Please sit down
Why is this angry idiot screaming at me?
It’s a question I’ve asked myself every time I’ve fruitlessly attempted to get into Eminem’s music — back as an impressionable young hip-hop fan and now as an adult — each time reaching different iterations of the same conclusion: I don’t know and I don’t care.
Eminem, birth name Marshall Mathers, is the even-lower-brow musical equivalent to Adam Sandler: dopey and juvenile, obsessed with pointing out the absurdities of celebrity culture, despite being a massive celebrity in his own right. Did I mention the poop jokes? The misogynistic and homophobic undertones? The cojones both to be unbearably obscene and to want to teach us something pure about ourselves? Jack and Jill is Recovery. Mr. Deeds is The Eminem Show.
Unlike Sandler, who at least has something of a filter, Eminem should appeal to no one. His humor is stuck in the third grade, while his mouth is too foul for anyone with a conscience.
However, he gets away with it all because he appears self-critical. Take this doozy from the song “Just Lose It”: “And I don’t mean rap as in a new case of child molestation accusation/ That’s not a stab at Michael/ That’s just a metaphor, I’m just psycho.” Here, Eminem lambasts Michael Jackson — a celebrity equal to or above Mathers’ stature at the time — for the most obvious of all things. It’s a glib moment in a glib song. However, then he turns it all on himself to save his flippant ass by mentioning, as if we didn’t know already, that he’s “just psycho.”
To him, it’s an apology for being crass and provocative. In reality, it’s a sorry excuse for existing in the first place, as if the demons of wealth and fame inspired him to keep toiling away at an art form that could not be more unlike him: gritty, genuine, beautiful, tinged with struggle but full of hope. His Beverly Hills doppelganger may be Adam Sandler, but in hip-hop, he’s both members of the Insane Clown Posse mashed into one.
Eminem’s recent career trajectory suggests he’s as confused as ever. Relapse was stained in vomit and doused in crushed pain pills. Recovery reimagined our rap hero as a preachy suburban dad. Now The Marshall Mathers LP2 sounds like a thinly veiled ploy to get us to remember his ’90s fame. Look at the new song “Rap God,” for example, with its scattered references to breaking tables over “faggots,” just like the Eminem of yore. Yet if this is him making a beeline toward the past — the days of “My Name Is,” “The Real Slim Shady” and cultural ubiquity — he definitely hasn’t learned anything.
“They asking me to eliminate some of the women hate/ But if you take into consideration the bitter hatred that I had/ Then you may be a little patient and more sympathetic to the situation/ And understand the discrimination,” he raps, so confident in the profundity of his words. We’ll excuse his sexism. He’s a romantic, pining for our forgiveness. He’s troubled. He’s 41. He’s still entranced by the poop stain in his underpants.
“Stop the tape!/ This kid needs to be locked away!”
