Still, he’s looking out for Hailie and expects other dads to do the same for their kids: In ” 4-Who Knew - Audio” he says, “Don’t blame me if little Eric jumps off of the terrace/ You shoulda been watching him/ Apparently you ain’t parents.” In “ 5-Stan - Audio,” Eminem even expands his paternal obligation to include a troubled fan-although the rapper’s sense of drama requires that the song’s homily come only after Stan has already killed himself.
Like Clinton, Eminem hypocritically extols family values that his own behavior doesn’t exemplify. When he assails Bill Clinton’s extracurricular sex life, it’s only to deflect attention from his own misdemeanors.
He may not truly believe in getting away with murder, but he does extol the pleasures of soft drugs and free (heterosexual) sex. Rather than speak truth to power, he’d rather just talk dirty. He’s more like Matt Drudge, taking the freedoms won by ‘50s and ‘60s radicals and using them to razz the contemporary left. In one of his schoolyard plaints, he recalls being pummeled by a bully in the bathroom when “the principal walked in and started helping him stomp me.”Īnd as skillfully as Eminem plays the victim, he has no interest in making common cause with fellow outcasts. He portrays himself as society’s battered child, the product of a broken home and trashed schools.
But where Mailer’s ‘50s white hipsters identified with the suffering and alienation of African-Americans as a way to break free from middle-class conformity, Eminem raps about his tortured life.
Norman Mailer might recognize Eminem as the latest incarnation of the white Negro. “You probably want to grow up to be just like me.” Without the colorful imagery, Eminem’s stance is: “I just said it/ I ain’t know if you’d do it or not.” Eminem alternately plays the parts of Marshall Mathers (his given name) and the aliases Eminem and Slim Shady, distancing himself from his violent alter egos and dismissing anyone who would imitate them: “I tie a rope around my penis and jump from a tree,” he jeers.
He also knows how to separate himself from what he says. But here’s what the liberal protesters don’t get: Eminem is their prodigal son, a free-speech advocate who knows the First Amendment as well as other working-class renegades know the Second.
Senate hearings and an unsuccessful attempt by Ontario’s attorney general to ban the rapper from Canada on the grounds that his recordings qualify as “hate propaganda” under Canadian law. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation called the nominations “a high-profile platform for Eminem’s messages of violence” and said Eminem’s music “represents some of the worst in defamation.” And GLAAD’s not alone: The phone system of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which hands out the awards, was overwhelmed with protests after the nominations were announced, and one Grammy voter informed the Los Angeles Times that he “hung my head in shame.” These protests followed last year’s denunciations of Eminem in U.S. The nominations, apparently intended to offset the Grammys’ longstanding reputation for blandness and irrelevance, set off predictable cries of outrage from liberal activists.