THE CD BOOKLET of Eminem’s last album, “The Marshall Mathers CD,” is lovingly furnished with photos of the little boy from Michigan. The diaper years, grammar school, the pre-peroxide days of teen rebellion–are all represented. But the most winning of these pictures shows the many-named rapper wearing a kitchen apron as he takes garbage out to a dumpster in what looks like the back of a fast-food joint–where our bad boy presumably labors humbly for minimum wage.
In Eminem’s new album, “The Eminem Show,” the real Slim Shady stands up and, whaddayaknow, he’s wearing a suit and tie. Actually, he’s sitting down in most of the pictures, posing Hamlet-like, here with pen and paper in hand, there just beyond the stage curtain while the microphone awaits his application. He is the entertainer, but also a heavy-hearted artist who sometimes feels, as he says on one track, like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. The inside of this CD booklet shows the young man some call a poet in a series of surveillance photos–his life, like his lyrics (as he is wont to complain), under a microscope. Ah yes, the life of a complaining celebrity.
It doesn’t have the same, almost canine, bite as the conceit of a young man screaming at the world from his bedroom window. Narcissism is to be expected from a teenager; in a successful entertainer, and Eminem seems plenty aware that he is just that, such self-obsession proves a shallow well. Even as he works to emcee the show, the rapper has to milk his own persecution complex. Which, ironically, supplies his most intense material–and sets a hard limit on his thematic range. He’s not a boy, not yet a man.
Only Eminem doesn’t go on a road trip to let off steam. He says the F-word, directing it at culture war veteran Lynn Cheney and the last vice president’s wife, Tipper Gore, famous for being one of the first to broach the subject of ratings for records. Indeed, Mr. M is upset with a lot of people. “White America”–perhaps the most furious of the album’s new songs–begins as a patriotic celebration of the “stars and stripes that men have died to protect,” but quickly stumbles into what it’s like to be a foul-mouthed rapper with a following. After that bit about flags and soldiers, Eminem is only interested in his own “army” of lookalike wannabes “marchin’ in back of me.” Like so many rappers, Eminem wants to elevate rage into art, to treat the despotic whims of children as seriously as anything else in human nature.
In “Soldier,” Eminem strives to christen anew the gangster urge as a military code. But this soldier vows simply to kill anyone who messes with him. On one hand the song seems to be a tribute to September 11: Rap music’s would-be felons wanting to be thought of as soldiers, good guys, the heroes of the day. On the other hand, it’s a symptom of the rapper’s megalomania that Eminem finds the difference between self and country so confusing. Perhaps in his mind, he is the greater cause for which people would go to war. But as this unlistenable song attests, Eminem has failed to harness the power of martial rhetoric for his own ends.
Unfortunately for Eminem, no amount of borrowing will save his sagging rage. Not that he doesn’t do his best to keep it up, even bundling several objects of hatred together in one song. The incoherent soliloquy of “Cleaning Out My Closet” has the rapper yelling about his mother, then his father, then his wife, then his critics. “Have you ever been hated or discriminated against? I have, I’ve been protested and demonstrated against / Picket signs for my wicked rhymes.” The chorus of the song is: “I’m sorry Mama, I never meant to hurt you / I never meant to make you cry, but tonight I’m cleanin’ out my closet.” By which Eminem means he’s leaving home. Only it sounds like he’s finally getting around to hanging up his clothes and throwing away those old sneakers that keep piling up.
Without the rage, Eminem is still interesting–as pure vulgarity. And here the limitations of good taste must stop me from quoting at any length this album’s preposterously funny insults to sexual anatomy, female virtue, chivalry, and anything that might resemble gentility when it comes to delicate questions of interpersonal discourse.
There is, of course, more to the album, past the rage and beyond the vulgarity, but that more is crap. The two main examples of this involve family, specifically Eminem’s daughter, who should probably be held blameless. The first is a poppy love song dedicated to the daughter, which proves only that the rapper cannot sing, cannot hit various notes, and has no real musical ability outside of divining rhythms for spoken verse. The other is like a family video, with daughter Hallie singing part of the chorus, “I think my dad’s gone crazy.” Cute if your dad’s a science teacher. Only Hallie’s dad is a famous young man running short on anger.
David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
