So I’m reading this book on Eminem. It’s by Anthony Bozza, a Rolling Stone journo who’s covered him since he started to break, and its pretty much in that RS free-flowing journo style – not nearly confrontational/cutting edge like the mag supposedly was in its heyday, but solid, investigative, thoughtful.
I still don’t quite know where I’m at with Marshall Mathers and his music. I remember the strange feeling as music critic after music critic lined up with the teens of the world in hailing the coming of the Great White Rapper. I didn’t get it. His singles (especially ‘My Name Is’ with its numb hook that still sends me to sleep) didn’t turn me on, and the controversy over his content was nothing new in the hiphop lyric field; I had no incentive to look closer.
But he kept getting bigger and bigger.
I don’t class myself as a hiphop backpacker, but rap music holds a key place in my background. Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet in 1990 was my wake-up call to the world of music. I had coasted through the 80s without ever engaging in music on any level – nothing ever got to me, until this. (Honorable exception: Karma Chameleon, the only song from the 80s I remember enjoying in the 80s.) PE was astonishing. Finally, music I could get into!
Over the next few years I followed Matt, Nicky and Brad’s explorations into the music, and eventually started making my own. I fell pretty firmly into what Bozza calls the ‘College Rap’ crowd – Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Digable Planets, De La Soul, Arrested Development.
I did enjoy the music of the aggressive, and rising, gangsta sound. The gangsta fantasy never really bothered me, except for its prevalence, and the suspicion that way too many people were taking it seriously as a bible for life.
The misogyny and homophobia were bigger deals, but still not dealbreakers. I needed to investigate and see how deep it ran, how serious the artist was, in order to figure out if I could back the music.
Course, I wouldn’t do any digging if the beats weren’t good. That’s why I didn’t care about Eminem for ages, and why I’m coming late to the party now – his recent single ‘Lose Yourself’ is outstanding in every way. And I still haven’t figured it out, but its a familiar process – trying to get to the meat of what’s going on with the image that’s presented.
Which leads back to the book. Here’s a quote from Bozza’s book, because it crystallises exactly the core of my reaction to the media storm over Eminem back when I hadn’t found any reason to care about him:
“When he did appear the problem for me was that he received all this analysis and psychoanalysis that black rappers never got. If you look at somebody like Tupac… when he was alive he was a ‘bad boy’, that’s all people thought of him. There was no effort in the media to deconstruct who he is or where he comes from. But as soon as Marshall Mathers appeared they all said ‘Oh, this troubled white youth. May we lay you down on the couch? What’s your problem?’ To me it really highlighted the issue that nobody gave a rat’s ass about why young black men felt like expressing themselves in this way, but as soon as a white guy did it then there was an effort to understand.”
The quote is actually from someone named Farai Chideya, a journo who runs Pop and Politics.
And I’m not going to follow this line of thought any further, because my dinner’s getting cold.