Missing the Point of the Many Masks

Eminem’s “The Marshall Mathers LP” begins with a statement of principles read by an announcer, the climactic sentence of which has gone strangely unremarked. Pardon me for sacrificing scansion and flava to the hyphen god as I quote it in full: “Slim Shady is fed up with your ----, and he’s going to ------- kill you.”

Without question, this is a mortal threat directed at anyone who hears it. Bye-bye to all 8 million Americans who have purchased the Grammy-nominated CD. Luckily for the future of profundity, few of the solons clamoring for Eminem’s expulsion from the temple of civilized discourse are in danger, because they don’t listen to Eminem--they just read about him. Still, moral arbiters agree that it’s a bad thing to kill anyone, even teenage hip-hop fans. So why do you think I’m being silly? Because Hitler himself found killing that many people a logistical nightmare? Because Slim Shady is a fictional creation who can’t kill anyone? Of course not--the reason’s much simpler. It’s because you don’t think Eminem means it. So now let’s figure out whether you think he means anything else.

Granted, that is to demand from the Eminem controversy a clarity it rarely achieves. Obtuse and uninformed though his critics may be, they’re aware that his songs aren’t pure acts of advocacy. With Marshall Mathers’ fraught relationship with his real-life wife adding clear-and-present piquancy to the hand-wringing, there’s generally reference to the rapper’s violent “fantasies,” his homophobic “epithets.” The feeling seems to be, however, that Eminem’s audience of unformed minds isn’t up to such fine distinctions, and that his juvenile/sociopathic/exploitative/yucky self isn’t either. Surely that’s why “Janie Runaway” has gone unremarked in the current Grammy brouhaha.

You’ll find “Janie Runaway” on another nominee’s album, Steely Dan’s “Two Against Nature.” It’s sung in the voice of an aging pedophile trying to set up a threesome with his jailbait house guest and a friend of hers. This being Steely Dan, the tone is complex, but that just means the pedophile isn’t presented as a beast. But aging males attracted to underage females are notorious rationalizers, far more hypocritical than young men enraged at their female sexual partners. Will “Janie Runaway” lessen their tendency to kid themselves about their own morality? As a critic who’s the father of a 15-year-old daughter, I’d say there’s more chance it will titillate. And as critic and father, I nonetheless insist that “Janie Runaway” is a brilliant song.

But the members of Steely Dan are in their 50s--now evolved, by the strange alchemy of respectability, into “Serious Artists.” Eminem is a 27-year-old white practitioner of a genre that 20 years on was recently accused by anti-Eminem New York Times columnist Bob Herbert--a reliably left-liberal African American, so he should know--as having “thoroughly broken faith with the surpassingly great, centuries-long tradition of black music in America.” Which is why I doubt hearing the music would tip the balance for many Eminem bashers. If you hate hip-hop, then of course you hate Eminem. You probably aren’t too fond of Lauryn Hill, either.

Yet how else is Eminem to be judged? This is the first major white practitioner of a sophisticated, foul-mouthed, “ill” aesthetic designed to give middle-aged blacks like Herbert conniptions--although, confusingly, Eminem’s defenders rarely pin down his precise achievement. Despite “Stan,” about a crazed fan, or “My Fault,” about a woman who ODs on Slim Shady’s ‘shrooms, he’s not so much a storyteller as a rhymer; although no name rapper has done so much with enjambment and polysyllabic line endings, many are more poetic in other ways. Both his sound and his delivery privilege treble over bass, a pop strategy that leaves hip-hop’s rhythmic and textural innovations to deeper musicians. In short, he’s a gifted technician, not a titanic one. But he’s the funniest rapper ever. No rapper has ever made clearer, especially to young whites who view black rappers as romantic outlaws, that hip-hop is a verbal construct, not to be taken literally. And no rapper has ever done so much with the fine distinctions that are supposedly over his audience’s heads. It’s not, as is too often said, that his artistry justifies his offensive content. His offensive content is the essence of his artistry.

Schooled in the over-the-top insults of the ritual dozens game, blaxploitation flicks and slasher movies, the everyday brutalities of police harassment and the drug economy, and the early censorship battles of 2 Live Crew and Ice-T, hip-hoppers love reality games. They regularly boast about “keeping it real” and regularly defend their tales of mayhem as fictions. So don’t think Eminem is the first rapper to play with multiple personas. Still, Marshall Mathers the man, Eminem the artist and Slim Shady the alter ego are an exceptionally well-defined trio deployed with exceptional intricacy, an intricacy hip-hop fans are trained to comprehend. Rather than attributing his antisocial impulses to Slim and letting that be that, Eminem insists--gleefully, guiltily, perversely, thematically--that his masks overlap.

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It’s fair to charge that Eminem and his music are homophobic, not simply on the basis of the vile f-epithet applied to anyone who is supposedly unmanly, but because various bawdy details corroborate it. But even his homophobia is examined by hip-hop standards (he decides “there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope,” albeit for the wrong reasons--because, he says, if bestiality and cannibalism exist in the world, anything goes) and his misogyny is much more so. It’s stupid or deceitful to argue that “Kim,” in which you hear him slitting his wife’s throat, is an incitement to murder. The wrong listener can misconstrue anything. But the unbearably raw pain of Slim’s/Eminem’s/Marshall’s drunken rage, misery and insanity is intended to make him an anti-role model and render “Kim” a far more socially responsible work than “Janie Runaway.” The teenagers know what the moral arbiters don’t understand.

Two tracks later comes the finale, “Criminal,” in which Eminem supposedly threatens to murder “a fag or a lez.” Only he doesn’t. Explicitly and unmistakably, there for any person with a 90 IQ to understand, the song is about words’ power to cause pain. It too comes with a statement of principle, uttered by Eminem himself. It’s about how stupid it is to think he’d kill anyone “in real life.” It concludes: “. . . if you believe that, then I’ll kill you.”

Think he means it? I sure hope you don’t.