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Five Days That Shook The World:
The Battle for Seattle
and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
with Photos
by Allan Sekula
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Published on February 18
BEAST IN GOLD
BRAID:
GENERAL PINOCHET
The General Turns
Out to Be a Coward.
When Police Knock
at His Door and Threatended to Slap Cuffs on him, Pinochet Fainted
EMINEM:
A Hired Gun from the
Poor Part of Town, Who Preys on the
Powerless, Extorts
Money from the Poor
and Celebrates a
Thuggish Brand of
Gangster Capitalism
BOVE OF MILLAU:
If There's One Organizer
Symbolizing the Worldwide Counterattack on Corporate Agriculture
It's Jose Bove
Published on January 30
THE TERRORIST'S
RETURN:
THE CRIMES OF SHARON
From Qibya to
Beirut:
Ariel Sharon's
Bloody Record
FAKING IT
Democrats Roll
Over on Ashcroft
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
They All Love
Anne Veneman
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Gore Gets More
Votes, Doesn't Care
What William Carlos
Williams Really
Thought About
The Beats
Published on January 15
BUSH PUTSCH
OKAYED
BY SENATE DEMS AND
BLESSED BY SUPREMES
More Scandals
of Squelched
Black Votes
Outside Florida
COUNTERPUNCH
SERIES
ON BUSH/CHENEY
CABINET CONTINUES
Nixon Protege Rumsfled
Returns
to Pentagon as
the Keeper of
the Trough
OUR LITTLE SECRETS
Russia Nukes Itself
Deregulation in
Airlines and Energy
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the Press
by Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
New Stories:
CounterPunch Coverage
of Election 2000
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February
20, 2001
The Politics
of Eminem
Swift, Twain, Browning?
Nah, It's Eminem
"My little sister's
birthday, she'll remember me
For a gift I had ten of my boys take her virginity ("Mmm-mm-mmm!")
And bitches know me as a horny-ass freak
Their mother wasn't raped, I ate her pussy while she was 'sleep
Pissy-drunk, throwin' up in the urinal
("You fuckin'
homo!")
That's what I said at my dad's funeral"
from the song "Amityville"
Back in the mid-Eighties when metal
rocker Blackie Lawless was acting out his rape fantasies on stage
with a circular saw as part of a codpiece (the prototype for
Eminem's current act featuring a chainsaw?), one of the arguments
that some used in his defense was that no one actually listened
to the likes of Blackie Lawless, so Tipper Gore and her footsoldiers
in the Prude Brigade really had nothing to worry about.
The same can't be said for
Eminem, since he sells millions of CDs and gets plenty of free
airtime on MTV and radio and-much to his fury-Napster. So a more
elaborate--though not necessarily more sophisticated defense
has had to be deployed. It goes thus: Eminem is a creature of
his environment. He is the authentic voice of the poor, white
working class. White trailer trash. He is what American capitalism
has made him. His angst is real, his anger legit-though misdirected
at women and gays because of malign social forces. Like Elvis.
Or Bill Clinton. One critic called him "our" Johnny
Rotten. But where the Sex Pistols attacked the Queen, Eminem
bashes queens. One's political, the other's not. And that's all
the difference in the world.
But then on top of this a second
defense is layered: namely, that Eminem is a master satirist;
that his lyrics-which some demented writer in The London Guardian
declared as being the equal of, and in some ways superior to
Robert Browning's - are really an ironic expose of our own homophobia,
mysogyny, class bias. He's our Swift, Twain, Ishmael Reed.
Then realizing there might
be a potential conflict between defense A and defense B, a third
one is proffered: namely, that the genius of Eminem is to be
found in the "ambiguity" of his lyrics-which would,
we guess, allow for him to be both "authentic" and
"satirical". It's like there's an unreliable narrator
at work, say the narrative voice in Henry James or Alain Robbe-Grillet.
But all of these are merely self-congratulatory
rationalizations of critics and they are undermined by what Eminem
himself has to say about what he's doing-which is that the lyrics
are a "gimmick", that "they don't mean what they
say", and "aren't worth a grain of salt". In other
words, it's all a put on, not for some satirical purpose, but
merely because he and his label know that these kinds of exploitative
lyrics appeal to pre-teens who share many of the same phobias/fantasies.
In other words, it's not about
making music, expressing the condition of the alienated working
class in Detroit, but about making money. Eminem said this precisely
in his attack on Napster. He's marketing hate to kids for money.
It's that simple and not that different in kind from tobacco
advertising-which could be defended on artistic and 1st amendment
grounds as well, and indeed has been by the tobacco industry's
hired guns.
Eminem's lyrics are a kind
of premeditated infantilism, but not a healthy regression toward
the polymorphous perverse, but a summons to the thanatic impulse,
a call for division, repression, an invocation of the very forces
that have divided the working class for decades. He serves the
interests of the State. The idea that Eminem might be "censored"
is a ruse, and a tired one, and an insult to those who have truly
been censored. Cross the powerful, question the System and you
risk censorship, lawsuits, SLAPP suits, beatings, harassment
or worse. As long as Eminem remains a whore for the corporations,
he will continue to accumulate wealth and be shielded from the
censors of the state. And he is a corporate mercenary, whether
it's flacking for Nike or for the music industy's trade association,
the Recording Industry Association of America.
Unlike the censors at GLAAD
and other groups, we have no desire to amputate Eminem's right
to self expression. Let him rap by all means. To our minds, here
at CounterPunch, he's a hired gun from the poor part of town
who preys on the powerless, extorts money from the poor, and
celebrates a thuggish brand of gangster capitalism. His defenders
and apologists in the critical world are just another arm of
the very same industry.
The more instructive analogy with Eminem
would have been with Browning's original idol, Percy Shelley-the
most irascible English poet since Kit Marlowe. Shelley was an
adulterer, an atheist, an abortionist, drove his first wife to
suicide, a victim of censorship who was driven from England,
and in turmoil with his own homosexual longings. The all-round
infant terrible of English poetry, who had the honor of being
savaged by the crypto-fascist Matthew Arnold.
Forget Shelley's ability with
the language and look only at the sensibility of the two. Both
have blood lust. But Shelley longs to see the powerful pay, the
deposition of tyrants; he was an unrepentant Jacobin. Eminem
is the neighborhood bully, preying on the weak, the defenseless,
the marginalized, singing the virtues of accumulation and consumption,
never once taking on the powerful-a would-be tyrant, himself.
It's one thing to defend Eminem against censorship-quite
another to promote, as Chaucer would say, "the sentence"
or message of his lyrics. Remember the lines by Shelley, dashed
off in a hour of rage following the Peterloo Massacre--the WTO
protest of its day, where 40,000 protesters and laborers were
trampled by English police on horseback. Try to find any similar
sentiments in Eminem. Here are two stanzas:
The seed ye sow, another reaps;
the wealth ye find, another keeps;
the robes ye weave, another wears;
the arms ye forge, another bears.
Sow seed-but let no tyrant reap;
Find wealth-let no imposter heap:
Weave robes-let not the idle wear;
Forge arms-in your defence to bear. CP
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