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There's a pleasing irony in Eminem emerging from his Detroit stockade with a No 1 album, Relapse, the same week that the US's biggest motor manufacturer collapses. What's bad for GM is good for rap.
When he invented Motown, all those decades ago (so long ago that Phil Spector had his own hair), Berry Gordy Jr had an image in mind — that of a Ford assembly line.
You put the metal, rubber, and plastic in one end and at the other end a Gran Torino rolled out. Nevermore, as Clint Eastwood recently reminded us.
But you can't keep America down. Back bounces Detroit's balladeer with what is being hailed as his best album (they all are, of course, if you believe the PR people).
Think of Eminem and, if you're like me, you think of that man-child in Eight Mile Road. It's a jolt to realise that he's now 10 years past music's “Forever 27 Club” (Hendrix, Joplin, Jones, Cobain, Morrison).
Tupac Shakur and Biggy Smalls, the Romulus and Remus of Rap, didn't even make it to 27. Both died younger than John Keats.
What would 2Pac have done — still be doing — had he lived as long as Bob Dylan (President of the “69 and Still Going Strong” club)?
He might, like Ice T and Ice Cube, have sold his image to mainstream film and TV. More likely, one suspects, he would have led the “slanging” he pioneered into ever “realer” places. As well ask what Keats would have done had he lived as long as Wordsworth.
The auguries for Eminem making it to Dylan's 69-club are better than they were.
In recent confessional interviews he's revealed that his latest album bounces off a spectacularly failed rehab in 2005 (his “anger management” period). A week out of his 28 days and he was using again. His drug of self-destruction was Vicodin —“hillbilly heroin”.
The album Anger Management made him so much money he could have snorted powdered platinum, had he wished, but that would have been fake, and he's never been one for that. Four years later and Eminem, we apprehend, is in recovery mode.
If his good angel, Dr Dre, hadn't snaffled the title he might have called this latest album “Detox”.
The lyrics of Relapse (“who's got the rubbers”) suggest surging energies. “Clean and Sober” would not have worked with the fans but that, presumably, is the subtext. He's back; and dangerous.
I was a student when warblers like the Applejacks and the Pacemakers were No 1. I had little time for them. The slogan of the day among young 1960s rebels was “engagement”. It was derived from Jean Paul Sartre's polemic “What is Art?”.
Sartre argued that art which didn't go to the barricades and fight was nothing but opium of the people. Whatever else, Eminem is engaged. Whether he's on the same side of the barricade as us is another question.
Close behind Eminem in the charts is Dizzee Rascal. He too represents Sartrean engagement, of a kind. Bow's favourite grime child coincides with the raising of Olympopolis —that Brave New World (Jowellgrad?) in east London.
However many gold medals we get in 2012, my guess is that (judging by the grotesque wind up in Beijing) no good music will emerge. “Fleurs du Mal”, Baudelaire called them. It's grime, grot, excrement, crime — bad things — that produce art.
Not all art, of course: law-abiding Switzerland, as Orson Welles reminds us, will always have its pretty cuckoo clocks.
Not everything has got better in my lifetime: but when I think of the Applejacks, pop music certainly has. You don't believe me?
Download “Tell me When” from i-Tunes and judge for yourself.
Reader views (1)
Dear Eminem,
i like ya songs hope ya can do a song about all the people who has wrot to ya . ow whos hayley? when im gone i like da most what song do you like the most i want to be like you i mite go on britains got tallant an sing 1 of ur songs tex back please.
- Callum, kilburn/UK, 01/07/2009 14:33
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