Eminem makes Steve Earle look like Toby Keith: Hasn't anyone noticed?

Radical Society, Oct 2002 by Radosh, Daniel

EMINEM CAN'T CATCH A BREAK. No sooner does he crown himself "king of controversy" than the culture warriors decide to give him a pass. The rehabilitation of Eminem-"onetime bad boy of rap" is how he's now described-is partly the result of the hit film 8 Mile, a wholesome, old-fashioned movie in which the rapper plays a less frightening (and less interesting) character than the ones on his albums. But even before 8 Mile, the rabid right had dropped Eminem as its whipping boy. One explanation: Since 9/11, they've had bigger fish to fry. "Now Republicans and conservatives aren't concerned about rap music," wrote John Podhoretz in the New York Post. "They're interested in national security, in terrorism prevention, the war against al Qaida and the war with Iraq. Are kids learning dirty words from Eminem? Big deal. Eminem won't kill them. Militant Islam will."

Sure, this raises the question of whether there weren't other important-even deadly-issues that Lynne Cheney et al might have been tackling before 9/11, when conservatives (and some liberals) couldn't spend enough energy hammering Eminem. But Podhoretz's claim isn't entirely accurate. In at least one respect, the "war on terror" has actually made the culture wars even more important to conservatives: now their bugaboo is not sex or violence, but treason.

This is, of course, what got Steve Earle in such trouble not long ago. The punditocracy flayed Earle alive for songs like "John Walker's Blues," while praising more avidly pro-America responses to 9/11 by Alan Jackson, Neil Young, and, especially, Toby Keith. (The right split on Springsteen.) Yet in this whole flurry of columns and talk show rants, there was barely a word about Eminem. No one seems to have noticed that the artist who has dominated the charts for a year-easily outselling all the above-mentioned combined-did so with an album bristling with references to 9/11. And not about how much it made him love his country.

He can't catch a break. The rapper who laments-okay, brags-that critics "put my lyrics up under this microscope, searchin' with a fine tooth comb," might as well not even have recorded The Eminem Show for all the guardians of patriotism and culture care. One of the only places he even comes up in the debate is in a Washington Times editorial that compares him favorably to Earle. "Eminem is a misogynist...malcontent," the Times said. "But at least Eminem hasn't stooped to the level of sympathizing with, much less glorifying, terrible Taliban John Walker Lindh." Nope, he's stooped much, much lower.

"There's no tower too high / No plane that I can't learn how to fly / What do I gotta do to get through to you, to show you there ain't nothin I can't take this chainsaw to?" Apparently Eminem's gotta do more than that, because for some reason, declaring himself hip hop's Mohammed Atta simply hasn't been enough to generate outrage. Part of the problem is that unlike Earle-and even Keith-who are at least expressing genuine emotions, most of Eminem's September 11 allusions-such as the one above, from "My Dad's Gone Crazy," a mostly delightful duet with his 6-year-old daughter-come off as cynically calculated bids for controversy. The only 9/11-related criticism I've seen of Eminem has been aimed at the hit "Without Me." The song has nothing to do with terrorism, but in a gratuitous effort to push buttons, the video features Em as Osama bin Laden.

Eminem dips into the lyricist-as-terrorist well twice on the album. In "Business," he rhymes Batman and Robin with Saddam and Laden (the most openly insecure rap star ever, Em casts himself as Robin, and, by extension, bin Laden) and boasts of having "his own private plane, his own pilot, set to blow college dorm room doors off the hinges." (He then deftly negates this tasteless allusion with his hallmark technique of segueing from offensiveness into nonsense, rhyming "hinges" with "or-inges, peach, pears, plums, syringes.") Later in the song, Eminem reaches for a pre-9/11 tragedy in an even more desperate attempt to stir up trouble, with the line, "how can shit be so easy, how can one Chandra be so Levy?" -possibly the worst lyric he has ever written.

Though Eminem may have the best flow of any rapper, boasting about it isn't what he's known for, or what he does best, which may be another reason the lyrics cited above haven't resonated. What sets Eminem apart from other rappers-and what made his first two albums masterpieces-is his willingness to plumb the depths of his own tortured psyche. There's far too little of that on The Eminem Show, and unfortunately some of what there is thuds loudly because Eminem can't resist amplifying his own angst to levels that even his most ardent defenders must find obscene. In "My Dad's Gone Crazy," Em claims there's "more pain inside of my brain than the eyes of a little girl inside of a plane, aimed at the World Trade." Well, no. I'm sorry your favorite uncle killed himself, Marshall, but it's not the same. That this lyric alone hasn't brought out the finger-wavers is a sure sign that critics no longer scrutinize Eminem as carefully as he thinks.