"It's kind of strange," Eminem would tell me when I asked if he was noticing any difference in his audience of late. Even some boomers are on hand (me among them), as well as a few smiling pre-teen kids perched on their dads' shoulders. It's a happy crowd, mixed in race and sex, that might just as well have congregated at a mega-church or a mall. There is barely a whiff of pot in the air, let alone violence.
But the roaring throng of 16,000 at the Palace of Auburn Hills is not angry. At its climax he vows to urinate on the White House lawn and hurls expletives at Lynne Cheney and Tipper Gore. I could be one of your kids!" goes its hectoring refrain, insistently gaining in malevolence as if a furious mob were gearing up for a rampage. A high point of the show is a song in which he exults in his role as universally despised spokesman for alienated Middle American youth. The US Congress, inflamed by the Columbine High School massacre and looking for scapegoats, rounds up the usual suspects for hearings.īut now it is two years later, and on a muggy late summer evening, Eminem is performing before his fans in the Detroit suburbs, the last stop of his 2002 Anger Management Tour. And since he is white, he can't be ghetto-ised: his music is saturating the suburbs at a faster clip than that of black hip-hop artists. The violence in his songs is echoed by headlines of his own arrest on gun charges in two consecutive public brawls.
Eminem 8mile rap accepela full#
His abundant use of the words "bitch" and "faggot" has aroused the full spectrum of the PC police, Left and Right. Flashback: it is the year 2000 and Public Cultural Enemy No1 is a rapper named Eminem (aka Marshall Mathers III), who has ascended from America's closest approximation of hell (aka his home town, Detroit).
0 kommentar(er)
