An excerpt, from near the top of the story:
As Chris Rock had it, something sure has changed in America when the best golfer is black and the best rapper, white. Rock's choice of word is remarkable: not richest, not most famous, but best. Because there can be no doubt about it any more - it's become churlish to deny it. You may dislike his language, his philosophy (and it is philosophy) or his hair dye. You may say it can't last, and unusually, for a rapper, he will agree with you ("I'm gonna do the music as long as I feel it, but the truth is that I can't rap forever").
But let's settle the bald facts: Eminem has secured his place in the rap pantheon. Tupac, Biggie and Pun are gone, and right now there just isn't anyone else but Eminem who can rhyme 14 syllables a line, spin a tale, write a speech, subvert a whole genre, get metaphorical, allegorical, political, comical and deeply personal - all in the one groove of vinyl. Eminem is a word technician. He makes words work for him, he's never lazy. Most rappers can be branded: we play Snoop for that down-and-dirty feeling; when you want to nod your head and pop your collar, there's Dre. Nelly will give you the songs of sex, Mos Def makes you want to start a revolution and Busta Rhymes is purely for bouncing to. Eminem, like Tupac before him, does a little of all these things. Like Pac, he does them with the integrity of an artist. This doesn't mean that he is above the vulgar business of entertainment. Only that elements of these two rappers are, in the sacred terminology of rap music, kept real. Tupac only sold himself so far, never entirely submitting to the demands of the pop market, never self-censoring.
Eminem's music shares Tupac's obsession with truthfully representing a group of disfranchised people: "I love that Tupac cared about his people, from his background, his generation; he cared what they thought - and anybody else, who didn't understand him, could go to hell."
That role, being the truth-telling prophet to a generation, is troublesome. Some truths are hard and self-destructive. Some are conflicting to the point of schizophrenia (Tupac wrote the feminist elegy Brenda Has a Baby and the abusive Wonder Why They Call You Bitch; Eminem wrote Just Don't Give a F 1- 1- 1- and Rock Bottom, in which he clearly does.) These boys are both Mad at Cha and not mad. They Just Don't Give a F 1- 1- 1- and they do. Certainly they have problems, but they are not criminals. They are rappers.
"The fact that a man picks up a microphone," says Eminem, urgently, "that's it, you see? That's what makes him a rapper. It's not a gun. It's a microphone." But this confusion of terms is at the heart of America's love/hate relationship with rap music. In a 20-minute video montage that opens Eminem's Anger Management Tour, a surreality takes over as we watch the most senior politicians in America, one after the other, stand up in the senate with a sheaf of paper in their hands, awkwardly reading out random lyrics, furiously condemning the dangerous social phenomenon that is Eminem. Even with the extra workload created by the War On Terror, it seems there's always time left over for that old favourite, the War On Rap.
Before this kind of misplaced hysteria, good rappers do not back down. They defend the right to use words as any novelist or filmmaker is free to do. But the trouble lies deep within the form itself. Rap uses a narrative medium that mixes story-telling with dramatic monologue, boasting with political mission-statements, original poetry with endless quotation.
As far as I can tell (looking from the outside in), he's just being a new Elvis. Only with a less cheesy first movie.
One of the interesting bits seems to be this one, on "keeping it real," in a way:
Of course, Eminem's music is entirely self-conscious, it is about rap. It asks: just how mighty is the pen? Eminem talks the talk (Don't think I won't go there/ Go to Beirut and do a show there!), but he has never seemed truly interested in walking the walk. To keep it real within the logic of rap and rock means taking on the weight of the world you represent. Tupac, like Kurt Cobain, was never able to rid himself of the fatal idea that he should fulfil, to the letter, the life and death of the less fortunate people he represented. Eminem has turned from that idea, as his hero Dr Dre did.
"I had a wake-up call with my almost going to jail and s***, like, slow down. It wasn't me trying to portray a certain image or live up to anything, that was me letting my anger get the best of me, which I've done many times. No more."
Eminem has become a tad Zen. |
