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. During a British TV interview, Gaga betrayed her limited art knowledge by bizarrely identifying that great Renaissance painting as the Venus de Milo, a notoriously armless Greek marble.
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.”
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