Talk of the Town - Eminem February 28 2001

About 20 years ago, I belonged to the downtown YMCA. That facility was so huge and underutilized that when someone drowned in its subterranean swimming pool, nobody noticed for several days.
The weight room was hot and rank. It had a wooden floor that was splintered from decades of iron being thrown onto the floor by powerlifters and bodybuilders. The club's core membership, despite marketing to downtown executives at the time, seemed to definitely be young African-Americans. There were many days I worked out there as the only white boy in a room washed in testosterone and sweat.
The weight room had no piped-in music but sometimes people brought in boom boxes. And it was there, in that cavernous dark room clanking with barbells, I heard rap music for the first time in any serious way. It electrified me, honestly, even as it scared the holy hell out of me. Violent and racially vengeful, the music was the edgiest I had heard in years — and it was a genuine form of street poetry. I became a fan ... without companions of my own color.
I remember listening to one particularly angry rap one day and asking someone twice my size, "Um, do you really feel that way?"
"Only when I do," he said, laughing.
You know where I'm heading: to Eminem. No, I have no "solution" to the problem he represents, but a few observations.
First, it doesn't surprise me that a significant portion of the culture — including the pale-faced babies of the middle class — have become infatuated with the nasty and often enraged language of rap. What electrified me in the old YMCA, besides the sheer otherness of the music, was the direct and aesthetically controlled expression of all those pent-up feelings suppressed by white-bread culture.
Nor has it surprised me that white kids have appropriated so many other aspects of black urban culture. I've written here before about growing up in the golden ghetto of Sandy Springs and becoming totally fascinated with downtown Atlanta's African-American culture. One function of oppressed minorities is to become a container for everything that's marginalized in the general culture.
So it's not the least bit surprising that "soul" — that dark property through which we can make beauty and meaning of suffering — came to be associated with black people, in their music and their food and their literature. I was never as awake in my teenage years in Dunwoody as I was on English Avenue in downtown Atlanta as the black power movement was dawning. The whole culture was awaking in a way. The lion of Zion began pawing the white psyche, a big cat toying with a guilty mouse in the dark. The wound was stimulating — like the violent music in the dark weight room. It was the darkest side of soul.
Eminem is dreaming on his feet.
The psyche is never politically correct. Anyone who pays attention to his dreams knows this. The dreaming psyche, without the inhibitions imposed by the mannerly ego, will produce dreadfully rude images and scenes. Most rap music is a rude dream. And Eminem's dream is every white mama's nightmare.
As long as rap music and its violent fantasies are confined to the ghetto or function purely as an entertainment for white people, as was my case, things are tolerable. But for Eminem to betray his race, his heritage — and he does that in his rejection of his mother — he crosses too far into the dark world for the culture's comfort. The boundary is lost. It's not them and us any more. It's all of us with our dark and hateful aspects. It's me, like the powerlifter at the Y, feeling hateful when I feel hateful but knowing that's not all of me. It's Eminem rapping: "Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?" Am I only the hate I feel?
One hates the homophobic and misogynistic lyrics. Yes, one notes that the record companies would doubtlessly refuse to distribute anything with comparable lyrics sung by fictional characters advocating lynching of blacks or gassing of Jews. But this criticism misses the point. Eminem's singing subpersonalities, particularly Slim Shady, are dumping their hatred on exactly the people the culture and time have fingered for hate. That's what the liberal part of us doesn't want to face. We'd rather Slim Shady practice a bit of don't ask-don't tell. He should be more responsible for promoting ... love!
Is Eminem making a commentary? Might he not really accept Elton John's gayness? Who the hell knows? What is clear to anyone not completely blinded by political correctness is that his work, like any good art, both comments and evokes the very state upon which it comments. Marshall Mathers and his voices are engaged in a ferocious internal argument that is being conducted everywhere in the culture — in our sleepless nights before television's pundits, in our dreams of raw hate and sex mixed with violence, in our fascination with O.J. and Nicole (she, too, traveled too far into the dark world).
To rephrase Pogo's famous line from the old Al Capp comic strip: "We have met the Eminem and he is us."