-
I do not intend to condone or excuse Eminem’s degradation of women,
but rather to suggest that we see it against a background of entrenched
institutionalized misogyny rather than as some phenomenon unique to
Eminem or to rap as a genre. Significantly, the “clean” version
of The Marshall Mathers LP, which bears no parental advisory
and is sold at Wal-Mart, deletes the profanity and drug references,
but does not alter the woman-hating sentiments (DeCurtis, “Eminem’s
Hate Rhymes” 17–21).
-
The degree to which violence against women is accepted as normal in
American culture is indicated by the haste with which it was dropped
from the media coverage after the Grammys. Pre-Grammy coverage of the
Eminem controversy on National Public Radio considered both homophobia
and violence against women as serious issues. However,
NPR’s day-after reportage of the rapper’s public relations
duet with Elton John on the song “Stan” said nothing further
about misogyny or spousal murder (National Public Radio). “Stan,”
however, rehearses the very same trope while deflecting blame onto someone
else: in this song, not Slim Shady, but rather an obsessive fan locks
his pregnant wife into the trunk of a car then drives off a bridge.35
In coverage by other media, ranging from the left-wing institution The
Nation to popular tabloid-style publications like Teen People,
violence against women took a remote second place to concerns about
homophobia, clearly an important and related issue, but one that comprises
a smaller proportion of the content of these recordings than their pervasive
degradation of women (Brown 35–8;see also Kim 4–5).
-
Writers in popular press magazines tend to make some obeisance to political
correctness by remarking briefly on the misogyny of Eminem’s lyrics,
but even these modest criticisms are neutralized by an overwhelmingly
positive evaluation of Eminem’s talent, by incorporating the misogyny
into an assessment of his “macabre imagination” (Toure 135–6)
(which then makes it praiseworthy), or, my favorite tactic, by juxtaposing
the criticism with lovey-dovey accounts of the rapper’s relationship
with his daughter. Thus, Kris Ex’s review of The Eminem Show
gives us the requisite misogyny paragraph,
His divorce from Kim Mathers fuels the slow Southern bounce of the hypermisogynist “Superman,” and his relationship with his estranged mother creates “Cleanin Out My Closet,” … [which includes] a list of atrocities and venomous threats … (108)
… immediately followed by, “Em’s love for his daughter, Hailie, produces his singing debut, the tender ‘Hailie’s Song’” (108). This type of journalism implies the same thing that Eminem’s songs do, that misogyny is a phenomenon driven by interpersonal relationships and justified by individual circumstances rather than a social blight for which Eminem happens to be a convenient representative: seldom do journalists question the implications of both his interviews and his murder raps, that Kim and mom are the “bad” women and Hailie the “good” one.
-
Even when her elder female relatives are not under discussion, journalists
invoke Hailie in ways that seem to inoculate Eminem from his own degrading
speech, as in this conversation about his fears of becoming a has-been:
[Eminem:] Suddenly, you’re not cool no more, you’re like the Kris Kross jeans or something, even if at first you’re the greatest thing since sliced cunt.
Word choices like “sliced cunt” and “pregnant bitch” (hit in the stomach with luggage, quoted above) suggest that there is more to Eminem’s misogyny than his personal animus towards his wife or mother, but this subtlety seems to pass beyond the radar of the Rolling Stone writers.
[Rolling Stone:] Now that you have joint custody of Hailie, you’re spending more quality time with her. What’s a typical day like? (Bozza, “Eminem: The Rolling Stone Interview” 75)
-
Some sources completely elide the misogyny issue, for example EQ,
a periodical for producers and audio engineers. Dr. Dre was their June
2001 coverboy—EQ rarely has a covergirl—and
the interview article discussed his production techniques in The
Marshall Mathers LP, which earned him a Best Producer Grammy. Considering
the obvious care that Dr. Dre took to fit the raps with compelling accompaniments
and sound effects, it is surprising that the article bears no mention
of the lyrics (Roy 48–55). Foregrounding the technical aspects
of music to the exclusion of text and narrative clearly parallels the
situation Susan McClary has described with regard to formalist analysis
of avant-garde music and its tendency to obscure misogynist content
(McClary 57–81), and Dre’s own perspective is consistent with
some of those McClary critiques. For example, he describes “Kim”
[the song] this way: “It’s over the top—the whole song
is him screaming. It’s good, though. Kim [the person] gives him
a concept” (Bozza, “Eminem Blows Up” 72). Masculine creativity
that is virtuosic, extreme, or “over the top” is the only
issue of importance; Kim as concept is infinitely more significant than
Kim as human being.
-
In magazines marketed to teenagers, Eminem’s misogyny is discussed
in terms that make it seem coolly rebellious, as the reportage in the
Summer 2001 Music Special issue of Teen People demonstrates.
The overall tone of the coverage is celebratory: the magazine cover
sports a large photo of Eminem surrounded by much smaller photos of
other musical figures, and the controversies are presented in a carefully
controlled manner under the title, “Rebel without a Pause”
: “He has shocked parents, rocked the Grammys and divided his fellow
musicians with his often inflammatory work. Can Eminem top himself?
You bet.” Shortly follows a quote from one of his new tracks, cleverly
titled, “I’ll s—t on you”: “A lot of people
say misogynistic/Which is true/I don’t deny/Matter of fact, I’ll
stand by it” (qtd. in Brown 36). “Misogyny” is not defined
for these young teenage readers, many of whom will not know the word’s
meaning.
-
Most disturbingly, under the rubric, “The Kids are All Right with
Eminem,” appears the photo of a 13-year old girl, posing sexily
in tight pants and midriff top, who opines that, although the song “Stan”
makes her feel “disrespected as a girl,” “it’s great
that [Eminem] says what he thinks about people … [and] doesn’t
restrain himself” (qtd. in Brown 38). Conspicuously absent from
Teen People is any allusion to the “disrespect” visited
on girls in many recent concert audiences, from Woodstock ’99 (the
scene of “rampant, horrifying sexual harassment,” eight rapes,
and intimidation of any woman who would not remove her top) (Aaron 88–94),
to the “Anger Management Tour,” where Eminem, Xzibit, and
Ludacris, in series, greeted the “ladies” in the audience,
received a friendly response, and then launched into raps with words
like, “Bitch, you make me hurl” (Brackett 21–2).
-
The young teenage girls to whom this magazine is pitched can scarcely
avoid grasping the message that it is “all right” for men
to make them feel “disrespected as a girl” as long as those
men are giving full expression to their untrammeled masculine subjectivity.
And despite the fact that the valorization of limitless
male subjectivity is like a bad hangover from nineteenth–century
Romanticism, these girl readers will have every reason to believe that
it is cool or at least normal because cultural products ranging from
late night talk shows to music appreciation textbooks tend to agree.36
Resurrecting the Mother
-
One girl who is not “All Right with Eminem” is Tori Amos,
whose 2002 CD, Strange Little Girls, includes a deconstructive
intervention on “’97 Bonnie and Clyde.” The CD is a collection
of covers of songs by male songwriters, all of which include the portrayal
of some woman whose character Amos inhabits in the song: she re-imagines
each song from a particular woman’s standpoint. The female characters
are represented visually in portraits—all of them Amos—with
captions—most of them cryptic. The picture for “’97 Bonnie
and Clyde” seems to be an earlier photo of the now dead wife/mother,
looking not at all like she’s “real, real bad,” but rather
like an updated “Angel in the House” : long blonde hair, “natural”
make-up, modest dress and affect, proffering a birthday cake (Figure
4). The caption reads, “She wonders what her daughter will
do,” which is something that we all wonder at the end of the song.
-
If the resurrection of the mother and intrusion of Tori Amos’s
feminine voice into Eminem’s narrative are not sufficiently disruptive,
her flat, whispered delivery of the text, punctuated by a wailing refrain,
chills to the bone (Example
5). At the end of the second strophe, she dwells on the text
“me and my daughter,” and the synthesized accompaniment imparts
a sense of the uncanny with its combination of excessive vibrato, portamentos,
and obsessive low string ostinato: gone is Eminem’s danceable groove
(although a snippet of clave rhythm is heard in the refrain)
(Example
6). We come away from the recording knowing that spousal murder
is no joke, and horror is even more evident in Amos’s stage performance:
she sings the part of the woman from offstage, visually marking her
erasure, the stage bathed in light—blood red.
-
Although Eminem’s murder ballad is at the center
of Amos’s conception of Strange Little Girls, she applies
her criticisms with a broader brush. In interviews she charges not only
Eminem, but also other pop figures with cowardice and hypocrisy when
they indulge in violent lyrics but then disavow them as “jokes.”37
Moreover, she remarks on the passivity of young women who, in their
search for masculine approval, permit themselves to be degraded.38
-
The importance of Amos’s aim in this project—to give voice
to silenced women and suppressed perspectives—is illustrated by
some of her experiences in making the recording. To select songs for
the CD, Amos consulted a “laboratory of men” who discussed
what the various songs meant to them. Amos relates that, at first, most
of the men did not want to discuss “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,”
but then,
One man whom you’d consider very intelligent said, “You know, I have empathy for this guy [the murderer] because the [expletive] did this, did that and he just had enough and snapped.” The one thing that struck me was that not one of them asked about the wife. Nobody ever talked about her! (Harrington T06)
Even audiences who do not identify with the slayer, as did the man in Amos’s “laboratory,” tend to disregard the slain woman:When I first heard the song … the scariest thing to me was the realization that people are getting into the music and grooving along to a song about a man who is butchering his wife. So half the world is dancing to this, oblivious, with blood on their sneakers. (Atlantic Records)
One person who is not dancing, Amos points out, is the woman in the trunk (vanHorn).
- Amos’s version of “’97 Bonnie and Clyde” is stunning not only because it exposes the horror embedded in Eminem’s jolly little tune, but also because it challenges us to listen for the voice of that woman in the trunk, and this strikes at the very heart of patriarchy. For once we acknowledge that there are other voices to be heard, and we make the effort to hear them (not their ventriloquized simulations), we have disrupted the unspoken assumption that the only subject position that matters is male, that women are disposable, and that it is “all right” to construct culture over our dead bodies.
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