Recommendations of the Editorial team
Sometimes, when the world is annoying, it’s good to put on “The Marshall Mathers LP” and rage along. Eminem created another masterpiece in 2000, just a year after “The Slim Shady LP”. Of course, Dr. Dre gave all of his albums this brilliant sound that hasn’t lost any of its power, but the way Eminem raps the cascades of lyrics, the flow and the whining anger: that’s incomparable. Why did I actually come up with that?
There is always a lot of discussion about German rap, sexism and (glorification of) violence; the boundaries between image and reality seem to be increasingly blurring. (If you want text examples, you can research them under #UnhateWomen, I don’t want to reproduce the dirt here.) And then the question arose: Why doesn’t the brutality of Eminem bother me, while I find so many German rappers unbearable?
Most of the time they completely lack what Eminem is all about: the self-deprecating joke. While he also likes to boast (“Excuse me if my head is too big for this building/ And pardon me if I’m a cocky prick…”), he puts himself down even more often – in his lyrics there is more hatred towards Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers than towards his mother or his ex-wife (with whom he is now good friends). And despite all the personal references, one thing is clear: just kidding!
Nasty lines, those evoke desire for fear
It’s so obvious that Eminem (pet form: “Em”), that pale face with the poutmouth and doughy skin, so much nasty rapping because these lines evoke the same fearful desire that children know: Look, I’ll do something bad and then I’ll run away and you won’t catch me! Or is it? Wow, dangerous! Of course, mothers didn’t find it funny that he imagined strangling or shooting her in “Kill You”, but Eminem had already taken the public’s outrage into account and incorporated it: “Oh, now he’s raping his own mother/ Abusing a whore, snorting coke/ And we gave him the Rolling Stone cover?”
Most “Marshall Mathers” songs are about the challenges of fame, drugs and alienation; in the smash hit “Stan” he delivered the moral at the end: Please live your own life! Mine isn’t all that worthy of imitation. When he’s in “Kim” insulting his ex-wife, there’s something pathetic about it, and he knows it: “You were supposed to love me! Now bleed, bitch, bleed!” Eminem includes his own shortcomings, it’s never about belittling women in general, about blunt misogyny, but about hatred of the one he can’t get along with.
Women are bitches, sluts, whores – men are cocks, fags, retards
And it’s pretty fair: the women are bitches, sluts, whores, the men are cocks, fags, retards. Such provocations are only fun when they’re a game – in “Criminal” Eminem says: “Half the shit I say, I just make it up/ To make you mad, so kiss my white naked ass.”
They are fantasies, roles, fairy tales. stories. At no time did I believe that he might actually kill his mother or set fire to the house where the woman who spurns him is bedridden (later, in “Love The Way You Lie”). Eminem is aware of his responsibility, even if the pills have clouded his vision a bit. He once put it this way: “You don’t get another chance/ Life is no Nintendo game.”
This text comes from our ROLLING STONE column “Birgit Fuß wonders through”