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EMINEM AND THE PROLEPHOBES |
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grammies for eminem?
A remarkable wave of hysteria has broken over the recent decision of American music industry bigwigs to nominate Eminem, the 27 year-old Detroit-born self-proclaimed "meanest MC on this earth", for four Grammy 'achievement' Awards, including one for 'Album of the Year'. Groups claiming to represent women, gays, and "moral citizens" have united to campaign against these nominations, which they consider "irresponsible". With subjects ranging from incest to domestic violence to casual murder, Eminem's 'Marshall Mathers LP' has probably already won him the coveted title of Hip-hop's Foulest Whiney Whiteboy Mouth. Even more importantly, it has sold close to eight million copies in the United States in less than a year. Figures like that don't please the likes of Jean Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a stateside lobby group with a small, wealthy membership and a hefty advertising budget. Garry, who has threatened to shut down Eminem performances with protest action, has slated those who nominated Eminem for "ignoring" the "hateful lyrics" on the "disgusting" Marshall Mathers LP. GLAAD has been joined in its anti-Eminem campaign by several small 'feminist' groups and a slew of opportunistic politicians. Opposition to the rapper is not confined to the US. Valerie Smith, a self-described 'community activist' in Toronto, last year filed a complaint with that city's Hate Crimes Squad over Eminem's lyrics, in an effort to have them banned. Smith's complaint, which has been referred by the Squad to Canada's Attorney-General, could lead to Canadians who listen to Eminem being judged guilty of 'Hate Crimes' described in Federal Law. Michael Bryant, a conservative Canadian MP, has shared Smith's bandwagon by appealing for new legislation to ban minors from buying "objectionable" material from music stores. Defending this call, Bryant claimed that "It is time for us to consider whether we apply the same standard to the music industry that we apply to the film industry. If this [Eminem's music] was played in a movie, the movie would be restricted...Parents would get to decide whether their kids get to hear this music". Bryant's calls for censorship have been echoed in New Zealand by far right groups like the Christian Heritage Party and the neo-fascist League of Rights, as well as by members of some allegedly left-wing organisations. For his part, Eminem seems able to laugh at his notoriety: the following lines are drawn from a song he cheekily titled 'Remember Me?' : "When I go out, I'm a gonna go out shootin/I don't mean when I die, I mean when I go out to the club, stupid/I'm tryin to clear up my fuckin' image, so I promised the fuckin critics/I wouldn't say "fuckin" for six minutes"
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CONTENTS
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a muzzle for eminem?The issue of the censorship of offensive music has special resonance for New Zealanders, who have experienced the musical talents of True Bliss, Paul Holmes and Rikki Morris at a closer range than the rest of the world. I'm not sure if Thr@ll as a sovereign entity has a line on this whole Eminem business, but I'm certainly going to put in my five cents' worth here. I'm going to begin by acknowledging that it's probably a fair bet that Eminem's not a very nice boy - anyone who is being sued by his own Mum would seem, surely, to be suffering from a severe charisma deficit. Nor can it be denied that some of the subjects of Eminem's songs are very unpleasant. As I see it, though, a patronising, very middle class attitude to the 'proles' - the young working class people who constitute the 'Marshall Mathers LP's core audience - is evident in the campaign to ban Eminem from music stores and bedroom walls. 'Expert' after 'expert' has testified to the ability of the rapper's music to exert a 'negative influence' on his 'fans'. The implication, surely, is that these people, often referred to by their 'betters' as 'white trash' or 'trailerpark trash' are incapable of telling the difference between art and life - between art and instruction to act - in the way that those who visit the opera or read sonnets can. Do we ever hear the middle class prolephobes complaining about the sexism in Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' or the anti-semitism in TS Eliot's poetry or the German militarism that courses through the music of Wagner, Hitler's favourite composer? The unstated assumption, of course, is that these are works of 'high' art, made to be enjoyed by people of 'taste', people immune to the 'negative influence' Eminem wields over his simpleminded audience. Eminem himself has made it clear that he does not wish to 'influence' his listeners positively or negatively, and has denied that his lyrics aim to be taken as statements of misogynistic, homophobic or pro-violence beliefs. "I just put my music out there and whatever people want to think of it they can think of it," he said last year. "But I think, for the most part, the kids get it. They understand it. I haven't heard of any instances where somebody raped a girl listening to my album or shot somebody listening to my lyrics." Perhaps Eminem is putting this another way when he raps, on his brilliant track 'The Real Slim Shady': "Yeah, I probably gotta coupla screws loose/ But no worse, than what's goin' on in your parents' bedrooms" Another thing worth remembering when we consider the outcry against Eminem is the historic tendency of all halfway-decent art to piss someone off. The most derogatory words in the vocabulary of art critics - here I'm thinking of little daggers like 'kitschy', 'cheesey', 'twee' and so on - tend to conjure up images not of offence but of awful niceness. Britney Spears and Pam Ayres and Gilbert and Sullivan are twee, Eminem and the Velvet Underground and Caravaggio are (or were) offensive. Which category, I wonder, would you pick your entertainment from? Leftists should, I would argue, stand up for the right of artists to shock, disgust and (most importantly!) produce good art.
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the labour party: prolephobes in power?I'm now going to try and draw a rather long bow, so to speak, by attempting to relate the Eminem furore to what I see as a wider political trend. It's worth noting that the organisations involved in the anti-Eminem campaign are not popular, much less democratic outfits. They are clusters of media-savvy middle and upper class 'activists' who enjoy speaking out on behalf of various minority groups. 'Feminists' amongst them , for instance, are the upwardly-mobile 'liberal feminists' who cheered the high ratings of Murphy Brown and, later, the appointment of Madeline Albright as Clinton's Secretary of State as 'great steps forward' for women. Groups with this sort of orientation are interested in carving a niche for a select few members of minority groups - the Murphy Browns and Madeline Albrights - in society's privileged strata, not in genuinely representing the needs of minority groups. They are, in short, organisations of the middle class, the 'administrative, managerial' class situated between the ruling class of suits and corporate hacks and the working class which makes up the overwhelming majority of society. The political embodiment of the middle class in New Zealand politics is the Labour Party led by Headmistress Helen Clark, and it is intriguing to note the similarities between what has been called the 'new moral wowserism' of the Labour administration with the antics of Eminem's critics. Noting that "the middle class has always been more afraid of the class under it than the class above it", revolution magazine recently linked Clark's ongoing crusade against Dover Samuels to her 'moral wowserism'."The things that Dover has criminal convictions for, the things that Clark and co. regard as black marks against him, stuff like selling a bottle of beer without a license and stealing a pillow, these are the sort of things that horrify middle class liberals like Helen Clark, whereas working class people don't give a fuck", revolution writer Phil Ferguson noted. "Working class so-called 'yob' culture in general is something that gives Labour the creeps - we should remember here that it was the middle class that supplied the world with missionaries."
run out of carrots? there's always the stick!To really understand the source of the virulence of prolephobia, we need to understand the position of the groups that, I have argued, are its main sponsors - the social democratic 'Labour' parties of the West. These parties have always played the role of 'good cop' in a 'good cop, bad cop' routine played out with openly right-wing parties. When the Tories' shrilly pro-rich policies have become too much for the vast majority of the population, a Labour government has appeared and offered contrary rhetoric and a few reforms as carrots to the restive proles. In the era of shrinking governments and globalisation, however, Labour parties are hard-pressed to come up with any carrots. Big-money investors and international financial organisations like the IMF and World Bank are only too eager to admit their distaste for the "economic consequences" of "expensive" reforms like benefit increases, new hospitals and job schemes. Faced with this reality, Helen Clark and her social democratic peers around the world - names like Tony Blair, Gerhardt Schroeder and Bill Clinton spring to mind here, - have fastened onto moralism and repressive legislation as inexpensive ways of attempting to paper over the dissent and social divisions that must almost inevitably exist in an era of chronic mass unemployment and a declining real average wage. Prolephobia comes cheaper than Keynes. Interestingly, prolephobia is increasingly manifesting itself in the thought processes of social democrat academics and policy analysts. In the last decade, for instance, a growing literature on 'Social Exclusion' has marked the musty publications of moral philosophers and sociologists.
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Where the previous generation of social democrats talked of tax hikes and increased spending on social services as a solution to poverty, political apathy and crime, Social Exclusionists see things in moral terms. For them, poverty is a moral, not a social ill: the despair and crime it creates are best tackled by moral hectoring and law and order 'crackdowns' (I used that word just for you, Mr Goff), rather than the redistribution of resources from the rich to the poor. 'Tory' Tony Blair, idol of Helen Clark's Labour Party, is probably the most extreme example of the new breed of prolephobic wowsers in power - recently his government decided that, instead of giving financial assistance to poor families in an effort to help the 33% of British kids who live in poverty, it would award every newly-wed couple in the country with a free guidebook to a 'successful marriage'. 'Tony's Lucky Tips' for young couples, as some wag dubbed it, was too much for even some of his own MPs to stomach. One dissident, banchbencher Anne Yates, complained that "there has never been a government as interested as this one in poking its nose into people's private lives". If only she knew why... Whenever the platitudes of guidebooks aren't enough to guarantee social control, Blair is quite happy to bring in the strong arm of the law, as a bill unveiled in the UK just this week makes clear. The so-called 'Anti-Crime Bill' seeks to establish a 'child curfew' and give the police the power to fine sixteen and seventeen year-olds caught 'drunk in public' 100 Pounds. In language reminiscent of Eminem's critics, Home Minister Jack Straw - the man who let General Pinochet go home - has defended the bill as "a crackdown on teenage yob culture". Like his Tory predecessor, who tried to ban 'youth rave events' and 'caravans of alternative lifestylers', Straw is a middle class missionary. His Bill is an attempt to curtail the growing willingness of British youth to say 'Up Yours' to Straw and his book of petty laws. Perhaps the last word should go to Eminem, who has found a remarkable number of variations on the phrase 'Up Yours'. Here is the conclusion to 'The Real Slim Shady', available on that Grammy-nominated 'Marshall Mathers LP': And every single person is a Slim Shady lurkin/He could be workin at Burger King, spittin on your onion rings/Or in the parkin lot, circling Screaming "I don't give a fuck!"/with his windows down and his system up/ So, will the real Shady please stand up?/And put one of those fingers on each hand up?/And be proud to be outta your mind and outta control/Ha ha Guess there's a Slim Shady in all of us/Fuck it, let's all stand up
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