| | On Eminem to Mr. Lewis:
I'm not that familiar with Eminem, nor with rap or hip-hop to any great degree, and have never been very attracted to it. But the lyrics you put up don't have the turn-off effect perhaps you would expect it to. I am not claiming it is great art, but I count it to the artist's credit that never having heard these words, I can *hear* the rhythm to it, much the same way one can in the Norse sagas, via consonantal rhymes. I also strongly suspect that the words themselves, which are just invoking the latest ephemeral panic buttons, are not the point. The point is the precise is to force the listener into an exotic emotional state, at which this is a fairly effective piece.
Umberto Eco's concept of "hyperreality" may be helpful; i.e., the effect of how once an pop art culture that originates in the popularization of representations gets going, those symbols then get used in new ways and in different disjunctions, and eventually create a conversation of symbols without original representation, which are then reincarnated in social practices which fulfill artistic images that have no originals.
Eminem is well aware that the images he refers to are stereotypes that conventional types use as bogeymen; what he's doing is pushing buttons. He clearly shows be knows they're bogeymen; "shut up,bitch, you're causing too much chaos" is putting the patriarch's words to Don Juan's actions- it is a specific lance to the hypocrisy of the "courtly protectors" of women who spend their time bemoaning rape and rap music while actively maintaining a misogynist culture that they wash their hands of.
Also, consider: Eminem is obviously directly provoking the guardians of morality, but the whole thrust of his ability to provoke depends precisely on his audience understanding them better than they ought. He is here using imagery taken from stereotyped porn formulas. I would seriously make a note that this work won;t speak to Objectivists precisely because they embrace one of the few ethics that *doesn't* promote hypocrisy in this way. I find myself laughing out loud at the angry response of the patriarch to this. By the very quickness of the anticipated patriarch's reaction, he reveals he knows a little too much about both sides of the official opposing bad guys. Eminem is laying bait for enemies to reveal themselves by howling in rage.
He's not really interested in the particulars, which even in this piece he switches back and forth on. What he is doing is constructing an idealized image of "your worst nightmare". He let's this slip when he says "...thinking I'm saying the shit cause I'm thinking it just to be sayin it." This confusing construction translates as: "you think I'm saying what I say in order to believe it just to say it." What exactly does that mean? I say it's a displaced reference; everyone knows that with Eminem, "half the things I say, I say just to make you mad." Yet here he is saying he really means it, or rather, that people think he really means it just so he can say it well.
Now, whatever else one might say about Eminem, he chooses his words with care, to cause the maximum emotional response to the listener. Yet here he has his theatrical audience- the moralizers- accusing him of what works out to be an extremely *serious* reference... the use of language as a tool to push someone into a state where they take on an aesthetic persona for the purpose of artistic excellence. I can't believe Eminem would use this reference, in the context of a song which clearly pushes *others'* buttons via an instrumental/performative use of language, if he wasn't quietly revealing his own bag of tricks.
Eminem is a performance artist is the serious sense, in that the artistic medium is in the *interaction* between performer and audience. He is setting up the viewer to watch a contest where the rapper plays the prim and proper bourgieousie like a drum. He is more quietly laughing at the audience who gave him all the gold records without realizing they are part of another game Enimem is playing.
Yes, he ~very carefully~ uses horribly ugly words. But he clearly divests himself of any attachment to those references in words understood by is literal audience- the fans who make him rich- while using those same words to create a spectacle of his intermediary audience- the moral and proper crowd. He is simply using any tools at hand- "Blood, guts, guns, cuts/Knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts" as ammunition, with full awareness that his tools are a hodge-podge of stereotypes. One has to understand that today's youth culture, precisely his audience of mostly white, young middle-class hip-hop enthusiasts, are used to this deluge of carping on their imagery... what they are watching is Eminem play the bogeyman of everything that would make their parents faint... and what they are really watching isn't so much Eminem but how easily those same wise elders are manipulated.
That said, let me be clear I am arguing that Eminem's work here has artistic value. My view as to its ethical value and cultural politics is complicated. I am not saying it is the highest piece of art... simply that properly understood it is much more clever,and much more serious, than in seems.
And honestly, if I seem to be reading in a bit, please understand I would have missed all this a year ago, but Eminem's methods here are *extremely* similar to those that my own profession practised seriously employs; i.e., the ars personae. When he says, "I invented violence, you vile venomous volatile bitches", he is doing two things ("tragedies happen in two states" is a double entendre). First, he is making an mundanely absurd statement and laughing at the proper people who will take it literally. But on another level, he is merely speaking in accuracy that he is taking on a certain persona by taking on a persona- not of violence, but the archetype of masculine violence from a patriarchal perspective. Thus, taking on these attributes, the claim "I invented violence" is not absurd at all. And he gives it away by referring in the same line, and in other lines as I have previously noted, to an analogue "castrating female."
I'm triple platinum and tragedies happen in two states
I invented violence, you vile venomous volatile bitches
vain Vicadin, vrinnn Vrinnn, VRINNN! [*chainsaw revs up*]
Texas Chainsaw, left his brains all
danglin from his neck, while his head barely hangs on
Blood, guts, guns, cuts
Knives, lives, wives, nuns, sluts"
He concludes the piece by first invoking "two states", then a classic image of a castrating female (venemous vile bitches), and then proceeds to invoke a familiar pop-culture image of violence (Texas Chainsaw), and then lists every association he can find. This is a classic, formulaic, by the book, Pagan invocation- he specifically employs imagery that screams of the Hindu goddess Kali. This locks into place that Eminem in taking on the part of a persona. What he is saying, in between the lines, is that it's really not protection from violence that the moralizers are scared of, but the image of their charges turning on them in necklaces of skulls and robes of severed hands.
Eminem is assuming as image; an incarnation of the Urban Predator, and unveiling himself before one audience while getting his rhetorical audience to take it seriously. If his lyrics are judged directly, they are not much art, but if one judges the same lyrics by their ability to create effect, the fiendish trap of situation he sets up for his opponents, via a persona, is cleverly drawn art. He is indeed triple platinum.
Still, this headbanging caterwauler far prefers the honorable Ludwig van. And platinum isn't my color of choice. (oh, BTW, Rand's "platinum gown" in Night of January 16th, originally Penthouse legend is a classical erotic reference; Rand has a hostile character let it slip. And the trial's still going on.)
Regards,
Jeanie Shiris Ring {))(*)((}
r.h.i.p.
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