Rap attack

Eminem unleashes his psycho-sexual demons on The Marshall Mathers LP

by Josh Kun

Two men are performing oral sex on a third and all three are enjoying it. The slurping is loud and theatrical, the moans are breathy and grunty, the "suck it" sex-talk is hot and cartoonish. The man on the receiving end is loving it, telling them how to suck it, telling them to take it out of their mouths then put it back in. Just as he's about to come, the two men call out someone's name: Eminem.

This "skit" unfolds toward the end of Eminem's new Marshall Mathers LP (Interscope). As with the rest of the verbal tornado that spins out of control on the album, it's not altogether clear what we're supposed to do with it. This is partly because Marshall is less comical and gimmicky than what Eminem sprayed the first time around. It's more possessed by psycho-sexual demons and more resistant to social responsibility -- and therefore, whether we like what we he digs out of his unconscious or not, it's more arresting, more believable, more frightening. The straitjacket's gotten tighter, the vicadin prescription's gotten bigger, and Eminem spends most of this album ranting about what's happened since his debut album made him into something outside his control: a celebrity, a role model, an icon, the off-the-hook white kid who blew his own dick up in a Rolling Stone centerfold.

Dig back to all the Cornel West-spawned "hip-hop as black nihilism" debates of the mid '90s and then do a post-affirmative-action race-and-class backflip. Marshall is a sparklingly produced, nimble-tongued spew of amoral, white underclass male nihilism. Ice Cube's anti-role-model "life ain't nothing but bitches and money" stance from back in the Compton gangsta days becomes something else in Eminem's amityville Detroit. Now life, if it's anything at all (quoth Eminem: "I used to give a fuck, now I give a fuck less"), is killing bitches -- decapitating them, stuffing them in car trucks -- instead of fucking them, and crumbling under the stress that money brings -- lawsuits, long-lost cousins -- instead of rolling trailer-park fabulous.

But it isn't Eminem's misanthropy that's so fucked, it's where that misanthropy gets directed, who it most frequently victimizes: women and gay men. GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) has issued a protest against the album. Eminem can't even get past the first song without threatening "faggots" at knifepoint.

On "Stan," a male fan who writes him letters and suggests they "be together" makes Eminem furious. "That type of shit will make me not want to meet each other," Eminem writes back as the fan drives his car off a bridge with his pregnant wife trapped in the trunk. He cringes at the idea of gay marriage over the perky summer bounce of the album's smash radio single, "The Real Slim Shady." And "Criminal" finds him trying to turn the tables of accusation while imagining himself as an object of male desire: "I'll stab you in the head whether you're fag or les, a homosex, hermaph, or trans-a-ves, pants or dress. Hate fags? The answer's yes. Homophobic? Nah, you just heterophobic: staring at my jeans watching my genitals bulging."

Eminem gets specific, too: Ricky Martin, Backstreet Boys, and 'N Sync are his favorite faggots to terrorize and "knock the fuck out." He hates the way "all these girl and boy groups" -- and all of their screaming girl and boy fans -- have made (in critic Gayle Wald's term) "girlish masculinity" the new litmus test for Total Request Live pop profiteering. "All I see is sissies in magazine smiling," he laments. "Whatever happened to wilding out and being violent?"

The stickiest part of Eminem's bashings is that he clearly enjoys thinking about gay sex. His desire to police it only results in its reproduction in graphic scenarios that he himself dreams up. The blow-job skit is the product of Eminem imagining a three-way oral. He does the same thing on "Marshall Mathers" when he attacks a stepfather who's accused him of fabricating his past: "He's just aggravated I won't ejaculate in his ass." In the video for "The Real Slim Shady," he chases down a group of 'N Sync look-alikes and rubs his ass on one of their faces.

It's worth remembering that all of this debuted in the #1 spot and has since enjoyed the second-best single-week sales total (1.76 million copies) in history. Which means that a lot of straight kids and gay kids, boy kids and girl kids, are taking it in and figuring out what to do with it -- all the gripping self-introspection, all the quick-witted smackdowns, all the "bitch, I'm a kill you" threats, all the deft riffs on media-friendly whiteness, all the sexual panic that over and over again turns so ugly that you cringe as your head rocks. Too bad for Eminem that some of the same kids are buying 'N Sync, the only band ahead of him in sales. It's not a shabby afterword: he's still a bottom, and the sissies are still on top.