun of me and I give them the same reply that Em might, F*** off n die! You have a new fan.
Interesting essay. Suggests a deeper explanation than good girls simply go for bad boys.
My personal opinion is an artist’s creativity is always fueled by conflicted with her environment, with the status quo. If the status quo in the artist’s milieu is political correctness, and she has no conflict, rather embraces it, and feels like a traitor to even criticize it, its unlikely she will ever come up with the PC equivalent of “Piss Christ.” Instead she will remain a “good girl,” in the status quo, content that she now lives in the best of all possible worlds, accepted by her friends and associates, who always conspire to save her from need-less suffering outside the hive mind. In this case, she can be a writer. Even a good writer. But not an artist.
Which I suspect why she enjoys an artist like Eminem saying what she can’t say, writing what she can’t write and more, thinking what she can’t think. Instead you admire his creative suffering, while only suffering his lyrics and attitudes. A little suffering. Measured suffering. Certainly no where near dark night of the soul suffering.
Just my take.
AWESOME! I wish I could write like you. I love Eminem. The only artest that I own all his CDs. You hit it perfectly hahaha
I think something that is neglected in both your essay and the comments is the absolutely amazing wonderousness of some of his wordplay. There are moments when the puns, double entendres and lyrical feats are frankly breathtaking.
Who forms pyramids and rap circles around square lyricists?
Finally someone that can appreciate Eminems art as much as I do. There are a lot of haters that hAve formed because of his new music but people need to listen more to his lyrics the way he plays with words and can create an image in your head. It just blows my mind that he dropped out of high school after flunking the 9th grade 3 times he’s a genius just goes to show u don’t need school to exercise your brain he did it just by readING the dictionary everyday
Click here to subscribe today and leave your comment.