Why Eminem is a greater artist than Lady Gaga will ever be
RAPPER Eminem is known for the violent, misogynous imagery in his lyrics. So why is leading American social critic Camille Paglia such an admirer?
Lady Gaga never saw it coming. After a relentless, month-long publicity extravaganza over two continents for her new album, Artpop, she was upstaged by a comet seeming to swoop in out of nowhere - the release of Eminem’s eighth studio album, The Marshall Mathers LP 2. Eminem’s sales boomed big, while Gaga’s embarrassingly fizzled, leading to quick, deep discounts to keep Artpop in the charts.
Eminem, now 41, did few interviews and personal appearances for this formidable double album. As with Adele sweeping the Grammys two years ago, his instant commercial triumph demonstrates the readiness of a discerning public to respond to power and passion of voice rather than to manipulative gimmicks or exhibitionistic stunts. Furthermore, the production of this album, in which Eminem was minutely involved, has a collage-like complexity and a bold grandeur that at times approaches the orchestral.
The greatest irony is that Gaga, product of an affluent Manhattan home and a private-school education, had boasted that Artpop would be the album of the millennium in fusing popular culture with art. She hired Jeff Koons to design the cover, which features a vacuous Koons sculpture of a spread-legged Gaga, backed by a crassly ripped strip of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
But it turned out to be Eminem, a high-school dropout from a squalid trailer-trash past, who has produced the true work of art. I have been arguing for years that the avant-garde is dead, that it ended the moment my hero Andy Warhol cheekily embraced commercial popular culture. But Eminem, with his churning nightmare visions and brutally raw hatreds, has proved that authentic avant-garde shocks are still possible. After a first listen, I wrote to a friend: “This album slaughters all PC taboos.”
Success often undermines black rappers by removing them from the deprivation and dangers of their harsh early environment. Striving to stay relevant, they can become pompous and monotonous, such as Jay-Z and Kanye West in their respective overblown new albums. But Eminem’s conflicts are internal and therefore irresolvable, forever propelling him forward.
Marshall Bruce Mathers III was born in St Joseph, Missouri, to a feckless, itinerant musician who soon abandoned his only child. Eminem’s erratic mother, Debbie Nelson (aged 17 at his birth), restlessly moved him from one family home to another in Missouri and Michigan. Rarely in one place for more than a year or two and chronically bullied by other children, Eminem developed his own distinctive imagination as a defence against an unstable world.
Eminem studiously absorbed from black rappers their brazen rhetoric and infatuation with guns, as well as their cynical stance towards women and gays.
Despite his title of co-executive producer, Dr Dre played a lesser role on the new album. Eminem has taken control of his creative operation, one sign of which is surely the commanding new voice that he is using at crescendo. This album, with all its tormented veering between craving and disgust, dramatically demonstrates how much deeper Eminem’s view of women is than that of his rap precursors and peers, who are stuck in tedious formulas of male sexual prowess and booty-wagging female compliance. Eminem has shown the full spectrum of male emotions on his albums, from a cooing tenderness toward children to ranting arias of betrayal and revenge. We see the agonising ambivalence that is one of the principal engines of obsessive art-making, from Michelangelo to Picasso.
Eminem’s work is a synthesis of traditions, black and white. Though his initial impetus was rap, his lyrics approach the slangy vernacular and taunting provocations of Beat poetry, whose syncopated metric was based on 1940s bebop jazz. Like the Beats, Eminem mischievously incorporates the rude and repressed, a Rabelaisian soundscape of belches, farts, pissing and vomiting. Eminem has a fearless sense of artistic persona. He calls himself “Michelangelo with a paint gun” or “Picasso with a pickaxe”. His method? “I word-bully”: his purpose is “to beat a beat purplish”. He is a “hogger of beats, hoarder of rhymes”. When the “flow” comes, “I speak in tongues”, flooded like a prophet with supranormal powers. He often portrays himself as a slave or victim of his own gift.
While Lady Gaga panders to fans, inviting their symbiotic attachment to her as “Mother Monster”, Eminem takes the courageous route of the true artist: he dares the audience to hate him. He breaks every shibboleth, every rule of decorum. He raves with the defiant, repellent spirit of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the poete maudit, cursed and exiled. “I want to dig my way to Hell!” thunders the majestic chorus of Wicked Ways, the final song on the new album.
Gaga, with her constant costume tat, fatigues the eye. Eminem, in his simple hoodie, looks like an ascetic monk, fed on apparitions and devoted to art.
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