|
COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On May 23, 2000, Eminem released the last great album of the twentieth century. His previous two albums had proved him to be a clever and foulmouthed rapper, but "The Marshall Mathers LP" was his masterpiece, condensing a few years of American culture into seventy-two minutes of tasteless jokes about Bill Clinton and "South Park," Jennifer Lopez and Christopher Reeve, Gianni Versace's murder and the Columbine massacre. There was a series of jabs at Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Will Smith, and *NSYNC, which was Eminem's way of acknowledging that they all inhabited the exuberant universe of "Total Request Live," the MTV program that screened their music videos back to back before a studio audience of screaming teen-agers. The best part was that Eminem knew his place in this world. He knew that he owed his career to the celebrity industry, knew that his tabloid sensibility was well suited to a tabloid culture, knew that the whole enterprise was built on bad faith. "Became a commodity 'cause I'm W-H-I-T-E / 'Cause MTV was so friendly to me," he rapped--and he wasn't really complaining.
Two years later, tabloid culture isn't what it used to be, and MTV executives are scrambling to keep "Total Request Live" from slipping in the ratings. Eminem's new album, "The Eminem Show" (Aftermath/Interscope), includes a few digs at mainstream stars, but his foes seem diminished, and so does he. He picks a fight with Moby, the mild-mannered electronica producer, calling him a "thirty-six-year-old baldheaded fag," and telling him, "It's over--nobody listens to techno." (Moby posted a polite response on his Web site: "Eminem has skills as an mc, but it disturbs me that he glorifies homophobia and misogyny in his songs.") He threatens to beat up Chris Kirkpatrick, from *NSYNC, which reveals merely that Eminem is the rare twenty-nine-year-old man who can still name the members of an aging boy band. He has to comment on the attacks of September 11th, so he compares himself to the terrorists--"There's no plane that I can't learn how to fly." If Eminem wants to remain Public Enemy No. 1, he'll have to do better than that.
Luckily, the rapper has found a new victim, someone who can give as good as he gets: himself. On earlier albums, he turned his life into a cartoon, starring "regular guy" Marshall Mathers (Eminem's real name) and his "crazy" alter ego, Slim Shady; he even created an animated series called "The...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
