The Eminem Show

Welcome to artimitateslife.com, a multi-streamed gush of live webcam feed where we get to see Mr Marshall Mathers as Truman trapped in some Gollywood remake of the 1950s as 2000s, with Jimmy Iovine in the Ed Harris role of Machiavellian mentor prophesying this as The Year Of Eminem – the album, the tour, the film and the cheque please.

A click of the cursor, and now Mathers is Toby Maguire smuggling sinful colour into the monochrome McCarthy hell of Pleasantville. Double click. Now he’s Holden Caulfield, raging at the phonies, publicly in hate but privately in love with the cheerleading team of J-Lo, Beyonce ‘n’ Britney. Triple click. Now we see Lon, sorry, Lynn Chaney telling Larry King why she doesn’t get why Eminem dressed up as a B-boy Bin Laden is funny.

With respect, Mrs Vice President, if you don’t get it, nobody’s going to explain it to you. Least of all Eminem, who, in ‘White America’, fires off a pre-emptive “Fuck you Ms Cheney!”

America loves a rebel to confirm the existence of its social strictures but not breach them. Marshall Mathers breaks rank by not only resisting rehabilitation, but also rejecting the celebrity suicide option. Even worse, he’s a parent – one of us/them. So while The Eminem Show airs the dirty linen of disastrous relationships with his mother, ex-wife and the courts (See ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’, ‘Say Goodbye Hollywood’ and more), it also preaches Mathers’ own customised family values (‘Hailie’s Song’, ‘My Dad’s Gone Crazy’). What gets the Legion of Oprah’s back up is that he betrays no interest in aligning those values – his “better nature” if you like – with a liberal lobby raised on ’60s a la carte egalitarianism. Forget all the Slim Shady dealings, the most subversive thing about Eminem is that he celebrates the contradiction of simultaneously trying to be a good father and America’s favourite folk devil, the worm in the bad apple in Mom’s apple pie (“9 millimetre heater stashed in 2 seaters with meat cleavers/I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t let Hailie listen to me neither”).

I like him best when he’s fuming like he did in ‘The Way I Am’. And there’s plenty more bile where that came from: you can feel veins bulging in the furious ‘White America’ and ‘Till I Collapse’, although sonically he’s stripped it all down. Dre’s enchanted tinker-toybox is opened on only a handful of tracks, the rest are blunt axe-handle jams (although some do have elaborate engravings in the grain). But there’s also a couple of verses on this album that he couldn’t/wouldn’t have written two years ago, managing to snag global and personal anguish on one hook:

“More pain inside of my brain than the eyes of a little girl/Inside of a plane aimed at the World Trade, standin’ on Ronnie’s grave, screamin’ at the sky, till clouds gather, it’s Clyde Mathers and Bonnie Jade”.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a bigger fan of Eminem’s than I was two years ago, maybe because all around him the pop, rock and hip-hop landscape has turned even more baby-poss homogenous. I used to think the problem people had with Mathers/Shady was that they couldn’t accept the idea of a devil’s advocate persona in music like they do in a novel or a film. I was wrong. It’s more complex than that. Eminem is an unreliable narrator who comes out with some obnoxious shit, but you can’t laser out the cancer in his songs without also erasing the intelligent cells. He acknowledges the rub himself in ‘Sing For The Moment’, featuring one of his most considered spiels yet over a super-heavyweight beat and grand larceny of Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’: “It’s all political, if my music was literal, and I’m a criminal how the fuck can I raise a little girl?/I couldn’t. I wouldn’t be fit to.”

The bottom line is, his rhymes are as raw and incorrect as diary entries; there is no ‘What would Mom think?’ impediment to his craft.

So bite on this: Eminem is the greatest dissenting American voice since Bob Dylan. There are a few I like better, but in terms of socio-visceral impact, we’re talking Little Richard, the Sex Pistols, Public Enemy. His is deep, dark shit, with the skits functioning as Shakespearian raps between gatekeepers and gravediggers, providing comic relief before the implementation of long knives. And he puts his country to the knife – sometimes surgeon’s, sometimes butcher’s – so many times here, Old Glory starts to look like Caesar’s toga.

Em-TV – it’s not for kids. But so what? Whatever happened to the notion of adult entertainment? I have three young daughters. I would no more play them an unexpurgated Mathers album than take them to see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or read them Naked Lunch for a bedtime story. But that won’t stop me from blasting The Eminem Show on headphones. And if you muzzle Mathers, what next? JG Ballard? JT LeRoy? The life and times of JH Christ? The memoirs of holocaust survivors? Put a gun to my head and I’d prefer my kids were exposed to MM’s most hateful bilge than the soul-rotting subliminal messages given off by the latest batch of canned spam Will Youngs or Ronan Keatings.