We're the Ones Who Made You

There's at least two tracks from Eminem's latest album, Relapse, that I can't get out of my skull. ("Hello" & "We Made You".)

I really am the last person who should be listening to the rap/hippity-hop music. And yet, what the fuck do I find myself turning on? Kanye West, T.I., Flo Rida, Jay-Z, Nelly... and now I'm getting on the Eminem bus?

Haven't listened to his other albums but I gotta admit the new one's growing on me. It's fucking *catchy*. (Damn Dr. Dre and his addictive beats! DAMN HIM TO HELL!!)

So much of the genre doesn't appeal to me. The pervasive weed culture. Singers announcing their own names throughout the tracks. The interstitial *skits*. Dated pop-cultural references. The lyrics: way too literal, too self-aggrandizing, too specifically autobiographical. Here's the opening lyrics of "Insane" off Eminem's RELAPSE:

I was born with a dick in my brain
Yeah, fucked in the head
My stepfather said that I sucked in the bed
Till one night he snuck in and said,
"We're going out back—I want my dick sucked in the shed!"

I get it. This happened to him.

getting molested as a child is to white rockers
as getting shot is to gangsta rappers.

(See W. Axl Rose.)
But how do you listen to lyrics like that—sing along to lyrics like that—and relate to it in any way if you haven't actually been molested as a child? Imagine the sea of Mid-West white kids at a concert, bouncing to the beat and singing about being molested as children. It's a long way from "Sweet Child O' Mine"...

But what can I say...? If the beat's catchy enough, anything goes.

I'm even warming to Eminem's nasally, class-clown delivery. (He does seem to play a strange game: I'm a clown—but I'm dead serious. I hate celebrities—but I hate myself. I'm a homophobic misogynist—but it's really just a caricature I'm making fun of. Here's a child molestation song!)

Have I made enough references to "child molestation" in this entry?

Here's someone's blog entry from January of 2008—Eminem's mom claiming that he's become an obese recluse.

xXx
As for me, more work to do. Always more work to do. Thursday night, I'm down to one project I'm concentrating on... and then I get a call from a producer I haven't talked to in a few months. So this weekend, I'm bumped back to tinkering with three projects.

And Malice keeps spinning the plates, trying not to let the shattering ceramic distract him from the plates that are still in play...