The New Believer Has A Seven-Page Xgau Article About Eminem

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200602/?read=article_christgau

The triumph of emo!

Some interesting Eminem trivia, btw. I spoke to Curtis Hanson recently, and he pointed out to me that "Lose Yourself" was the first Eminem song to use the third person, an intentional choice on his part. Interesting, since I never really considered it. Then I got around to thinking that, well, that is kinda weird, since so much hip-hop is really first and second-person centric, at least since the golden age of hip-hop storytelling. Perhaps another thread would evince otherwise.

ok, don't take this as snottier than I actually mean it, but: because interesting things stay interesting after they vanish from the immediate zeitgeist, maybe?

And that's just what I thought about him until the last album, which made me want to write a lengthy academic essay about artists with promise who resort to poop jokes as a sign of contempt for their fans, success or both.

yes, all 20 million of them

fixed

i'm with nabokov's transparent things narrator on that one:
"in matters of art, 'avant garde' means little more than conforming to some daring philistine fashion"

interesting piece, though, even if it still doesn't make me want to revisit the music

hoo-kay, Dean-o.

thug = black person

Well, I think Christgau is smart enough to realize that some people might assume that "thug" was a racially-loaded signifier if he just said "Eminem didn't come on thug" and left it at that - that's why he specifically addresses the issue of race in the next sentence. However, he addresses it by refuting the simplistic (and racist) equation of blackness and thugness.

esham was doing that stuff even b/4 the gravediggaz right? who else? was brotha lynch hung first?

For the record, that's not a value judgment, and I don't think the juvenile is the only thing going on in these records (or that it's necessarily a bad thing), but still ... this is like the third piece on him I've seen that spends pages and pages explaining this supposedly complex concept, and all I can think of is "yes, duh, that is what we conventionally call juvenile!"

(Christgau actually goes into that kind of stuff a bit w/r/t Eminem appearing on record as actually emotionally affected by dealings with women, something most rappers mostly diminish -- tons of exceptions on that rule, I think, for sure -- but there are more ways of coming at that: surely it's way more rule-breaking in rap to be the one to hate on your own mother!)

It seems to me to be kind of rare that people successfully turn this kind of archetype into a mainstream phenomenon -- i.e., the bratty white kid throwing a big tantrum, "acting out," very very middle-school. (This isn't to minimize actual problem dude has had, just talking about the type.) Axl Rose has definitely gone in that category: who else?

In terms of Em's mainstreaming, my experience is that he's also just more compelling than other provocateurs and tantrum throwers.

wow, you have just articulated why I don't like either of these morons.

xpost

Fred Durst actively fronts, though, right? I don't think he owns tantrums at all; he pretends he's all that. Davis + Korn seems closer except that Davis isn't very tantrumy -- he sets himself up as kind of a sensitive poet of bad shit that's happened to him, or whatever. He's not lashing out at people, right, just kind of "feel my pain."

Oh, and Korn, too.

Bright Eyes!

As a provocateur he leaves your Mansons in the dust because (I suspect) he's just smarter and a better writer. It may also be that I don't have a Jesus thing, so I don't care so much about Manson's gothic, but the let's get into the information stream of consciousness that Shady inhabits looks more like the sworld I know.

yeah shooting a guy in the head after receiving a blowjob is just an exquisite piece of harmless drollery! wtf are you talking about...

I knew this would all tie back to AIDS Wolf somehow...

anyway, i haven't read the xgau essay yet. but as someone who has started and abandoned about 6 eminem essays over the years, i'm interested.

I haven't read the thread after this, or reread the article from a couple days ago, but did you miss the part of the review (or his earlier MMIII disquisitions, which are basically summed and edited here) where he says that Eminem's entire artistic persona and significance exists in relation to a hiphop audience filled in significant part with white consumers of the fantasy of black gang violence?

Yeah, and my point is that instead of explaining how juvenile things can be complex, articles like this shoot straight toward explaining the complexity, without acknowledging that the thing can still be everything else we think of as juvenile. You know?

except insofar as they can borrow the language to piss off adults, which in itself is a noble goal

Exactly what I mean when I say "obsessed with transgression" -- this is slightly dumb, right?

Well, I do sort of mean it. I mean, obviously there's a point in one's development at which, if you haven't stopped getting thrills from making people scowl or scold you, you've missed the boat. But on the other hand, the dynamic between the young at the older, at its healthiest, is partly one in which instinct chastises habit, passion derides the cooler heads that're eventually going to have to prevail - Dionysus vs. Apollo stuff, you know. Not all transgression is good and noble, of course, but transgression itself, I'm sure you wouldn't deny, is often the gesture by which doors are opened, presumptions challenged, and eventually minds changed. In my experience, the sort of nothing-to-lose teenagers who'll swear like sailors at a guy they've never met are (and I know this sounds like bringing-theory-to-bear-on-real-life stuff, but I'll ask you to take my word from 10 years or so of working with young people) actually doing the objects of their antogonism a valuable service.

I think I'm particularly interested in this these days, because it seems like 60s + 90s idealism have converted a lot of good ideas into seeming like cheeseball hegemony, such that things like "ironic" racism (and actual racism) are now fairly popular transgressions (also fake-Nazism, a bit behind the times of the original punk wave -- and by "fake" I mean "the only real meaning I understand behind painting this Swastika on the synagogue is that it will seriously freak everyone out"). Especially dangerous in that bully-circle sense, where kids who feel powerless or oppressed will seek out targets with histories they can exploit for easy feelings of power.

I saw an interview with Peter Yarrow on PBS where he sang a multi-cultural song so deeply fucking patronizing and intelligence-insulting and bad that it could practically make you want to become a bigot: the whole thing in a nutshell.

And "thuggery" here seems like such a word to stop discussion, to eliminate the worthiness of investigation; Eminem may have bullied and said homophobic things, BUT he's not a 'thug' and we all know 'thug' = not 'complex' or worth investigating etc.

-- gabbneb (gabbne...), February 11th, 2006.

I know you were just hitting your single lookit-the-white-people-more-racist-than-I-am note again.

-- gabbneb (gabbne...), February 11th, 2006.

I know you were just hitting your single lookit-the-white-people-more-racist-than-I-am note again.

-- gabbneb (gabbne...), February 11th, 2006.

a bare-faced willingness to tell a core constituency that their particular rap flava “represented” “reality,” which most in their hoods would scornfully deny

Xgau's take on Dre is so clearly just an idiosyncrasy of taste that it's hardly worth comment in my opinion - to construe it any other way does seem to suggest that you're attributing ignoble motives to what's essentially a stylistic preference. (The conflation of "thug" with "black person" on this thread would be funny if people didn't actually want to advance the case that that's how the sentence reads, but I address this parenthetically since what could be duller than to waste a discussion of an interesting article on calling Xgau a racist when any idiot knows he isn't one?)

a) i'm drunk
b) i agree with thomas tallis because miccio called him eric bachmann and i like eric bachmann
c) xgau is pithily full of shit that gets stinkier the more it is deconstructed
d) have a good weekend
e) xoxo

And the deconstuction worker is just like you.

No question there's plenty of shitty 1-dimensional gangsta rap but it wouldn't seem so one sided if he didn't do things like accuse three-6 mafia of 'crack nostalgia' or off-handidly dismiss one of the best producers of the past 20 years, all while attempting to impress the complexity of a singular figure upon his audience. 'Gangsta' becomes a pejorative that merits immediate non-consideration.

Someone like Prince Paul or Doom could get similar levels of analysis to Eminem on the merits. "If I was black, they'd write of me by half"...

Deej - Eminem's far from the only rapper Xgau lauds or is interested in. He's championed hip hop since 1979. Kanye was his number one this year. He thinks gangsta rap is bad in part because it fails its black audience.

em rilly does play on a difft meta level -- like that great "curse curse and bleep bleep" gag that took me by surprise the first time i heard it, and on lots of his freestyles he actually has great recovery skills, dissing previous lines he's just decided weren't that good, and etc. if anything, xgau's piece underplays the vulnerability of the shady character by contrasting it too strongly to rabbit. the shady character actually reminds me sort of like A) an internet troll character (as sinkah pointed out ages ago) but also B) a universalized italian pantomime clown sort of figure, like a folk anti-hero that anyone can slip into or out of. i was at a poetry reading tonight and this guy's excerpt of his longer piece, done at least in part in the voice of an abusive father, just faded into straight shady for a bit. i asked him about it later, and he hadn't even realized.

which is also, by the way, why the trickle-down bullying thing doesn't quite work -- b/c em's persona is so completely self destructive, self abnegating, and by that token unhinged.

"I'm homicidal, and suicidal with no friends
Holdin a gun with no handle, just a barrel at both ends
Sprayin tecs at you until you see your fuckin legs
With the bullet holes and the exit wounds layin next to you
(AHH!) Fuckin mad dog, foamin at the mouth
Fuck mouth, my whole house, is foamin at the couch
Jumped out of the 93rd floor of a building
And shot every window out on the way down to the ground (KEEP FILMING!)
Woke up to a hospital staff, got up and laughed, chopped em in half
Suffocated the oxygen mask
Shit if I get any higher, I'ma get the East and West beefin again
Slide back to Detroit and stand in the crossfire "

Anyway, the tiringness of said subject matter of most rap is why I'm listening to female country singers almost exclusively this week. But pretty soon their particular general range of topics is gonna feel just as oppressive, eh.

Also some of the tone of Xgau's piece is probably a sense that lo this many years later he still is looking for some way to scream look, he has a sense of humor, ok? he's not alway serious, and when he plays serious it's half because it's funny to play serious. laugh, goddamn it, laugh! to lots of readers.

anyway if ppl have to lionize someone, i far prefer em to kanye. for one thing, em can actually rap.

The Kogan essay hints at why I don't think there's any particular advocacy against gays on Marshall Mathers (which is the record I had in mind) - everything he says on that record is carefully crafted to be about more than one thing at once - the trapdoor that leads to other trapdoors. None of the meanings are stable enough to finally stand. And it is a mistake to forget that Eminem is a comic artist, albeit one that has a serious mode.

Ironically, I think the one that fails to get him off the hook is the one people have quoted in his favour "there's no reason a man and another man can't elope", which doubles back on itself with the surrounding context a bit too easily. However, I prefer to believe he only means what he seems to say when he's dissing out Bush.

fitz I ain't him if that's what you're implying - not sure that I'm "endlessly pimping" for him either, I just think his take is almost always interesting & complex and worthy of serious thought/discussion instead of "omg he doesn't like [insert music some other cat likes]" - I don't think I "act as his spokesman," nor even agree with him all the time, so much as I wanna rep for the complexity & coherence of his ideas and encourage/spur engagement instead of dull Jack T. Chick-style "haw haw! wotta square!" knee-jerks. So in that sense, yes, I tend to rep for Xgau even when I don't share his take: it's just that the dismissals of him are often so dull and rote and disengaged when they can be both well-reasoned and deeply engaged. I also think he's really funny a lot of the time.

as a probably uninteresting aside, I believe this post is the first time I have used the word "cat" to mean "dude"

OTM

So Wrong

The reason those of us unconcerned with proving what race men or hiphop headz we are don't feel the need to big up Chuck D or Scarface when we talk about Em's significance is the same that we don't feel that need when big-upping say Neil Young. The dude does stuff that transcends not just genre but medium.

thanks for the clarification, and all that sounds very reasonable.

While we're talking about "dull and rote" dismissals, may I suggest you revisit your standard Kate Bush crit - "she's a boring hippy"
(it's not the dislike that I object to, but do you even know what a hippy is?)

My biggest problem with Eminem and the typical praise that follows him is the whole "holding up a mirror to the hypocrisy of America" schtick, when what he's actually doing is projecting his "fucked up" Super 8 home movies onto the rest of the country.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000005JHP.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

no, nothing hippie about it at all

one thing about em's misogyny that i don't think gets enough play is the way his anger arises from a position of powerlessness vis a vis women. he's a single-mom kid, which i think is why authority in his songs tends to take female form. (even politically, like the way he talks about the bushes as "laura and her husband", and goes after lynne cheney but dismisses her husband with a one-liner.) but he's always in a position of vulnerability with his mom or kim -- until he gets angry and goes berserk on them, but that's always because of real or imagined wounds inflicted by them. but anyway, i think there's still a lot of stuff in those first two records especially that hasn't been so much digested as just swallowed whole. there are good things still to be written about him, but maybe not in the believer.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0252,eddy,40826,1.html

http://s54.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=1WMW7VVXMZVVR2XXQ5LWF9Y9UE

I thought that was kind of a standard theory about misogyny in general.

liking fantasy/tolkien stuff does not a hippie make (although that was one aspect of hippie culture, but hardly the dominant one, esp. if we are thinking in a precise manner about the actual, historical hippie culture)Since Kate was about 8 years old during the heyday of that era, I don't really get that she's a hippie. Seems more like she was a bookish type who created her own little fantasy world, partly informed by a love of fairytales & folklore) That aspect of her work faded a lot by the time you get to Hounds of Love, which is more than 20 years old, so even if your dis was accurate, it's horribly out of date. Also, a recording artist should know that judging a songwriter's work by an album cover is shallow at best. Perhaps that's where the "creative" writing bit comes in.....

by your reckoning, everyone who saw the LOTR movies is a hippie. No wonder you're mad, that's like a billion hippies roaming the planet.

well psychologically maybe, but i'm thinking of by-the-numbers read on misogyny as a mechanism for maintaining male dominance -- of the home, the workplace, sexuality, etc. whereas to me em's misogyny reads more like a reaction against female dominance, which colors it differently.

I also like Gabbneb's little description of the breadth of "Stan", to which I would tend to add that the song is also about transferrance. It is an airport novel in the same way as "Brighton Rock" is a pulp thriller.

Those who note that Xgau's essay doesn't add all that much are probably right. It may be informative for those who haven't read much eminem lore previously, though, although I'd recommend the Eddy essay linked above, Chuck's review of MM and Kid Rock in 2000, and that Kogan P&J essay first.

A couple of stanzas of free associative free speech played for laughs.
this leads to something his mother always told him. The thought is unfinished; instead he bursts into the most amazing explosion of abject sexual misogyny, real tourette's stuff (although I'm undoubtedly using the term in a clinically incorrect way) that's linked with a compulsion to just say what comes into his head (and to a genuine sexual presentation of the mother that surfaces elsewhere, e.g. his image of coming on his mother's tits in "Without Me").

This leads in turn to an imaginitive free association that touches on childhood memories of surrogate parents passed on now, the POV of a toddler on the 911 plane, various other evocative images, and finally some sort of identification with his critics: "I don't blame you, I wouldn't let Hayley listen to me either" - a reminder of the basic normality of this father child relationship.

It is like he's in the process of some sort of resolution; it is certainly the case that he cares so much about free speech for these formative reasons - explicitly locates it as a product of the mother child disfunction.

hardlyart.blogspot.com

remember when people cared about eminem?

RIP big man, heaven needed your awesome beatmaking skills.

Eminem is to rapping what Johnny Winter was to blues guitar.

epitaph-worthy OTM