On the bright side, at least she isn't obsessing over Dubya.
It's not time for her to start drinking yet.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Posted on 11/23/2002 3:34:04 PM PST by GeneD
A gaggle of my girlfriends are surreptitiously smitten with Eminem. They buy his posters on eBay. They play him on their Walkmen at the gym. They sing along lustily to "Cleanin' Out My Closet" and "Lose Yourself" in the car. They rhapsodize that his amazing vignettes of dysfunctional families make him the Raymond Carver of hip-hop.
They crowd into movie theatres along with teenage boys in watch caps, and then insist that Eminem's rapping his way out of a Detroit car factory in "8 Mile" is way hotter than Jennifer Beals's dancing her way out of the Pittsburgh steel mill in "Flashdance."
They put off helping their kids with homework so they can watch the rapper's trailer-park mom being interviewed on "Primetime Live."
"My 11-year-old daughter is repulsed that I like him," a friend says, as her daughter chimes in that mom is "psychotic and weird." Mothers, the little girl explains, are not supposed to like people who talk about "drugs and sex and hard lives." Kids don't want to see their parents hopped up over a 30-year-old hip-hopper.
It doesn't feel quite so rebellious to like The Most Evil Rapper Alive, as Zadie Smith dubbed Eminem in Vibe, if your mom is rapping along when he describes how he'd like to rape and kill his mom.
"I have to listen to his music in the car because my kids don't want to hear him anymore," a friend with teenage boys says. "He's attractive and smart and very, very macho. There's no fake posturing in his music. He blasts away."
Frantic to be hip, eager to stay young, we are robbing our children of their toys. Like Mick Jagger, we want to deny the reality of time and be cool unto eternity. Eminem sings only about himself, which makes him a perfect boomers' crooner.
But yo, dawg, our suffocating yuppie love has turned Marshall Mathers into Jerry Mathers. Eminem is now as cuddly as Beaver Cleaver.
Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore haven't criticized him lately. Instead, his talent has been hailed by the arbiters of real culture.
In a radical chic ode to the rapper in The New York Observer, Paul Slansky, the Los Angeles writer, suggested that middle-aged fans liked to echo Eminem's anger after they drove in the car pool: "So we drop off the kids, roll down the windows and blast Eminem."
In the same paper, Andrew Sarris called the star the new James Dean, and in The Times, Neal Gabler deemed him "the meta-Elvis."
Pat O'Brien chatted with Eminem on "Access Hollywood" about his "crib" in a Detroit suburb and his Oscar chances. Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times Magazine that the singer's "mayhem is so calculatedly over the top that it seems no more or less offensive than typical multiplex Grand Guignol."
As Don Imus drily observed to Frank last week: If we're talking about Eminem, isn't he over? Can his street cred survive his being on the short list for Time magazine's Person of the Year, alongside Dick Cheney?
He's charming the people he's supposed to be menacing. What happens when Rebel Without a Cause becomes Rebel With Applause?
Eminem used to become irritated when interviewers and other musicians, like Moby, criticized the misogyny, homophobia and violence in his lyrics. Now he probably misses being able to get a rise out of people.
The biggest fight he's had lately is with a hand puppet, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, whom he and his posse pushed around at the MTV awards. (The dog later sniffed, "My mom was a bitch, too, but I don't go writing songs about it.")
Rock 'n' roll and hip-hop used to be about protest; now they're the soundtrack of commodity capitalism, pushing cars, clothes, computers, vodka and running shoes.
It used to take longer for rebellion to go commercial. Deadheads were truckin' for decades before Jerry Garcia began peddling his tie-dyed ties in Christmas catalogs.
Eminem says he will never shill, and he told Pat O'Brien he can still be raw: "I can't see losing that edge . . . especially now being on top. I got new problems." Yet he's flipped the script, rounding his edges for the mainstream. In "8 Mile," he's portrayed as a defender of women and gays. On the cover of his latest CD, "The Eminem Show," he has traded his do-rag and baggy Nikes for a black suit.
He'll have to be very smart and very wicked if he doesn't want to hear himself in elevators.
On the bright side, at least she isn't obsessing over Dubya.
On the bright side, at least she isn't obsessing over Dubya.
It's not time for her to start drinking yet.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
They need somebody to replace Bubba as their love object.
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