Funny bone

Eminem communicator

by Alex Pappademas

Hey, kids -- it's Beavis! With skills!

That was all I wanted to give Eminem, at first. It had less to do with the music -- cult-building indie 12-inchers like

"Bad Meets Evil," the major-label opening gambit "Just Don't Give a F**k," the crossover smash "Hi! My Name Is" -- than with (I admit it) the Race Thing.

Because sometimes white hip-hop heads dig white hip-hop artists way too much. On some level, all of us long for an unwack white rapper to stamp our ghetto pass, validating us as more than just black-culture interlopers, so we're all over any Caucasoid MC who can rhyme "funny" and "money" without tripping over the microphone cord. Then you've got the downer-than-thou fans, the pasty-faced hard-rocks who cringe at white rappers like Eminem (or MC Serch, or Mike D, or stupid-whiteboy alpha male Vanilla Ice) as if they were watching their dads try to rollerblade. And sometimes it seems there's no middle ground.

Eminem (alias Slim Shady; born Marshall Mathers) could be Vanilla after a Y2K upgrade, packing a hard-knock-life background (he grew up on welfare) and plenty of underground juice. Skills aside -- and the kid can write -- Eminem's a star because he raps to rock fans in a voice they recognize as theirs, because he feeds into the dread/delight relationship America's had with the "wigga" ever since Elvis first bit a black man's rhymes. In short, because he's white. It's reverse Tiger Woods-ism, with executive producer Dr. Dre in the background, laughing all the way to the City of Compton Bank and Trust.

Having said that, I found The Slim Shady LP (Aftermath/Interscope) almost impossible to hate. It's a crude (but cleverly articulated) vent session starring a broke, drug-damaged punk with a bad haircut, the kind of kid for whom the notion of whites as a "privileged class" probably seemed like a sick joke.

Unleashing his id as a deranged character named "Slim Shady," Eminem comes off like a Rust Belt Jeffrey Dahmer, gobbling drugs and exacting violent revenge on school bullies, ex-girlfriends, and his own mom. On "Guilty Conscience," he and Dre debate the pros and cons of raping underage girls (Shady's staunchly "pro"); later, he twists Will Smith's good-dad anthem "Just the Two Of Us" into "97 Bonnie and Clyde," rhyming to his infant daughter about murdering her mother, then asking her to hold the rope while he sinks Mom's body in a lake.

On a record so sociopathic it could put the fight back in the PMRC, "97 Bonnie" stands out as both repellent and oddly poignant. Although Slim Shady has been critically well received, it elicited an almost unprecedented diss in Billboard editor Timothy White's "Music To My Ears" column. White -- never a big hip-hop booster -- focused on "97 Bonnie" in condemning the album as violently misogynistic, accusing Eminem of exploiting human misery for profit.

Point taken. But whose misery is it, really? True, Eminem brutalizes women in his songs. The guy's got some serious "mama issues." But for Eminem, murder is almost always a prelude to suicide, something he's practically obsessed with. "Since age 12," he tells us, "I've felt like I'm someone else/'Cause I hung my original self from the top bunk with a belt." That's the core of Eminem's nihilism right there -- he rants like Norman Bates as a rageaholic Jenny Jones guest, but it's all rooted in a profound identity rip, the despair of a kid who obviously can't stand himself, who wants out of life ASAP.

Oh, yeah, and it's a comedy album. There's nothing on Slim Shady as funny as Redman's irresistible "I'll Bee Dat," but Eminem knows his way around a punch-line rhyme, and like Slick Rick, who occupied a similarly fucked-up moral universe prior to his imprisonment on attempted-murder charges, he's got stories for weeks. "My Fault" is Rick-meets-Tarantino: our antihero picks up a girl ("Susan, an ex-heroin addict who just stopped using/Who loved booze and alternative music") who accidentally eats 22 'shrooms and freaks out, flashing back to childhood sexual abuse while a woefully unprepared Shady tries to, uh, empathize ("I'm high too, bitch, quit grabbin' my T-shirt!"). Indefensible, sure. But that's just Eminem's way of daring you not to laugh.

Ultimately, Eminem sounds as lonely in his world as Mobb Deep do in theirs, or as Kurt Cobain did in his -- even if, for now, he can only express that loneliness through splatter-cartoon shock tactics and the odd stab at pathos. I'm guessing he has a heart. But at least Everlast had the scars to prove it. Still, I won't be all that surprised if Eminem's next album is his Paul's Boutique; a guy who can write lines like "If I told you I never did drugs/That must mean I lie and get fucked more than the President does!" won't turn irrelevant without a fight. But sometimes, just not giving a fuck isn't enough, and maybe Eminem's next career move should be to grab that belt and string up Slim Shady. Because, come on -- even Beavis knew when to quit.