Eminem is telling us something - don't censor the messenger

And I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am
In the paper, the news everyday I am
(Eminem, "The Way I Am", 2000)

He lived up to his reputation. On 26 July, 28-year-old white US gangsta rapper Eminem played at Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena and backed up the next night at Sydney’s Australia Dome. The hour-and-a-half concerts cost the fans that paid $100 for tickets slightly more than a dollar per minute. Eminem performed with his trademark chainsaw (without teeth due to Australian workplace health and safety laws), dressed as a B-grade horror film serial killer. He swallowed a fake ecstasy tablet, sat in an electric chair and called his estranged wife Kim "a f****** bitch" while pro-drug messages flashed on TV screens around him.

And he told the crowd he’d brought a gun into the country.

Prime Minister John Howard called his music "sickening".

In the process, Eminem became Australia’s moral panic du jour. In an era where Baby Boomers maintain a stultifying stranglehold on youth culture, it’s little surprise that one of the biggest moral battlegrounds of the nineties and the new millennium has involved rap and hip-hop, a music and culture that perhaps demonstrate the new generation gap more clearly than any other form of youth expression.

Eminem, a Grammy winner and four-time nominee, is a pop culture icon. The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem's follow-up to his triple-platinum debut, The Slim Shady LP, sold 1.76 million copies in its first week, the second-highest opening-week album sales figures in history. As of the week beginning 6 August, Emimen’s Marshall Mathers was at number 18 on the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) charts and Devil’s Night by D12, featuring Eminem was at number six. According to those who testify from the moral barricades at these times, Eminem’s popularity makes vast numbers of the population very sick individuals.

The man himself begs to differ. "A lot of my rhymes are just to get chuckles out of people," Eminem says. "Anybody with half a brain is going to be able to tell when I’m joking and when I’m serious". Eminem understands his appeal. Lots of people – most of them young – relate to his music. "I believe that a lot of people can relate to my shit," he says. "Everybody has been through some shit, whether it’s drastic or not so drastic. Everybody gets to the point of ‘I don’t give a f***’."

Born Marshall Bruce Mathers III on October 17 1972, Eminem had a self-described "real, stereotypical, trailer park, white trash" upbringing, constantly shuffling between homes and never knowing his father. Finding it difficult to make friends, he retreated into pop culture’s comforting buzz of white noise. However, at age 12, after settling with his mother in Detroit, Marshall began hanging with friends and discovered rappers such as LL Cool J and 2 Live Crew. Developing a reputation as a nimble rhymer, he dropped out of school after failing grade nine and in 1996, released his debut album Infinite.

In 1998 he released The Slim Shady EP, which made its way into the hands of rap legend Dr Dre, who became Eminem’s producer and mentor. Following his charismatic video in early 1999 for "My Name Is …", which parodied everyone from Marilyn Manson to Bill Clinton, Eminem’s popularity gained enough momentum to warrant a US tour months before his major-label debut was released. The Slim Shady LP entered the US Billboard charts at number 3 with its shocking depictions of rampant drug use, rape, sex and violence, at times directed at his mother, father, sister and Kim Mathers, his wife and mother of his child.

Violence has always been a reality for Eminem. Bullied at school, he was once beaten up so badly he spent five days in a coma and has attempted suicide. In addition to the gun charges (for pistol-whipping a man he caught kissing Kim and allegedly brandishing a hand gun during an argument with a member of rival band Insane Clown Posse Eminem’s raps have also found himself facing custody battles with his ex-wife and defamation writs from his mother after claiming she "smokes more dope than I do".

Eminem’s raps are undoubtedly violent, homophobic, and misogynist. In "Shit on You", he threatens:

I will shit on you I don’t care who you are
I’ll shit on you
I don’t give a f*** about you or your car
F*** your house
F*** your jewellery
And f*** your watch
F*** your wife
F*** your kids
F*** your family
I’ll shit on you.

Do Eminem’s rhymes make Eminem the person violent, homophobic and misogynist also? Maybe if the real Slim Shady finally did stand up, we’d understand him better. Indeed, it’s Eminem’s power to contradict himself, his fans and the popular culture landscape that makes him so fascinating.

While moral entrepreneurs attack him, fellow musicians – from Sir Paul McCartney to members of The Corrs and Dido, whose track "Thank You" became a smash after being sampled for Eminem’s "Stan" – have anointed him pop’s chosen one. Even Sir Elton John, a well-known gay rights activist, agreed to perform with Eminem at the 2001 Grammy Awards despite arguments from various groups, including the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, that Eminem’s music "contains the most blatantly offensive, homophobic lyrics [the organization] has seen in many years". Ironically, Eminem’s ability as a composer has also been compared to that of gay icon Noel Coward, and his trip to Australia brought condemnation from The Australian Families Association – usually no friend of gays and lesbians – for his homophobia.

Like Madonna and U2 lead singer Bono (yet another fan) during the band’s Zoo TV and Popmart eras with his MacPhisto character, Eminem is a perpetually evolving series of self-referential personas that refuse to be contained. Marshall Mathers III has an Eminem album named after him, but Eminem is also Slim Shady, who is now working with the group D12 (short for The Dirty Dozen). Eminem’s raps are performed by these personas. "Slim Shady is just the evil thoughts that come into my head," Eminem says. "Things I shouldn’t be thinking about."

Eminem is a deliberate paradox, warning fans that they "should take my music with a grain of salt". "The Real Slim Shady" actually condemns the hate crimes he is accused of perpetuating, allowing him to rip contemporary culture open and let it bleed:

Yeah, I probably got a couple of screws up in my head loose
But no worse than what’s going on in your parents’ bedrooms
Sometimes, I wanna get on TV and just let loose, but can’t
But it’s cool for Tom Green to hump a dead moose …
And that’s the message we deliver to little kids
And expect them not to know what a woman’s clitoris is
Of course they gonna know what intercourse is
By the time they hit fourth grade
They got the Discovery Channel don’t they? …
Well, some of us cannibals
Who cut other people open like cantaloupes
But if we can hump dead animals and antelopes
Then there’s no reason that a man and another man can’t elope
(Eminem, "The Real Slim Shady")

Somehow, these lyrics get missed. It’s easier to be affronted than confronted by Eminem, but isn’t all powerful fiction based on personal experience to some extent?

In "’97 Bonnie and Clyde", the song which the fictitious Stan uses as inspiration for killing his girlfriend, Eminem raps about ex-wife Kim’s murder as he disposes of her body while their daughter Haile is in the car:

Baby, don’t cry honey, don’t get the wrong idea
Mama’s too sweepy to hear you screamin in her ear
That’s why you can’t get her to wake, but don’t worry
Da-da made a nice bed for mommy at the bottom of the lake
Here, you wanna help dada tie a rope around this rock?
We’ll tie it to her footsie then we’ll roll her off the dock.
Ready now, here we go, on the count of free … One … two … free … WHEEEEEE!
There goes mam, spwashin’ in the wa-ta.
No more fightin wit dad, no more restraining order

Eminem even recorded Haile’s voice to use on the track and one of his stage tricks involves throwing an inflatable dummy called Kim to fans, who tear it to pieces.

The argument here is not about free speech, but cultural double standards. Artistic license, character, metaphor and irony have always been part of popular culture. In a world where the boundaries between high and low art are continually blurred, it is increasingly inappropriate for a set of artistic criteria to be applied to one art form, but not to the other. Why are novels granted such freedoms, while pop music must be taken literally?

Like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho "’97 Bonnie and Clyde" and "Kim" grapple with one of our last great cultural taboos. They climb into the head of a killer and force the listener to adopt his persona. The Dixie Chicks' country hit "Goodbye Earl"depicts the premeditated murder of an abusive husband by his wife and female friend and features a video in which the killing is played out as comedy! Johnny Cash and Nick Cave have been singing about killing people for years and no one takes them literally.

But of course, that’s the fear – that we’ll produce a generation of Eminems. According to John Howard, "You cannot have these constantly gratuitous exhortations to violence and not expect some impact, some consequences, some spin off". At the time of Eminem’s visa controversy, Liberal Party MP Peter Slipper argued, "There is no way the Australian government should allow those who pray on the disenchanted and disillusioned youth of Australia to visit our country and promote a culture of drugs, violence and foul language."

The riots and rapes at the Woodstock ’99 concert and the tragedy of Jessica Michalik who died of injuries sustained in the mosh pit during Limp Bizkit’s 2000 Sydney Big Day Out performance are compelling evidence of music’s power over youth and should not be ignored. The media does affect people in powerful ways. Otherwise, advertisers wouldn’t spend billions of dollars doing what they do. However, Eminem’s music has also been credited with waking someone from a coma. People consume popular culture because it gives them pleasure, yet the positive effects of media on behaviour are rarely, if ever, researched.

To claim that listening to Eminem, Limp Bizkit, Marilyn Manson, or anyone else causes anti-social behaviour neglects what has made young Australians so disenchanted and disillusioned in the first place. Mr Slipper may be surprised to learn that his government’s policies could have contributed. Similarly, John Howard coming across like a bad parody of South Park’s Mr Mackie ("Drugs are bad, m’kay") will only add to the cultural cache of Eminem songs such as "Purple Pills" and "Drug Ballard". Editing the chorus and changing the title of "Purple Pills" to the radio- and parent-friendly "Purple Hills" will turn it into a classic.

As a result, Eminem is turned into a scapegoat while the very social problems that give his music symbolic power receive, at best, lip service, and at worst, are ignored.

Merchants of Cool, a documentary recently screened on SBS demonstrates how a fortuitous mix of legitimate generational change and marketing savvy have allowed rage rock, gangsta rap and its exponents such as Eminem, Limp Bizkit, Pappa Roach, Mudvayne and Insane Clown Posse to emerge as mainstream performers. Hip-hop’s primary audience is white middle-class teens who want something to be angry about. Eminem fulfills the need for an icon of "white-boy-rage" perfectly.

It’s a story as old as rock itself and started with Elvis – the incorporation, commercial exploitation and enslavement of black musical celebration and protest by white culture. Eminem is no Elvis, and he’s a million miles away from Vanilla Ice, but the fact that Eminem is the best-selling rap artist in history makes a poignant statement about corporate media racism.

In his groundbreaking 1979 book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige posits that youth culture is always a complex mix of the authentic and inauthentic, the commercially corrupted and the pure. Eminem is no different. Culture, marketing and politics have conspired to create a monster that fuels genuine youth rage, but at the same time helps sustain an increasingly global and homogenised record industry.