Cinnamon Synonym Sin In A Men
- nostrangersound
- Dec 10, 2024
- 11 min read
Why Does Eminem Keep Doing This?
There are 230 million reasons for him to hang up his monochromatic hoodie and bask in the glow of his whiteness reflecting back at him, as swarms of fans take to the streets to honor Marshall, the former Rap Olympics runner-up and current maestro of milquetoast and mayonnaise who inspired the careers of everyone from Machine Gun Kelly to those dudes from your high school who recorded Amp-addled struggle bars into their Xbox headset and insisted you listen before first period the next morning. 230 million reasons for him to pack up his pen and pad and retire to wherever Snow and Vanilla Ice disappeared to after their shine was extinguished. Enough reasons to retire and live off the royalty boons that occur with each year’s Call of Duty release.
But the title question is as potent as it is willfully obtuse - outside of his own hubris and perhaps as a means to collect capital for a Lions’ ownership bid - what is possessing Mr. Mathers to continue to heap layer after layer of Dorito dust onto his already extremely disingenuous claim to Best Rapper Alive? The almighty dollar has certainly had a hand in propelling his sinking ship; why else would a man who so hamfistedly lampooned many a pop diva in his spryer days tap Ed Sheeran, Beyoncé, Rihanna (twice), Sia, Gwen Stefani, and Kehlani for singles in the past decade and change? Em acknowledges his commercial success despite continual critical discontent on multiple occasions, most recently on the FIVE AND A HALF MINUTE LONG spare Spongebob background music “Alfred’s Theme” from 2020’s Music To Be Murdered By: Side B:
But how could I get up in arms about you saying trash is all that I put out?
Bitch, I still get the bag when I'm putting garbage out
Despite my insistence that the Spotify algorithm is glitching, there needs to be someone operating the ferris wheel of mediocrity that Marshall has been consistently hopping on since before Ronald Reagan was burning in hell. Of course, the operator in this overwrought metaphor are his fans; NOT “stans”, as I feel that term has transcended Eminem’s usefulness in greater hip-hop and internet culture. To place the blame for Eminem’s continued relevance squarely on the shoulders of his supporters is, democratically, victim blaming. I’m going to glass-half-full this situation and assume that “Those Kinda Nights” 112 million streams on Spotify can be chalked up to ambulance drivers who were too focused on the road to change the song when the Invisible Hand threw it onto their Release Radar. All jokes aside, the tired, huddled masses who continue to prop up the career of a man who claimed his bars were “like COVID, you get them right off the bat” in the year of our Lord 2020 are both responsible for and entitled to financial compensation because of the hell their savior hath wrought on the world.
In a scenario in which I awoke to find myself the only one who recognized Eminem’s music (a la Yesterday, I think, never saw it), I would largely keep that shit to myself; maybe kick “Just Don’t Give A Fuck” in front of my closest friends or rap “Under The Influence” (probably Em at the peak of his powers, by the way) when someone at work I really don’t want to talk to came sauntering my way. The cultural vacuum created in such a scenario would leave the legion of fans he has cultivated over the past 25 years to be dispersed to either Macklemore stansmanship or scouring their local record store for a used vinyl copy of To Pimp A Butterfly (I’d take our present hellscape over either scenario).
Continuing to cape for a rapper that has an ever-loosening grip on what is considered “good taste” (in lyrical content, beat selection, featured performers and, most confoundingly, audio fidelity) is perhaps a symptom of a more insidious cultural disease, one that rewards artists in the present for accomplishments in the past and proves that a name and a marketing plan are much more important than making music that sticks to one’s soul. The fact remains that in our present hellscape there’s still throngs of people who champion Eminem and see him as the Platonic ideal of the rappity rap superstar. Why this insistence continues to pervade seemingly every GOAT conversation can be difficult to pinpoint - are some letting their nostalgia for the simpler times paint their perceptions of his later-career arc? Am I simply not familiar enough with the intricacies of the English language to comprehend the brilliance of some of his most hard hitting and lyrically diverse social commentary? Or are the masses simply in on a joke at my expense? If I had to put my weight behind a particular theory as to why Eminem continues to hold hostage the hearts and ears of throngs of fans, I’d motion that his stature is due to his perceived excellence as a white man in a black art; in other words, he was good at the act of rapping and his lyrics covered topics that existed outside of the relatively small sampling of black culture that was popularly allowed when he first broke in 1999.
The early period of Em’s work (1999’s Slim Shady LP to 2004’s Encore) often showcased his intrepid form of syllable packing bar to bar, with lines of devilish, if sometimes sophomoric visualizations careening wildly between muscular drums and bubbly basslines (courtesy of Dr. Dre, the Bass Brothers, Luis Resto and later Em himself). Anyone over the age of 33 who has sanctified Eminem in their rap canon often points to this period as a high point for rap; when a 28-year-old platinum blonde in a white tee could declare that his particular brand of hip-hop was positively inimitable and the record sales and critical acclaim backed them up and drowned out all cries to the contrary. The first five years of of Em’s career (shut up about Infinite) have been discussed and litigated to death by writers, cultural critics, and moms who drove their kids to Hot Topic to buy The Eminem Show; the homophobia, the consistent treatment of women as objects to be drugged (“My Fault”) and/or killed (“Kim”, “97 Bonnie and Clyde”, “Kill You”, “Guilty Conscience”), the numerous allegorical forays into matricide, the general misuse of Nate Dogg (“Bitch Please II” notwithstanding) can be debated until the curtain closes, but the fact remains that Eminem was a cultural force that, at the very least, was very good at rapping and made a few people very wealthy. And if I’m being completely transparent, some of the songs still hold up despite their aging poorly.
At the risk of derailing the momentum and vigor of this essay I’d like to take a moment to note that the themes that formed the bedrock of Eminem’s “golden” catalogue are not unique to his music. Looking at other platinum selling artists from around the same time, there are of course similar misogynistic and homophobic tendencies that were present in some of the biggest hip-hop songs from the ‘99 to the 2000. Why Eminem’s content was more heavily scrutinized is an intersection of his popularity - namely, his prevalence as the “Great White Hope'' in the homes and portable CD players of teens from Waukesha to Waukegan - and his specificity. While 17 year-old Lil Wayne was “slamming her like Shawn Kemp'' and Kurupt was masterfully reciting a laundry list of laid-down, Veloured-up pimp shit on “Xxplosive”, Eminem was penning screeds that targeted his own mother and the mother of his child with venom that rappers usually reserved for the police and cheap champagne. Even when he wasn’t focusing on the two women that were, ostensibly, closest to him, he was using women as props to hold hostage in front of the pearl clutchers.
Where the line is drawn between acceptable misogyny and/or homophobia isn’t the point; if music is a reflection of who we are as a culture (or a collection of subcultures, more accurately), there’s bound to be some messed up shit that rises to the top. Interconnected American evils produced the mindsets that Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Juvenile, DMX, Jay-Z and the other rap superstars of the late 90’s rode to great success, warts and all. The perhaps all important difference that the rappers mentioned above have in comparison to Eminem is that Eminem has sold damn near 230 million records worldwide, enough to provide every resident of California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois with TWO copies of Encore. It’s a bit reductive to say that Eminem is wholly more offensive content-wise than any of the rappers mentioned above, but there was (and still is, to a certain degree and demographic) a spotlight on him that makes his lyrical forays into being an all-around bad guy much more potent and influential within the cultural sphere.
The fact that I was in Pull-ups when The Slim Shady LP came out makes me altogether incapable of charting Eminem’s full cultural impact, because I wasn’t mentally present for his ascent or the finger wagging backlash against him. The Eminem that was popular when I was coming up was soundtracking Halo 3 custom games and JV basketball warm-up CDs. The Eminem that had risen out of his first retirement ashes a pale Robocop of a rap star who climbed back up the charts by sanding down his once sharp edges to something that was more likely to be heard in Kohl’s fitting rooms than out of car speakers. The downward slide that became a spiral with silly or otherwise insipid Encore album cuts like “Puke” and “Big Weenie” were further maximized and zanied on his comeback Relapse, then quickly dismissed for middle-American stadium-rap on Recovery, which for all intents and purposes served as Eminem’s reignition into the sales stratosphere he left behind for his first retirement.
Like many of my pale brethren coming of age in the 2000s or 2010s, I found Eminem to be a suitable soundboard for my most angsty thoughts, dreams, and unfortunate Facebook posts in my youth. I spent months on the waiting list at the public library trying to get a copy of The Slim Shady LP to burn to my iTunes. I spent much time laughing at the Urban Dictionary definition of “fromunda cheese” after hearing Em use it on “Crack A Bottle”. I occasionally didn’t like my mom. Eminem served as the genesis for my introduction into hip-hop, which for better or worse has led me to try and diagnose why those who followed a similar life trajectory could still be conned into playing something like “Stepdad” 53 million fucking times. For many suburban white children, our introduction point into any black art form is through whatever is most popular and accessible, and it is contingent on us to dig deeper if we’d like to experience anything that mackles just a little bit less.
While I may have been in the crosshairs for the Eminem indoctrination in my middle and high school years, the landscape of popular music didn’t offer much alternative. The 2010 American musical zeitgeist, at least in my white, suburban bubble, was the worst combination of glitzy and ineffectual, alternating between the sort of sappy, incorporate-my-Greek-letters-into-my-wedding rock/country of “Hey Soul Sister” and “Need You Now” and the pounding synths of “OMG” and “In My Head”. Among those songs that rounded out the most popular of that year, at least according to Billboard chart data, were a few undeniable slappers (“Tik Tok”, “Bad Romance”, “Bedrock”), a couple of songs that I won’t completely balk at if I hear them at a wedding or a bar (“Dynamite” and “I Like It”), and two Eminem songs that I’ve been unwillingly subjected to more so than any other; “Not Afraid” and “Love The Way You Lie”.
Those two diamond selling singles, it should be said, don’t hold serve among Eminem’s worst tracks. There isn’t anything said on either song that falls to the level of “Fack” or “Remind Me”. On the contrary, they are at worst bland reimaginings of the same ethos that drove two of Eminem’s most sustainably popular songs, “Lose Yourself” and “Stan”. But there’s a certain element of complacency, both in their much more robotic rhyme schemes and anthemic choruses that forestall the decade-of-doom that led me to first ask the question central to this essay. Regardless of your feelings on Eminem, comparing “Love The Way You Lie” and “Not Afraid” to “My Name Is” or “The Real Slim Shady” is like wistfully reminiscing on the vibrance and whimsy of a 1998 McDonald’s while eating a quarter-pounder in the modernist gray purgatory built on the graves of Grimace and the Hamburglar.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that “Not Afraid” and “Love The Way You Lie” were the beginning of the end for Eminem’s spot as a pantheon-level rapper. The entire premise of this exercise is flawed, because to my ears Eminem hasn’t done enough to put himself in that conversation, full stop. What those two songs did for Eminem was provide in the cachet to continue to cultivate a large swath of folks that will at least listen/download his music, if not actively go to bat for him in YouTube and TikTok comments. Those fans then enable him to continue to let fly the deluge of dookie that is his past 5 projects (2013’s MMLP2 to 2020’s Music to Be Murdered By: Side B), and the cycle will continue until he is shoving the tennis balls of the end of his walker down a faceless woman’s throat in his first hit single of the 2050s.
If you are someone who calls yourself even a mild fan of Eminem, please don’t let anything I’ve written here dissuade you from continuing to labor in your delusion. Make sure you wash out your blender bottle after finishing your Code Red and protein powder cocktail. Finish writing that letter to your congressman asking them to heighten the DUI threshold so you can get your license back. Tell your mom you love her. If you learned anything from this, it’s that the cultural sphere you find yourself in doesn't have to be so opaque and whitewashed. You know that guy that says “Slim Shady you’re a basehead” and was subsequently killed for it? He has some pretty good songs too. He also isn’t very nice to his significant others and has some less-than-stellar views on 50.8% of the U.S. population. Use that as a starting point and perhaps the next time the Super Bowl is in Detroit you’ll be calling for the Stevie Wonder and Anita Baker holograms instead of a geriatric Army recruiter.
A couple of other thoughts on Mr. Skibbedy Bee 313 that didn’t fit anywhere:
Invest in Pepsi now and you’ll be rich on Monday. Whatever mountain they siphon the dew from will be working overtime to keep up with demand.
Contrary to anything said above, I will take my shirt off if Marshall walks on stage and hits the “there’s seven different levels to devil worship, horses heads…”
Do Snoop, Dre, and Kendrick not have enough star power to headline a halftime show on their own? No disrespect to Mary but they should be front and center for an LA Super Bowl. Adding Eminem has been the most obvious bit of pandering to white america since they gave it to Bruno Mars.
My ideal (not realistic) set list:
“Still D.R.E”
“Beautiful” (bring out Uncle Charlie, cowards)
“Who Am I”
“It Ain’t No Fun” (Nate Dogg hologram!)
“Bitch Please II” (Xzibit hologram!)
“Family Affair”
“As”
Eminem-led rendition of “Courtesy Of The Red White And Blue”
I could have spent a bunch more time going over the blandness of Eminem productions, but it would have made me sad. I sincerely think Em has an actual, honest-to-god classic if Dre made all the beats for his first album. Three of the four best songs on his first album are Dre. Robotic beats make for robotic rhymes.
If you notice, “The Way I Am” isn’t on my linked playlist of Actually Good Eminem because I feel it was the genesis of this sort of robot rapping that has torpedoed any sort of wackiness that he exhibited earlier in his career. Angry Eminem is just behind Horny Eminem as the worst iteration.
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