Eminem Is Right

Policy Review, Dec 2004/Jan 2005 by Eberstadt, Mary

In a 1994 interview that focused on the death of Kurt Cobain, Vedder noted with particular insight:

"We [that is, Vedder and Cobain] had similar backgrounds, yeah, things that happened with our families and shit. ... I think that's something that comes out in what we wrote in our songs, definitely. . . . But what makes it more similar is the way people responded to what we wrote and sang about, the intense identification. . ..

"And I think it was maybe a shock to both of us that so many people were going through the same things. I mean, they understood so completely what we were talking about.... Then all of a sudden, there's all these other people who connect with them and you're suddenly the spokesman for a f- generation. Can you imagine that! . . . when our first record came out, I was shocked how many people related to some of that stuff .... The kind of letters that got through to me about those songs, some of them were just frightening

"Think about it, man," he says. "Any generation that would pick Kurt or me as its spokesman - that must be a pretty f- up generation, don't you think?"4

Well put. And as it turned out, Cobain and Vedder were only the beginning.

Where's daddy?

EVEN LESS RECOGNIZED than the white music emphasis on broken homes and the rest of the dysfunctional themes is that the popular black-dominated genres, particularly hip-hop/rap, also reflect themes of abandonment, anger, and longing for parents. Interestingly enough, this is true of particular figures whose work is among the most adult deplored.

Once again, when it comes to the deploring part, critics have a point. It is hard to imagine a more unwanted role model (from the parental point of view) than the late Tupac Shakur. A best-selling gangsta rapper who died in a shoot-out in 1996 at age 25 (and the object of a 2003 a documentary called Tupac: Resurrection), Shakur was a kind of polymath of criminality. In the words of a Denver Post review of the movie, "In a perfect circle of life imitating art originally meant to imitate life, Shakur in 1991 began a string of crimes that he alternately denied and reveled in. He claimed Oakland police beat him up in a jaywalking arrest, later shot two off-duty cops, assaulted a limo driver and video directors, and was shot five times in a robbery." Further, "At the time of his drive-by murder in Law Vegas, he was out on bail pending appeal of his conviction for sexual abuse of a woman who charged him with sodomy in New York."

Perhaps not surprising, Shakur's songs are riddled with just about every unwholesome trend that a nervous parent can name; above all they contain incitements to crime and violence (particularly against the police) and a misogyny so pronounced that his own mother, executive producer of the movie, let stand in the film a statement of protesting C. DeLores Tucker that "African-American women are tired of being called ho's, bitches and sluts by our children."

Yet Shakur - who never knew his father and whose mother, a long time drug addict, was arrested for possession of crack when he was a child - is provocative in another, quite overlooked way: He is the author of some of the saddest lyrics in the hip-hop/gangsta-rap pantheon, which is saying quite a lot. To sophisticated readers familiar with the observations about the breakup of black families recorded several decades ago in the Moynihan Report and elsewhere, the fact that so many young black men grow up without fathers may seem so well established as to defy further comment. But evidently some young black men - Shakur being one - see things differently. In fact, it is hard to find a rapper who does not sooner or later invoke a dead or otherwise long-absent father, typically followed by the hope that he will not become such a man himself. Or there is the flip side of that unintended bow to the nuclear family, which is the hagiography in some rappers' lyrics of their mothers.