No Free Pass for Eminem

Steely Dan’s music isn’t abrasive like hip-hop. It’s at the opposite extreme, cool and enticing. Some listeners might even find themselves singing along with deeply unsavory come-ons. The group’s audience, mostly boomer-age adults, considers itself sophisticated enough to handle a few ironies and the concept of an unreliable narrator, and the music goes down so smoothly that it seems perfectly genteel. Mr. Becker and Mr. Fagen are punctilious pop craftsmen who have spent a long time in the music business. So Steely Dan is granted literary license. Similarly, there was no controversy when Shawn Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home”–about a woman who takes revenge on an abusive husband by burning down the house – received Grammys as Record of the Year and Song of the Year for 1997, even if it was pro-arson.

Eminem gets no such leeway. He’s belligerent,foulmouthed and sick-minded, and his favourite all-purpose insult is a homophobic slur. (In a defense that’s both weak and disagreeable, he has said he doesn’t mean it to apply only to homosexuals.) Where Steely Dan uses insinuation and indirection, Eminem is bluntly antagonistic; where Steely Dan lives for understatement, Eminem goes for hyperbole.

Instead of the Slim Shady alias he used on his previous album (which, incidentally, won two Grammy awards for “rap” without any repercussions), Eminem uses his real name in the title of “The Marshall Mathers LP.” And his music is hip-hop, which renders him immediately suspect to much of the baby-boom generation. Somehow, all those factors make him forfeit the presumption that every word on his album is not completely, unironically sincere. He’d be the first artist who, to paraphrase Philip Roth, never made anything up.

And if that were so, he’d probably be safely behind bars. Between the murders, death threats, rapes, bank robbery, drug abuse, drunken driving, fistfighting, vandalism, animal mutilation and the notion that, as he sarcastically raps, “I invented violence,” Eminem would be a full-time crime wave. Op-ed handwringers, who are used to parsing the straight-faced pronouncements of politicians, can glean all the scurrilous quotes they need. People who worry about domestic abuse (most of Eminem’s misogyny is directed at his wife and his mother) and about homophobia also have plenty of ammunition. All of them help Eminem reach his true objective: “I think I was put here to annoy the world.”

Where Steely Dan plays one basic identity game – impersonating louse after louse – Mister Mathers runs a multiple-identity Olympics. He’s a success, a loser, a madman, a star, a whiner, a combatant, a jerk – anything, he insists, but a hypocrite. He portrays realistic irritation spilling over into homicidal rampages, and as a child of the tabloids, he exploits his own troubled real-life marriage, like Henny Youngman turned blood-thirsty. He knows he’s a mess; he also jeers that plenty of other people have thoughts like his that they’re unwilling to admit. “Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose,” he raps. “But no worse than what’s goin’ on in your parents’ bedrooms…”

What may be the funniest part of the Grammy hoopla is that Eminem-haters think the imprimatur of the Grammy would be to Eminem’s advantage.

If “The Marshall Mathers LP” were named Album of the year, they seem to think, Eminem would be established in the pop mainstream, with his four-letter words and vicious fantasies certified as acceptable behaviour…

The New York Times, 18. 02. 2001

Baby-boom generation – peopleborn during the demographic explosion of 1946-1964.

Ex. 28. Explain the underlined words and phrases. Give their Russian/ Belarusian equivalents.

Ex. 29. Explain what is meant under:

· …the music goes down so smoothly that it seems perfectly genteel…

· Where Steely Dan uses insinuation and indirection, Eminem is bluntly antagonistic; where Steely Dan lives for understatement, Eminem goes for hyperbole.

· Op-ed handwringers, who are used to parsing the straight-faced pronouncements of politicians, can glean all the scurrilous quotes they need.

· Where Steely Dan plays one basic identity game – impersonating louse after louse – Mister Mathers runs a multiple-identity Olympics

· …portrays realistic irritation spilling over into homicidal rampages…

· …got a couple of screws up in my head loose…