No, Just Missing the Art of the Song

A few years ago, Paul Simon suggested in an interview that our generation would live to see the demise of melody in popular music and, frankly, I scoffed at the idea. The joke is on everybody. There is an occasional recognizable tune (“memorable” is not a word that comes to mind) in the bland melange that constitutes current radio playlists. But there is also a sing-songy predictability, a mundane propensity to imitate and a farina-like texture in most of what I hear that reinforces Simon’s prediction.

Many rap artists, like Eminem, hold the music of “boy and girl” groups in blatant contempt and have abandoned melody altogether. This new music’s phenomenal popularity lends irony to the traditional complaint of lyricists that it has always been the composer who received the lion’s share of public acclaim, while the wordsmiths labored in relative obscurity.

With all due respect to Dr. Dre’s catchy drum tracks and Eminem’s angst-ridden performance, there is no composer to lionize on “The Marshall Mathers LP,” a Grammy nominee for album of the year and the subject of a bottomless whirlpool of contention.

It is a venerated tradition in popular music to incrementally escalate the threshold of revulsion in polite society. Elvis Presley is always cited as the prime example of this, but he sang songs and--I don’t want to be the first one to break this to you--but the tracks on “Mathers” ain’t songs! Songs have a lyric accompanied by a melody: Eminem’s work is more a chain of consciousness poetry, not that different from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a respected work that was considered highly offensive in its day. Lenny Bruce was an offensive poet of sorts, as were Henry Miller, Redd Foxx and Eldridge Cleaver, all shocking sizable segments of the status quo in their turn. There’s no way of knowing whether Eminem will someday be seen in this company, or if he’s simply a contemporary phenomenon.

In a political and sociological context, it seems there was a great deal of good accomplished by the debunking of hypocrisy relating to race, the military, big government, sexuality, chemical dependence, environmental pollution and so forth. In the early ‘70s, it offended me that so much of pop music’s lyrical content was blatantly suggestive of sexual conduct without coming right out and saying it. So I put the f-word on my first solo album. Needless to say, it wasn’t played on the radio. I have no problem with dirty words or Eminem’s craftsmanship per se, even though I admit that my idea of a great song is Joni Mitchell’s “Dark Cafes.”

Eminem’s imagery is concussive, starkly persuasive and inflammatory in its depiction of inner torment and external cruelty. He slings the lingo of degenerates, thugs and drug addicts with an authentic, disturbing conviction. He’s the best white rapper ever. That sadism, depravity and perversions of all fibers and colors are part of his weave is not even surprising. What’s getting all the attention is his shameless gay-bashing and enthusiastic endorsement of domestic violence, rape and mass murder.

Let’s not, in this context, make the mistake of equating Eminem’s flagrant scorn of gays and women with the liberating revolutions associated with the sexual gyrations of Elvis, Bob Dylan’s protest songs, or John and Yoko Lennon’s passive anarchism.

In “I’m Back,” Eminem boasts, “I take seven [kids] from [Columbine], stand ‘em all in a line. Add an AK-47, a revolver, a nine, a Mack-11 and it oughta solve a problem of mine and that’s a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time.” (It was their fault for being bullies.) He reprises this theme in “Who Knew?”: “How many retards listen to me and run up in the school shootin’ when they’re [expletive] at a teacher?” But does he really mean it? In “Role Model,” he exhorts, “Follow me and do exactly what the song says: smoke weed, take pills, drop outta’ school, kill people and drink.” But nah, he tells us, he doesn’t really mean it. As he recants in “Criminal,” “. . . half the ---- I say, I just make it up, To make you mad.” So he plays it both ways, hiding behind ambiguity.

It wasn’t that long ago that Charles Manson got his wires crossed and found a hidden message in the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” He followed the supposed instructions therein and ordered the deaths of innocent people to foment a race war. But the Beatles’ “secret plan” was encoded for Charlie alone. (Nobody else thought “Helter Skelter” had anything to do with a race war.) Eminem, on the other hand, openly advocates intolerance for everyone (“rape sluts, make fun of gay clubs, men who wear makeup”) and murder (“OK. I’M READY TO PLAY, I GOT THE MACHETE FROM O.J.”). Then this disclaimer: ‘Ha, ha, ha, I’m just playin’ ladies, You know I love you.”

Funny stuff. Eminem is, of course, no Manson, but whether some twisted mind takes some of his words as a message to commit foul deeds the way Manson did with the Beatles, the disturbing thing about this nomination is that everything Mathers is saying is obviously acceptable to a great many people. Marshall sneers at the Grammys. (“You think I give a damn about a Grammy?”) But in “The Real Slim Shady,” he fantasizes about sitting between Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the ceremony and suggests that the academy would select him with an ulterior motive--”just to get me here.”

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As the Grammy awards have grown into a high-profile media event, the most serious criticism mounted against the competition has been that it’s just about money and has become just another awards show. Now the academy faces something more serious in the potential devaluation of its moral currency.

What is wrong with voting for “The Marshall Mathers LP” for album of the year? You can hardly come up with an answer if you don’t understand the context. It’s enough to say that our respected and universally admired little phonograph will not emerge without tarnish from this particular plane crash. If I was who Marshall Mathers claims to be, I wouldn’t even bother to show up. If he wins, it’s almost sure to be the kiss of death--in terms of loss of credibility within the hard-core hip-hop world. And if that doesn’t stall him, who’s next on the hit list? In “Criminal,” Mathers complains that people bother him when they ask if, when he says he wants to kill somebody, “I’m actually gonna do it or . . . I believe in it. Well . . . if you believe that, then I’ll kill you.”