Synopsis
Grammy-winning Eminem (Marshall Mathers) is the first white crossover star of the hip-hop generation and it is a crossover notable for the absence of the resentment (but more of the controversy) that confronted past white performers of “black” music. In fact, black cultural bigwigs from Zadie Smith (who profiled Eminem in a Vibe cover-story lovefest) to rap progenitor and mogul Russell Simmons, not to mention superproducer to the stars Dr. Dre, a host of lesser lights, and hordes of bona fide fans have been crawling out of the woodwork to deflect the very criticism you might expect a white boy to draw when taking up a black form as his own. Meanwhile, self-consciously highbrow journals like the New Republic and the Nation have taken Eminem to task over his confused class antagonism, as portrayed in both his music and his first (it won’t be his last) $100 million–grossing feature film, 8 Mile, and his truly scary misogyny and homophobia. This illustrated collection with fifty photographs includes interviews with Eminem along with selections from Toure, Andrew Sarris, Kenneth Turan, Armond White, Richard Kim, Ann Powers, Vic Everett, and many others.
Publishers Weekly
As if to balance the muted hagiography of most recent biographies of the rapper, Als and Turner have compiled a comprehensive, provocative and fascinating look at the varied critical reception given to Eminem and his music by more than 25 prominent writers, including Frank Rich, Richard Goldstein, Robert Christgau, Zadie Smith, Elvis Mitchell and Armond White, plus two revealing interviews with Eminem. The result is a solid look at the complexities presented by "a white boy bursting with lewd boasts and menacing taunts in the nastiest gangsta style." Defenders of Eminem's art such as Christgau ("Because he can be such a jerk, he can also be such a genius") and Paul Slansky ("the most compelling figure to have emerged from popular music since the holy trinity of Dylan, Lennon and Jagger") do their best to explain the value of Eminem's mix of innovative beats with homophobic, misogynist lyrics. But the strongest voices belong to the nay-sayers. These include Hank Steuver's look at "the bizarro-world Eminem logic" posited by critics who say that "Eminem doesn't really mean those awful things he says about people"; Roy Grundman's expos of how Eminem's semiautobiographical film 8 Mile is contrived to show "one big orgy of black hands patting a white back"; and most notably Goldstein's view of Eminem's critical ascension as "a glaring example of the herd reflex passing for rebellion" whose danger "isn't the fantasies Eminem generates but the refusal to see them as anything more than that." (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.