Oh Marshall, why? I used to think you was unbreakable. Guess what? You got a hairline fracture in your Waterford crystal and it is starting to grow. Bitch – you got a run in your stocking and no nail polish. Shit. The worst part? It is not your fault. Y’all got to know what time it is, right?
The Source – one of the fucking reasons why Mathers is as household as Ajax, put out the twenty seconds from Eminem’s early days, where he says “Black girls are stupid, white girls are cool.” The issue was wrapped in plastic and a Paul Revere-style holla on the front with incendiary letters “THE MOST EXPLOSIVE ISSUE EVER.’
Well, yeah, this time, believe the hype.
It came with Slim Shady on the cover, giving the finger to the people reading, buying, believing The Source. Eminem, the biggest hip hop superstar in the history of the game, completely defying the fact that he was white in the first real black man’s world is up for some shit that might be the ticking time bomb that I had thought it might become.
I love that little white boy for many reasons. I understand what it means to be racially ineligible for the game you play best. He is me in a nutshell, like Mr. Peanut, spectacles and all y’all. He seemingly came from nowhere, but was backed by Dr. Dre, the most respected name in the industry, with the most integrity outside of the great Chuck D, and a Black producer. He was acting like he fucking owned the world already, with “My Name Is.” Like we were all supposed to know it in the first place.
Lyrically the equivalent of Bob Dylan he would endear your ear with his nasal underdog poetics that you had to just love, just fucking fall in love with, even though he would say the most despicable and hateful things about women, the mother of his child and his own mother. He is a brooding, baby handsome, misogynist genius – universally reviled by feminists. But no one listens to women’s voices. They didn’t get in the way of the rise of this New World Brando, “The Wild Boys” or “On the Waterfront” era Marlon, before he got fat and all up in the islands.
Then he took on the homohater stance like it was the latest dance craze (chickenhead, et al). When confronted by the GLBT community he went up and ‘won’ (not really, you cannot win. homophobia is a no win situation, everyone just ends up dying and hating and having to do retail therapy to get over the shit) by sharing the stage, flossing a baby blue tracksuit to emphasize his delicious babyness, and embracing the ETERNAL FLAME CANDLE IN THE WIND QUEEN OF QUEENS LET THEM EAT COCK, MRS. ELTON JOHN (if only Liberace were still alive, that would have topped it, ahh Lee, if only) at the Grammys. This made gays all over the world wince because it was just so cooorrrnnnyy, but I guess that was progress. At least they didn’t try to wash MRS. ELTON JOHN off the stage with a firehose.
It was our own community that didn’t accept the attempt at apologia. Rather than going further playa hating Slim Shady, we turned on our own founding Mommie Dearest and then started a shitstorm of bitchy gossip (“That old queen just trying to get him some of that dirty white boy chicken, look at her yes – her wit’ her greasy lips!”), left the homophobonics to the perpetrators, and just got over it. While in “8 Mile,” Eminem defends a homosexual man. He doesn’t want to be perceived as hating gays and went to some effort to appeal to the GLBT community and appear remorseful, and short of riding shotgun in the convertible with Anna Nicole Smith at the Key West Gay Pride Parade, he did an ok job.
He went off for no reason at the Insane Clown Posse, who are completely fine if you ask me. Then, he equally, for no reason went absolutely postal on the postmodern Da Vinci, musical Michaelangelo, Moby.
Lashing out at everything and everyone became his modus operandi, and queers, women – especially Kim Mathers ( I bet they have really, really, really, really, great sex, just a theory). I was glad when he missed the Oscars to get married to her again and adopted her son from another man, while still caring for Hailie, who he has always had the most admirable and beautiful love for, which is why I kind of get past his misogyny. He has a daughter, and I hope he knows that what he reaps now, he will sow when she becomes a woman and must face what her father has done to her world by making them think that image of women he created is the truth about cats and dogs. I hope he realizes that she will have to deal with his legacy and long winded onslaught on the opposite sex and be able to survive it.
He became the voice of an army of angry white boys who had felt they had been lied to by mainstream society. They were the important ones. They were the real deal, the shit, in a good way. Finding out that they had been just fucked with so that they would buy into more bullshit insignificant conspicuous consumption.Welcome to the world of minority livin’! He gave white audiences a chance to voice their anger, their dissent, their silence. Even they had poverty, crime, racism, a ‘hood they hailed from that scared them, but that was all they knew. “Being caught between a father and a primadonna” is the kind of eloquence that comes once in a generation and that what he gave, he gave all of us. This permission to be a minority, is a state of grace that allows for some spiritual solace, whether or not you are leading a march, or wearing an Elvis costume and sitting on the toilet. Yet like Elvis, because of his race, Eminem was given countless privileges in the industry that would have expected to have given him less, even raising the visibility of hip hop higher, making it the most popular music today, with Britney, Madonna – fuck even me – spitting bars – knocking rock down with an even bigger cock. But then there is the brilliance there, of comparing himself to Elvis, as if he knows he is guilty of hijacking Black music, just like the E before him.
So where do we lose here? The rise of hip hop only makes it better for artists of all backgrounds, from all of everywhere, to make their mark, and all in all, we get to dance, for real though. But if we uncover that Marshall – or rather the corporate structure that is what really lies behind his steel blue eyes, is a closeted racist, we must also realize and accept that everyone in the world is to some degree. Maybe he was actually preparing and bracing for it for a time, waiting for the shit to hit the fan, taking pre-emptive strikes like signing the biggest, bodega mixtape, bulletproof, baddest, blackest thug in the woodpile, 50 Cent. That’s some cement street cred right there. Motherfucking credit card made of asphalt. That is 50 and the G-Unit, a Greek chorus to add to the Jacobean drama unfolding in the pages of The Source.
Shortly thereafter, Eminem took on a different role, producing a tribute to Biggie and Tupac, using bits and pieces from the remaining tracks left from the too young and too unnecessarily dead hip hop visionaries. It was a sorry, sentimental quilt hastily basted together, admirable for the effort, but lacking the truly inspired voices of both artists. He works hard, is a terrific and prolific artist, and he’s down. Street cred cannot always be purchased, unfortunately or fortunately. Slim Shady had street cred in spades, but then he called a spade a spade, and now he has to backpedal, and it is a sorry thing to see.
I love that The Boo Yaa Tribe, African American/Latin/Samoan/Maori/Philipino rap legends who had practically fallen off the face of the rap world, like it was flat and shit, were signed by Interscope purely on Eminem’s good taste and newly found power. That is dope, because the Boo-Yaa are OG and never given props or recognized for the contributions they made. Eminem is a true hip hop fan and has the sense to bring to the world this music long ignored because it was of the wrong color. He’s not a racist. He’s just a smart and troubled boy with a great charismatic swagger that is starting to cause him to trip on himself. He’s stuck in this never ending war of the worlds that is about skin, and it isn’t a hoax on the radio. It is for real.
Back to The Source. Not having ever really noticed mad or radical angst toward certain artists, this outburst surprised me. I found out about all this oddly enough in TIME magazine. There is no whiter magazine. If TIME was any whiter, the pages would all be blank. There was a small piece about the editors of The Source, ‘outing’ them as white Harvard grads, implying that this attempt to take down Eminem was on lurid and self created controversy created to sell magazines and create dissent within the hip hop community. Chuck D was very interesting on the subject. When I discussed it with him at the Moveon.org event. He said that he liked Eminem, but he didn’t respect him. They had returned from an Australian stadium tour, where people of color are scarce, unless you count the sunburned. He watched an enormous audience of white kids singing along to a song, yelling “Die Nigger Die” and thought, “there is something terribly wrong here.” Since when is it ok for this audience who really knows nothing of the struggle of the minority population able to use the words, the language, the culture, the posture, that we paid for with our blood, our children, our survival in the ‘hood/projects/concentration camps of a country that does not care for us, didn’t ever care for us, and likely never will? But they love the music, and they move the units, and “it ain’t personal and shit, dawg, you my nigga, for real though.” Who is right? Who is wrong? Who is racist? Who is black? Who is white? What the fuck is going on?
All this crazy lunacy and anger will not take down Eminem. It may even help his career. It will certainly perpetuate the discussion about the complexity of our racist world, and if he can step up with his characteristic ‘I don’t give a fuck’ attitude and inspired poetic rhymes, and Chuck D can answer and debate with the scholarly cadence that has taken him into another even higher realm of knowledge, then maybe there might be an opportunity to truly create change. For if Public Enemy was our bachelor’s degree in dissent, then now he, with the Fine Arts Militia, is bringing the Phd.
Maybe it would be possible to see an end to racism in our lifetimes. Just maybe. It is all possible. I am glad that The Source had the brass balls to bring the shit up. Best case scenario? The loser of these battle rhymes will be racism. You couldn’t ask for a better outcome.