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A Context for Eminem’s “Murder Ballads”1 Elizabeth L. Keathley |
- The
media coverage of rapper Eminem in the days immediately preceding and
following the 2001 Grammy awards rehearsed a number of common tropes
regarding controversial art forms: is free artistic expression more
important than a moral social order? Is there a distinction between
individual expression and commercial manipulation? Do portrayals of
violence beget more violence? Is rap music indeed “music”?
Concerns about vulgar language, homophobia, and the degradation of women
arose from a range of voices because The Marshall Mathers LP
had been nominated for the prestigious “Album of the Year”
award by the members of the National Association of Recording Arts and
Sciences. According to C. Michael Greene, then the Grammy organization’s
president, the nomination was intended to “recognize [Eminem’s]
music and not his message” (All Things Considered). At the
time, I found feminist objections to Eminem’s depictions of violence
against women particularly salient perhaps because, between the Music
History Sequence and the Opera History course I was then teaching, I
tallied a depressingly large number of dead women. My gruesome accounting
revealed four women murdered by jealous husbands or boyfriends; two
killed or raped by authority figures; one ritually
sacrificed; and five who died after having been seduced and abandoned
or forced to marry against their will—for a body count of twelve
dead women in one semester of teaching. And that did not include tuberculosis
victims.2
-
Catherine Clément’s Opera: or, The Undoing of Women
has come into and then gone out of fashion, but our canon remains littered
with women’s corpses.3
When I attempt to problematize these works for my students, the bodies
will not stay buried. For example, when I discuss the social dimensions
of Wozzeck, the anti-hero’s oppression at the hands of the
Doctor and the Captain, and how he reproduces that oppression by murdering
Marie, it is not uncommon for students to remark, “I thought he
killed her because she cheated on him,” as though that were a reasonable
explanation and even a natural consequence of female infidelity.
-
Thus, it struck me then, as I will argue here, that the misogynistic violence of Eminem’s rap songs has at least as much to do with the traditions of “whiter” aesthetic forms—opera, cinema, bluegrass murder ballads4—as it does with the conventions of gangsta rap: the very appeal of these rap songs depends on a widespread acceptance of violence against women as a cultural norm. In making this claim I wish both to acknowledge and to amplify Tricia Rose’s observation that “some rappers’ apparent need to craft elaborate and creative stories about the abuse and domination of … women … reflect[s] the deep-seated sexism that pervades the structure of American culture” (15).5 I also wish to suggest that, due to Eminem’s status as a white rapper masquerading within a black genre but supported by a predominantly white recording industry, his murder rap songs simultaneously serve the fantasies of white men and deflect blame for their regressive gender politics onto the putative violence and lawlessness of the black urban culture that engendered hip-hop. bell hooks’ comments on Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice are relevant here: she both condemns the book’s advocacy and celebration of rape and cautions that “we need to remember that it was a white-dominated publishing industry which printed and sold Soul on Ice. While white male patriarchs were pretending to respond to the demands of the feminist movement, they were allowing and even encouraging black males to give voice to violent woman-hating sentiments” (136).
-
Robin D. G. Kelley has argued that, for many white, middle-class, male
teenagers, gangsta rap provides an “imaginary alternative to suburban
boredom”: “[T]he ghetto is a place of adventure, unbridled
violence, and erotic fantasy,” which these young
men consume vicariously and voyeuristically (122). This, claims Kelley,
explained the “huge white following” of NWA (Niggaz with Attitude).
Unlike some previous white rappers, Eminem’s credentials of “ghetto
authenticity” have been established through his urban Detroit upbringing,
his black homies, and rise to fame through MC battles—actual head-to-head
rapping contests.6 Rap
and urban music periodicals (The Source, Vibe, Rap
Pages) have consistently held Eminem’s verbal ability in high
regard, calling him “a white boy who can hang with the best black
talent based on sheer skill” (Coker 162).7
Moreover, it was Dr. Dre of NWA notoriety who provided Eminem’s
first recording opportunity, essentially launching his career. Dr. Dre
remains Eminem’s chief producer.
-
Eminem can and does deliver the lurid goods for the delectation of suburban
white boys, and he does it in whiteface, virtually guaranteeing greater
access to the money and machinery of the music industry. Reflecting
on the commercial advantages of white rappers, Eric Perkins recalled
an alleged statement of Sun Records’ Sam Phillips from the early
1950s: “’If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound
and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.’ That white
man [was] Elvis Presley” (Perkins 36).8
-
In addition to noting that rap is only the latest genre of black American
music to be appropriated by white culture, some critics have drawn parallels
between white rappers (“the great white hoax” qtd. in Perkins
35) and blackface minstrelsy: when Al Jolson donned blackface, one critic
observed, he became the first Beastie Boy (White 198). Such masquerades
may be motivated less by purely musical interests than by a desire to
hide behind the guise of another in order to transgress social norms.
Dale Cockrell has argued, for example, that some early
blackface minstrels protested social conditions while in their “Ethiopian”
disguises.9 But other
instances suggest that the musical discourse of the “Other”
facilitates and justifies fantasies of illicit pleasure, a kind of carnivalesque
colonialism: fictive orientalisms, the tango, and jazz have variously
served to represent sexual license for the delectation of European or
American audiences. Thus, the ghetto is only the most recent port of
call for European/American musical tourism.
-
If the structure of Eminem’s CDs—with their mix of jokes,
skits, danceable tunes, satire, self-abasement, and racial and gender
impersonation—bears a certain resemblance to a minstrel show, a
more significant parallel is minstrelsy’s “mixed erotic economy
of celebration and exploitation”: like Eminem’s fans, the
blackface minstrels’ audiences were predominantly white and male,
and their fascination with and anxiety about minstrelsy, nineteenth–century
America’s most popular form of entertainment, were bound up with
received notions of black masculinity. For the young
white men and boys whose fanship made Eminem’s most recent CD “go
platinum” before its release (Richtel C4), the rapper’s sonic
“blacking up” is, to use the words of Eric Lott, “less
a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror,
and pleasure” (6).10
Many of Enimen’s first-person tales of drugs, violence, and domination
of adversaries represent the urban exotic for the thrill of white boys
in their emulation of the language and attitudes of the “real Nigga,”
the gangster and the pimp, thus invoking constructions of black masculinity
with roots in pernicious stereotypes.11
In the same sleight of race operative in blackface
minstrelsy, Eminem, by virtue of his popularity and media attention,
has become the most widely recognized emblem of gangsta rap, his homophobia,
misogyny, and violence reinforcing stereotypes not about white men,
but rather, about black men.12
A screenshot of Eminem's official website 
Hip-hop Meets Family Melodrama
-
The two murder raps under discussion here, however, are not set against
an exoticized urban landscape of pimps and hoes and do not speak in
the tongue of sexual braggadocio; rather, they resemble any other
bourgeois melodrama in their presumption of the rightness of the patriarchal,
nuclear family. Their suggestion that this caring
father has become a murderer only because his immoral wife has pushed
him beyond his limits resonates with the moral claims of conservative,
father-oriented movements, such as The Promise Keepers.13
In this context, the “whiteness” of the
violence is clear: according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics,
the numbers of black women murdered annually by intimate partners have
dropped by half since 1976, but those of white women have been “especially
stubborn, varying from 800 to 1000” per year during the same period
(see American Bar Association).14
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Like bluegrass murder ballads, “’97 Bonnie and Clyde”
from The Slim Shady LP and “Kim” from The
Marshall Mathers LP concern a murder prompted by sexual jealousy
in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, and they relate the events
from the murderer’s point of view. While their small scale and
focus on the murder event align them with ballads (as opposed to an
opera or a movie, in which the murder is only one of many events, and
more than one point of view is apparent), the fact that the songs unfold
at the same time as the action, rather than narrating events of the
past, more closely resembles those larger-scale dramatic forms.
-
In both songs, the victim is the protagonist’s estranged wife,
and the precipitating event is her remarriage to another man, construed
by the protagonist as infidelity and setting up the transgression-and-punishment
paradigm that informs so much nineteenth–century opera and literature.15
The “realist” aesthetic of the songs suggests an alignment
with film noir, as does their implication that it is the woman’s
act of independence that wreaks disaster: “[Putting] self-interest
over devotion to a man,” according to film historian Janey Place,
“is often the original sin of the film noir woman” (Kaplan
2–3; Place 47). While the murderer’s revenge
for this failure of wifely devotion comprises the written narrative
of both raps, the unwritten narrative—the act that the protagonist
avenges—is the wife’s initiative to remove herself and her
daughter from an abusive relationship.16
-
In both “Kim” and “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” the
feckless wife is contrasted to the innocent baby daughter, a pre-sexual
and therefore pre-dangerous female, on whom the murderer lavishes affection
in chilling juxtaposition to the slaying. In addition
to their narrative similarities, the two songs have similar structures:
both use sound effects to portray location and action (car doors slamming,
dragging the wife’s body through the bushes, passing traffic);
both use rapped lyrics for the verses, where the narrative is told;
and both have a sung refrain that ironically reworks romantic tropes.17
- The
song title “’97 Bonnie and Clyde” refers to the father
and daughter, now outlaws, who remain after the wife has been murdered,
and the song’s refrain, “just the two of us,” which takes
its lyric from Grover Washington Jr.’s 1980 romantic ballad, is
transposed to the father/daughter dyad.18
Reference to the glamorous criminal couple Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker
is not unique in the genre of gansta rap: Yo-Yo and Ice Cube cut two
tracks under that name (“The Bonnie and Clyde Theme” from
You Better Ask Somebody and “Bonnie and Clyde II” from
Total Control), followed by Jay-Z and Foxy Brown’s “Bonnie
and Clyde Part II” (Chyna Doll), which Jay-Z also recorded
with Beyonce Knowles of Destiny’s Child, among others. Notably,
these other rap songs on the Bonnie and Clyde trope are duets with two
adults interacting as equal partners, a distinct difference from “’97
Bonnie and Clyde,” where “Clyde’s” peer has been
extinguished and replaced by a clearly subordinate child. Of
course, all of the Bonnie and Clyde raps invoke Arthur Penn’s popular
1967 movie of the same name, “the most explicitly violent film
that had yet been made” (Prince 9), and generally credited with
ushering in the American cinematic norm of “ultraviolence.”19
-
As “’97 Bonnie and Clyde” opens, the murder has already
taken place, and father and daughter go to dump the wife’s body.
The circumstances of the murder are revealed gradually
through the father’s reassuring prattle to the child, expressed
partly as baby talk, partly as that rationalization parents use to keep
children from fretting, such as, “don’t worry about that boo-boo
on mama’s neck; it don’t hurt,” after the murderer has
slashed her throat.20
I find this song both horrifying and compelling. Eminem’s jesting
tone and smooth rapping style, the danceable rhythmic groove, the dark
humor of the lyric and clever narrative twists engage me even as I recoil
from what the words signify: “Say good-bye to Mommy … no more
fighting with Dad … no more restraining order … We’re
gonna build a sand castle and junk, but first help Dad take two more
things out [of] the trunk” (Example
1).
-
The wife silenced, only the murderer’s point of view is presented:
“Mommy was being mean to Dad and made him real, real mad. But I
still feel sorry I put her on time out.” But
the suppressed narrative—the woman’s perspective—can
be gleaned from brief verbal cues (like “restraining order”)
and from this tale’s similarity to a real-life scenario that occurs
with depressing frequency: stalked by her former spouse, the wife had
been granted a restraining order against him to no avail, for the stalker
murdered her, her new husband, and her step-son (Example
2).21 Even
further in the narrative background is a history of violent and controlling
behavior during the marriage: according to the National Violence Against
Women Survey, stalkers do not typically begin these behaviors after
the relationship has ended; rather, the stalking behavior is merely
an extension of the relationship, one that the victim generally leaves
only after having suffering protracted abuse.22
Acquaintance with the alarming frequency of spousal
abuse, stalking, and spousal murder creates a strong cognitive dissonance
between the song’s humorous affect and the gravity of its implications.23
- The scenario of this song is depicted on the cover of The Slim Shady LP (Figure 1).24 In the foreground, a woman’s legs and bare feet protrude from the trunk of a car, and in the middle ground, father and daughter stand together at a pier from which the woman’s body will be dumped. Since this LP is named for Eminem’s gangster persona, Slim Shady, we might assume that Slim is the protagonist of this song.25
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