Aaron Apps
This essay begins with a difficult task: to describe Eminem’s lyricism without referring to the lyrics themselves as they contort, spasm over beats, and form in between bars. The lyrics can’t appear on the page at any length because they are too expensive to publish, thanks to copyright law. It’s a problem that leaves me as a reader and writer in an eddying, troublesome conundrum that is hard to swim out of. How does one describe the mechanics of poetry without tearing into the engine case to see how the pistons move? How does one show the magnificent engineering of the gasoline driven line within the machine without showing the schematics? How does one say anything about a verse without quoting the verse itself? Such a constraint throws a wrench into all efforts aimed at close reading.
As I pondered how to approach the lyricism in Eminem’s songs with no access to the verse itself, I realized that not having access to the lyric opens up a much wider space of discourse about Eminem. I’m approaching his work as poetry with an emphasis on the verse, from the perspective of a poet, but there is always much more to poetry than rhymes, cadences, and metaphors. Shutting the valve off to one area in the engine floods another area and creates a new set of possibilities, a new approach. And, just maybe, the lyric unto itself becomes more of a crutch than a guide. There is so much to Eminem’s lyricism that isn’t in the tight construction of the bars that is equally, if not more, important to his body of work as a poet.
Besides, I’m critical of contemporary New Formalism (an approach to reading and writing poetry that focuses entirely on close readings of the rhetoric within poems) for its strict focus on the verse itself as an immunologically abstracted thing, as something separated off from the world entirely. I’m skeptical of New Formalism because its interest in rhyme, meter, and diction is set always over and above the content and politics of the poem, and this move that focuses on the workings of the poem has a politics of its own that attempts to keep writing in the domain of the self-referential, self-contained aesthetic object. But surely hip hop can’t be contained in such simplistic aesthetic borders. Hip hop samples, steals, defaces, quotes, and is always already political. Hip hop is hostile and contentious territory. When I look at my predicament through this lens, when I accept the mess of influences and outside refuse, not having access to the lyrics themselves seems like a gift rather than a curse. Close reading the metaphors and rhyme patterns in a few verses would be almost too easy; in their place I’m left with Eminem as a complicated, porous figure who creates verses that are shockingly dexterous, I’m left with Eminem “the Poet.”
So, in Eminem’s case, what does it mean to be a Poet? Eminem is a popular figure as much as he is a lyricist, and all of the controversy that surrounds him makes the task of talking about him as just a lyricist troubled work. One can’t draw up an easy immunological border between the perceived pubic auteur and the lyric crafted between the bars of blood-beating beats. Eminem is a “Poet” in the capitalized sense of the word. He expands beyond the borders of the song outward into his image and the public’s multifaceted ideas of his image. The figure, the image, the specter of “Eminem” has all of the allure, style, and excess of poets of historical and biographical note such as Rimbaud, Keats, Plath, and Byron. Marshall Mathers isn’t just another rapper who constructs shockingly tight rhymes into musical bars, Eminem is as much myth as he is man, and he becomes a myth to his listeners much like the above poets. Eminem crafts or comports into images as much as he creates music. The lyrical skill that can be teased out via close reading is there in Eminem’s work, it’s there in excess, but it feels equally honest to step back from its intricacies in in order to circle around the “Poet” or “Rapper” as a proper noun. That circling feels like a truer gesture toward getting at the rhymes. That tangential meandering toward a center through the spectacle of Eminem’s persona gets closer to the truth of the lyric.
As I sidestep the intricacies of the lyric in order to talk about public persona, I want to mention and hold up scholarly efforts that delve into the lyric because they are accomplishing important work in terms of pushing rap into the realm of poetry, where it deserves to be. Lyrically intricate rap verses deserve to be elevated both for their complexity and for their social and economic content. Eminem creates poetry of worth and substance in this sense, but Eminem is his own monster, his own amorphous body of pop- and socio-cultural problems. I want to acknowledge that rap is poetry, and that Eminem is among the most skilled living writers of verse (literary poets, slam poets, and rappers combined) from the outset of this argument in order to elide the work of proving his artistic merit as it happens in the gears of the words in the engine of the verse. I want to do this both because I can’t quote from the songs, and because to merely quote and close read rhymes would be problematic. Instead, I’ll focus in on Eminem, a figure with his own set of influences, and his mythos. What happens when we crack open the myth and turn the rapper back into a man? What happens when we take the public persona and fold it back into the rhymes? How do they relate? How do they clash? Where do we as listeners and viewers end up in relation to the performance as we sit back engulfed in the flood of images and lyrics? How do Eminem’s underground roots connect to the glistening leaves of his pop persona?
To do this work, to make these connections, to step into the pastiche of his image in order to get at the reality of his lyrics, I want to cut Eminem down a few notches in order to build him back up. I want to see into and through the gleam of his cultural cache in order to see both what’s great about his lyrical skill and what about it makes it bridge over to a wider audience. I’ll say this: I think it’s too easy to posit that Eminem’s mass appeal is strictly a product of race. I think the problem is more complicated, and is rooted to a degree in the style and content of his lyrics. Again, the lyrics are important, but I want to take a different angle in as to why they are.
Eminem isn’t made of the same matter as Macklemore, Riff Raff, Paul Wall, Asher Roth, Yelawolf, Mac Miller, El-P, nor are any of those rappers cast from the same matter as one another. Sure, race is a factor; Eminem appeals to a struggling white audience, and connects to that audience in a strangely personal way that effervesces with a kind of sincere effect, but that’s not all that makes him tick, that’s not all that makes him successful. The threads Eminem connects to his audience make his success understandable quantitatively. Simply put: in terms of sheer numbers (not demographic percentages), there are more white than non-white people irking out a living in poor and lower-middle-class conditions. And suburban kids outside of those conditions often imagine themselves in such conditions, or are only a generation removed from them. It’s a perspective that strikes a major chord with a large consuming audience. Eminem is the perfect coat of paint for the consumer—it’s not just that he’s white, it’s that he presents aspects of that audience’s struggle back to it in ways that are deeply appealing. Eminem is seductive to the helplessness, anger, and alienation that this audience feels.
But it’s not just race or class connecting Eminem to a particular audience; it’s also the style of his lyric—the way the rhymes are constructed, and the hype that surrounds them. The approach and stylistic choices he deploys in his verses are tied to a certain energy that reflects class distinctions and social struggle, but I think the approach and craft is itself essential to Eminem’s appeal. There’s something specific to Eminem. Any of the aforementioned artists are invested in portraying the challenges of a hard-lived existence, even Asher Roth, who openly claims his suburban roots, has a political edge if you look past his radio tracks, yet none of them even come close to Eminem’s initial or continued success. There’s something strange and particular about Eminem, and there’s something seductive about him. I’m tempted to say that it is the fantasized violence and anger that the songs contain, but even that feels too easy, too concrete. Sure, that violence is tempting, but it alone isn’t enough to draw in the massive success and respect that Eminem has gleaned both within the industry, and especially within the larger music-consuming audience. Even if Eminem’s actual experiences don’t overlap with the audiences in any concrete way, the sense of overlap is more palpable, and seemingly more real. This is the audience who buys Eminem records in excess and supports his legacy, and they’re passionate about him. There’s something very particular about Eminem that gives him an extra boost in his audience’s eyes, and it isn’t a singular thing. It’s not just race. It’s not just marketing. It’s his whole body of authorial work that creates the mystique. It’s Eminem the Poet, proper.
Nor is Eminem’s success a simple matter of lyrical skill (even though I’m putting an emphasis on that point within this essay). Yes, he is a great lyricist—he blows me away sometimes with the razor edge of his craft, that’s undeniable—but there are multitudes of great lyricists like Ice Cube, Andre 3000, Big L, Kendrick Lamar, Rakim, Lauryn Hill, Lil Wayne, Big Daddy Kane, Ludacris, Talib Kweli, Scarface, etc. Not to mention other thoroughly canonical figures like Jay-Z, Tupac, Nas, and Biggie. So, why is Eminem viewed as unequivocally “the best” by such a large body of the listening public? Why does such a large portion of the purchasing audience flock to Eminem and not to any other number of rap greats?
I admit that I’m often critically drawn to the reactions people have to songs and videos as they are released, and as they begin to pick up momentum as cultural objects. In short, I like to read internet comments because they provide a strange lens into the fan community. As I scroll through people’s cursory reactions on YouTube and on forums, there is often someone ranting unprovoked about Eminem’s greatness in relation to whatever video or article is at hand; it’s a strange dynamic within the fan community, and one that I as a listener don’t understand. Or, I potentially understand it in terms of the racial and socioeconomic dimensions of the popular listening community; I just don’t understand it in terms of lyricism itself. In fact, the attitudes of such fans make me exude a curmudgeonly affect toward Eminem as a public figure. Sure, he’s lyrically impressive even at his worst—even The Relapse (widely acknowledged as Eminem’s worst album, even by himself in several interviews) includes tight rhyming constructions and multiple voices that echo the best of high Modernist poetry in terms of sheer lyrical skill—but these are features that you can find in most rap that is invested in the lyric. What makes Eminem stand out? Is it because he is the most skilled “white” MC we’ve ever seen? I don’t think that in and of itself is enough. Then, what gives?
Before I got caught up in the strange problem of writing about the lyric without quoting it, I was caught up in the problem of writing about Eminem himself. When I mentioned to a colleague that I was writing about Eminem’s lyrical ability, and that I was a bit hesitant about doing it because I felt he already had too much credit as a figure, the colleague in question cornered me and was adamant about how Eminem’s greatness was “a given, acknowledged by everyone,” and said that I was “just being contrary.” The same thing happened when I mentioned my hesitancy about the article to my Intro to Fiction students at the University of Minnesota. One of them responded with utter sincerity, “yeah, but Eminem is so great.” Maybe I am giving into a contrary tendency, but while I don’t deny that Eminem is both lyrically skilled and culturally important, I just don’t think he deserves to be held above any of the aforementioned artists. Creating an essay that fetishized Eminem’s lyricism and only fetishized his lyricism felt like bad territory to tread into even before I came to terms with any formal limitations.
It’s not just disrespectful to these other artists to call Eminem the greatest lyricist. What’s worse is that it’s disrespectful in a way that’s not interesting or generative. As a poet, I like it when writers, critics, and academics slander and tear apart the figures in canonical anthologies in order to include women, people of color, and people of different class backgrounds—it makes the whole effort of anthologizing more honest and permeable, it runs against New Formalism. Calling rap poetry on par with the rest of contemporary, oft-academic poetry functions in a similar way: the action that includes it in the academy changes our perception of the poetry being produced and propagated by the academy. Tossing rap up into the poetic stratosphere is a win-win situation—such acts make things more inclusive and create a space where we can look at literature for reasons other than its high-thrown status as literature, as cannon. Texts like Adam Bradley’s Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop and Jay-Z’s Decoded are important because they expand the borders and expectations of what we consider poetry by considering rap to be on equal footing with literary attempts at genre.
The motivations for calling Eminem “the greatest living lyricist” (rhetoric that is always filled with hyperbole), on the other hand, feels conservative and stifling. It’s a gesture that is disrespectful to many other voices within hip hop that we should be listening to—whether those are the prophetic lyricists who have come from harsh backgrounds into places of fame, or the highly politicized voices of the underground. It seems wrong to merely write about Eminem using the same approach as Adam Bradley or Jay-Z. It seems wrong to articulate Eminem’s lyrical skill in a way that fetishizes both the lyric and the artist given strange space he occupies within our popular imagination. If I take the poetic significance of rap as a given, as an a priori state, where then does Eminem stand in the pantheon of lyricists? Is he, as most of the anonymous internet claims, the greatest living MC? Of course not, and who cares? But then how do I answer the previous question? Where does he stand amid rap’s many great lyricists? Where do I position him within that vast spectrum? And, why does he remain so much more seductive than other MCs of his lyrical ability?
I don’t have an easy answer to either question, but I do have an anecdote that might help tease out some of the rhetoric that tangentially surrounds the question of Eminem as a lyricist. I like to think that I might ironically (in terms of distance, rather than comedy) circle around Eminem’s position as a lyricist for the duration of this essay in order to trace the contours of his lyricism both in terms of cultural origins and public perceptions. When I taught a hip hop course at the University of Minnesota titled Prophets of the Hood, a course that used rap lyrics to focus in on the existential nihilism that is produced in the face of political and social oppression, at some point the students devolved into playground antics of deciding who were the top ten rappers of all time. While such list making is ultimately silly and hopelessly subjective, it does hold some cultural weight within the hip-hop community given that MTV’s “Hottest MC” list or The Source’s coveted “5 Mics” rating can make or break a rapper’s career, and within the auspices of the classroom it brought out some noteworthy dynamics between my students in terms of the relationship between audience and race. To be a bit reductive for the sake of brevity, there was a sharp racial divide between the students in the class in terms of how they perceived Eminem’s significance: the white students thought Eminem was one of the best rappers of all time, and the students of color didn’t even put him in their top ten. Everyone acknowledged Eminem’s skills as a lyricist. Sure, it was a self-selecting audience of students who decided to take a summer course focused especially on creative writing and hip hop (in the state of Minnesota), but it also seems quite apropos in retrospect. The students who didn’t hold Eminem on a pedestal posited a multitude of rappers for the top spot, which seemed much more honest and aesthetically diverse. When we finished off our top MC tangent, everyone (Eminem fans and skeptics alike) started ragging on Lil Wayne. He wasn’t making anyone’s top ten, lyrical skills or not. I’m not exactly sure why, but I think it has to do with the way they related to Lil Wayne—as easily consumable and complicated as his verses may be, they lack any emotional or political root. Being all spectacle and lyrical skill with no point through which the audience can relate to him, Lil Wayne doesn’t make the cut. While Eminem, on the other hand, uses emotional sincerity and a connection to a certain economic background in excess, and he definitely finds a connection to his audience through that sincerity.
Audience connection aside: Eminem is still the lyricist Nas cited on “Ether” as having enough lyrical skill to tear down Jay-Z on his own album (on Blueprint’s “Renegade”) during their historic rap battle. And now, more than ten years later, Jay-Z and Eminem have a co-sponsored DJ Hero game called the “Renegade Edition” that recalls that historic track. Eminem’s reputation as a lyricist runs deep and is widely accepted, but the move that puts him in a position to stand between two of the great MCs as the bar on which their own lyrics are judged against each other’s is what backs up fans’ claims to Eminem’s greatness. But it’s not just the lyricism as a singular thing that is driving audiences in mass to Eminem’s side to become devoted fans, there’s something more to it as I’ve already intimated. I want to posit that connection is rooted in Eminem’s origins in battle and live-performance rap. That approach to hip hop as central force in the development of his lyrical voice, combined with an ability to cross over to the mainstream because of his race, skill, and connections to Dr. Dre’s popular audio productions pushed him the him the extra mile to not only cross over but to enter the popular ether as a dominate force. Signing to Interscope Records pushed him to the next level, but being rooted in a certain cultural lineage allowed him to prosper. Eminem’s approach to rap is rooted in a certain style, and that style gives him a platform to launch from.
Of course, the above list of things (race, class, image, etc.) that allowed for Eminem’s success within the mainstream sounds like a hodgepodge rather than a singular root cast deep into the soil. Eminem’s lyrical adroitness is undeniable and much of his legacy is contingent upon that skill, so looking to the origins of that while acknowledging the perfect storm of other factors that allowed him to cross over seems like a reasonable move. It ultimately comes down to how those lyrical origins transfer over to the public persona. Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers do not rely only on swag or persona to connect to the audience, there is always the lyrics to back that persona up. There are always those verses that touch, prod, and shock the listener, both with their content and with their skill. There is always something at stake in the background. There is always verse between the bars that prevents the audience from classifying Eminem as another joke in the league of Vanilla Ice. Eminem has “cred” as a rapper; no one denies that he is the real deal.
But there is also a certain style and accessibility to Eminem’s verse that makes it cross over easier on a mass scale, and I think that accessibility is equally rooted in his experiences as a battle rapper in small Detroit clubs. His skillfulness is always already rooted in the sense of performance and raw skill that such environments demand, and unlike many other MCs with similar roots, Eminem was able to transfer that skill built around live, intimate, high-pressure performances into an active and successful writing practice. This positions him in a strange place—he’s not just a battle rapper or freestyle rapper, although he has those skills in his toolkit at any moment, he is also an adept writer who can craft complicated metaphors and narratives into verse.
The combination of both sides of the lyrical coin in one artist is rare, or, at least, the fluidity with which Eminem is able to flip between the two sides of the coin is rare. To get an idea of how this difference between the two approaches to the lyric plays out in other artists we might contrast Black Thought of The Roots and Pusha T of Clipse in order to see how these two approaches to the lyric stand apart. Black Thought rhymes in a more straightforward manner that’s invested in the sound of the flow over the beat, while Pusha T’s style leans more toward metaphor and complexity. In short: Black Thought provides a smooth delivery while Pusha T provides a dense one—they’re both experts operating on different poles of the lyrical spectrum, and they both have radically different approaches and styles. Pusha T’s lyrics are harder to access and more veiled in their metaphorical intricacy such that they demand multiple listens just to tease out their densely wrought meanings, while Black Thought’s lyrical constructions tend to be more straightforward and dexterous in terms of delivery. When I return to a Black Thought verse it is because I’m surprised by the smoothness of the delivery, not because I didn’t understand it (at least usually). What is so impressive about Eminem is the way he is able to shift between these two juxtaposed lyrical poles.
Eminem’s recent EP collaboration with Royce da 5'9" Hell: The Sequel under the group name Bad Meets Evil shows Eminem at his most lyrically playful and metaphorically complex, but even in the atmosphere of a semi-competitive collaborative work Eminem writes in a mode that is accessible to the listener. Tracks like the violent narrative “Stan” from the Marshall Mathers LP or the essayistic protest song “Mosh” also hover between the two poles of complexity and straightforwardness in wonderful ways; the listener slides along with the message, floating with it as it rides the beat, sputtering as the lyrics release clever jabs. Eminem jumps into slick and straightforward flows at one moment, and then gets caught up in the complexity of an extended metaphor in the next. At his best, he mixes the two seamlessly.
This might be a strange place to go in order to further illustrate my point, but I want to take a look at Eminem’s Nike Air Jordan “The Way I Am” sneakers.
In the song that the sneakers take their lyrics from, “The Way I Am,” Eminem reacts to the media’s influence on his life from various angles. He laments the reaction of activists to his homophobic and sexist lyrics, as well as to the public’s pop-like perception of him as an artist. The Way I Am is also the title of Eminem’s memoir that features the same multi-colored and overlaid lyrical scrawls on several of its graphic, well-designed pages. These spastic, random collections of words written in Eminem’s handwriting feel resonant with his lyrical origins, and having those lyrics printed on sneakers feels all the more fitting. I can imagine the sneakers squeaking on the floor of a freestyle club, worn on the feet of a body pressed closely against other bodies with thick smoke snaking in the air and shifting DJ beats pounding in the ears. The music fades to silence and then an MC introduces the two rappers who are going to battle. Their lyrics flood over the body and the crowd reacts booing, yelping out expletives, oohing and awing at every clever bar thrown back and forth between two rappers engaged in competitive lyrical combat.
The form of the lyrics on the shoes, spastically scrawled, overwritten (palimpsestic), worn on the body, and still ringing with clarity, feels as though it somehow gets at the roots of Eminem’s approach. They represent (if you’ll allow the pun) the way he is. Eminem’s lyrics make sense to the listener on the first go, but they are also crafted and spastically overlaid in their rhyme and metaphor. Eminem has both a smoothness of delivery to hook the listener, and the complexity of lyric to hold them there for multiple listens. The fact that the shoes are part of a massive marketing campaign through the Nike Corporation feels somehow true to Eminem’s body of work as well. As much as he rails against his image, as much as he connects to a more working-class audience, he still is a media object that has been traded on TRL in excess right alongside N’Sync—his ability to cross over to a wider audience is also part of his body of work. And as much as I want to avoid dwelling on the media-oriented aspects of Eminem for too long, both because I’ve already mentioned it and because it does have its troublesome elements, when I see the massive stadiums full of people that Eminem is able to fill in Detroit when he does a homecoming tour, I think the honesty of that poor and working-class battle rap stage is still there, at least the heart of it is, even as it has exploded in size to include such a massive and wide-ranging audience. Even if he does reach a substantial following, it is a following that gleans its members from a vast number of backgrounds, and it includes the working class folks Eminem claims roots in.
And it all comes back to battle rap: the battle rap performance stage is the platform that allowed Eminem to cross over in the first place, and it’s what keeps his lyrical approach exciting. There is a need to be sharply clever, and to have a razor-edged wit, but there is also a need to do it in a way that is understandable to the audience in the immediacy of the moment. When that clear delivery gets combined with the mad and obsessive desire to create lyrics that stand up against some of the most complicated verses ever made, the result is an artist who has both credibility on the lyrical end of the spectrum and a level of unprecedented accessibility.
There’s a wonderful MTV video of Eminem freestyling with his now deceased friend Proof from early in his career that speaks well to the intimacy that’s at the core of Eminem’s practice.1 The two rappers slide back and forth, rhyming, calling on each other to take over at certain points as they slide into and out of lyrical energy together. As they rap, Eminem references his own life growing up in Detroit, and points out the windshield of the car at his old house (they’re parked in front of one of his childhood homes for the interview). The combination of this intimacy of place and performance with an artist who stands on top of the TRL charts for record periods is what makes Eminem stand out. And it’s the intimacy that makes him so successful, at least in any sustained sense. It’s what allows listeners to enter a world that relates to their own.
It’s not just that he’s white, TRL friendly (in an ironic way, but TRL friendly nonetheless), or of a certain economic class—it’s that he’s all of those things, while simultaneously being the sort of lyricist who is able to blend together complicated lyrical skill with a wonderful and accessible delivery. It also remains true that the Eminem is also always larger than the lyric itself; he is always the public Poet with a seductive backstory and comic delivery. He dresses up like Britney Spears, hosts shows on MTV, and fetishizes violence, but he also simultaneously is rooted in a working-class authenticity that comes through in the rhymes. And as much as I can drift away from the lyric itself in order to talk about public reception, I feel always drawn back to it in an inescapable feedback loop.
Without his lyrical skill and roots in battle rap, Eminem would both lack the credibility to exist as a rapper within the rap community, and he would lack the ability to create such simultaneously seductive and complex songs. Eminem is a Poet with a huge public persona, but what is a Poet without their poetry?
Chapter Note
1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-2kk6s1axk.