E Martin Nolan
Given his tendency to provocation, Eminem would seem an easy target for criticism. His lyrics lead directly to issues of homosexual, women’s, and minority rights; the meaning of white trash, the meaning of blackness; the responsibilities of the public entertainer, the limits of free speech; the value or cost of embodied depravity, the moral consciences of entire generations; and on, and on. Indeed, his work demands, and often receives, an immediate and prominent response. But he can also be a Trojan Horse. Obscured beneath his surface provocations lies a murkiness that lends itself not to certain platitudes but to uncertain ambiguities. This is easily overlooked because listeners can simply construct their own Eminem out of his myriad parts in order to justify whatever argument they would like to prove. Such efforts do more damage than good, however, despite how well intentioned and morally upright the arguments they support might be. This is not only because they ignore the ambiguity of the rapper’s provocations but also because they tend to ignore those aspects of his work that would contradict their arguments.
Eminem is not important because he explains, exemplifies, or exposes this or that truth about our society, civilization, etc. He is important because he does something more difficult than that: he confronts us with ambiguity and makes us cope with complexity and misdirection. He does this through an ambitious formal technique as well as through the narratives, arguments, diatribes, and comedy routines that fill his songs. These sources of complexity are dependent on one another. To understand that dependence, we must first know how the form works, then we can examine the content that fills that form and, finally, the ramifications of the final product. His verse in 50 Cent’s 2012 single “My Life” exemplifies Eminem’s formal craft, so I will start there.
“My Life” sandwiches a roughly minute-long verse by Eminem between two half-minute verses by 50 Cent. 50 Cent’s verses are solid, workman-like efforts. The verses are very similar in structure and content, so for our purposes a look at his first verse will suffice. It reviews his meteoric rise in 2003 and his break from former collaborators Game and Young Buck. After claiming that these rappers are nothing without the support he has now withdrawn, 50 vaguely gestures toward humility—“I’m not perfect”—before pronouncing his own worth—measured in earnings—while also announcing his return to the rap game.
This is all rendered in a well-established rap formality to match the well-established clichés (or tropes if you’re being kind). Aside from the last couplet, the end rhymes are almost entirely exact, with the rhyme limited mostly to the final sound of the rhymed foot. Adding to that regularity is the fact that each of the first six lines ends in a monosyllabic short “i” word (e.g., “rich,” “bitch”). The seventh and eighth lines interject with a forgettable couplet built on two disconnected clichés (one about lessons “learned” and another about “evil” money “earned”), which at least introduce a new end rhyme. The first eight lines are largely iambic, becoming almost perfectly so as the lines approach their ends, thus adding to the regularity established by the rhyme pattern. Lines nine and ten mark a significant, if brief, formal shift to a run on two internal rhymes describing 50 in a thin glaze of up-from-the-bottom-by-the-bootstraps glory.
The verse ends in nonchalant affirmation of 50’s talent and an announcement that this is his “recovery.” If the 50-Eminem–50 verse structure of “My Life” did not already invite a comparison between the two rappers, then surely 50’s invocation of Recovery, Eminem’s wildly successful comeback album, does. The comparison is not flattering to 50. Compared to Eminem’s verse—which is, to be fair, one of his most formally impressive to date—50’s verses seem flat and unimaginative. His verse structure comes off as simple and his content is thoroughly expected.
Eminem’s verse is not one of his most thoughtful, intriguing or even disturbing. Like 50’s, it is riddled with clichés, although Eminem is also showing off his ability to twist or elaborate on a cliché until it becomes unexpected. Still, it is in its formal achievement that Eminem’s verse really stands out. Eminem eases us into his verse. As if aware of the standard nature of the verse that precedes his, he uses the first four lines to establish a formal base from which he will launch the wild excursions to come. The opening content parallels the form: lines one through three describe the speaker in a preparatory mode, sharpening his tools and mulling his lyrical revenge. The form to this point mimics 50 by featuring perfect rhymes fitted neatly onto the repeated final feet. In matching the complexity of 50’s first verse, Eminem is effectively taking the formal baton from 50. But Eminem uses the opportunity to near-rhyme the early sounds of the repeated end-feet in addition to the end sounds, creating multisyllabic rhymes where 50 relies on monosyllabic rhymes or entirely repeated phrases. Even in the handoff Eminem is beginning to transcend 50’s formal accomplishments.
Both verses are aimed at enemies, but Eminem’s are unnamed, probably because the point is not to destroy any particular enemy—not this time at least—but to forge an excuse to unleash lyrical prowess. So the enemy here might as well be identified as the whole rap universe. In the fourth line, Eminem shifts from preparation to attack mode, with spaghetti identified first as a means for storing energy and then as an excuse to use wordplay (“or should I say spaghett-even?”) to begin the assault. Lines 3 to 6 form another triplet, this one based on three-syllable cadences and “-ing” endings; but the real action occurs within the lines, with each progressively packing more sound into the interior, until, in the seventh line, Eminem moves the song into new territory: he quickens the pace and packs four additional syllables and at least one extra stress into the line, without disrupting the timing of the end rhyme. Notice how he is beginning to range from the formal base established early while maintaining a connection to it.
In lines 8 to 16 Eminem shows off his range, ability, and control. Depending on how you lineate (always a fraught exercise with a musical, performed literature like rap), line 8 begins either a couplet composed of very long lines, or a quatrain rhyming on the second and fourth lines (I will assume it is a quatrain). The rhythm becomes unhinged, or fluid, here, with the pace quickening between the rhymes—with Eminem still enunciating clearly—and slowing back down near the rhymes, which, again, are perfectly timed despite the complicated route the line takes to get to them. The rhymes here are built on a long “e” sound, which introduces a new sound element to the mix, while the rhythm is varied but contains distinctive feet that echo prominent snatches of rhythm from earlier in the verse, thus reinforcing the verse’s overall continuity. This quatrain’s elaborate structure matches the elaborate metaphor it describes, in which Eminem’s imagined enemies have their vocal chords torn out and connected from their eyes to a source of abundant electricity. This is done so that Eminem can provide lesser rappers with the vision his ability makes possible. This quatrain alone contains more attention to metaphor and imagery, as well as to sound, rhythm and pace, than 50’s first and second verses together.
He lets up in lines 12 and 13, before waking the line up with “Fuck letting up” and lowering his voice to a whisper—thus adding yet another feature to his already packed verse—and again quickening his pace in lines 13 to 16, in which he picks up the long “e” rhyme from above before momentarily abandoning rhyme and letting the rhythm free to lead a quick tangent. This segment closes with an interruption similar to that which ends line 13 (these “wakeup calls” act as additional framing devices for the madness happening within the variations of this verse). Lines 17 and 18 work as a variation-by-regularity: this is a straight-ahead couplet that returns the verse to the regularity (it is right on top of the beat) established in 50’s verse and Eminem’s opening lines, providing a contrast from the variations that dominate the middle of the verse.
This respite does not last long. As soon as the verse regains its formal bearings it takes off again into an interior-rhyme and wordplay-laden couplet in which the rapper’s relationship to rap is described as simultaneously forced from without (he is trapped in rap) and self-reinforcing (rapping only makes him more trapped). This is less jarring than the extended metaphor involving vocal chords plugged into electricity. Still, the extended metaphor and dense language in these lines are handled with impressive nimbleness and control, and Eminem does manage to extend the paradox of entrapment through the remainder of the verse, which features a return to the whisper-speedup combination from earlier and an outro that mimics the regular triplet that began the verse.
So, formally we end the verse where we began. Likewise, it is difficult to detect any real change in the speaker, aside from the claim that he “is going psycho again,” which is unconvincing, especially in a verse that awkwardly juxtaposes this with more convincing boasting. This is the song’s problem in general: the successful rap artist’s struggle is not central or convincing but a theme tagged on to give the song the illusion of weight. Despite that, the skill and compositional technique on display in Eminem’s verse cannot be ignored, and it could be argued that in this case such excellence alone carries all the meaning the song needs. Still, Eminem’s career output provides plenty of opportunities to consider his impressive chops along with more worthy content, as we will see later.
For now, we have found that Eminem’s “My Life” verse establishes a strong formal basis, varies widely from that basis while maintaining a strong tie to it, before finally returning to that basis. This is a prodigal verse, and in that it should be familiar to students of formal English verse. Paul Fussell defines “the fixed element in poetry” as “the received or contrived grid or framework of metrical regularity” while “the variable is the action of the rhythm of the language as it departs from this framework.”1 Fussell’s definition of “metrical regularity” is more exact than that applicable to the verses of “My Life,” but the relationship between fixity and variation that he describes is directly applicable to the song. 50 Cent’s verses mostly adhere to the “fixed element” they establish, with a few barely notable variations, like their short runs on interior rhymes.
It is, therefore, in the range of his variations that Eminem sets himself apart from 50 Cent in “My Life.” Range of variation, however, is not in and of itself an admirable quality in a rap verse. Rap, like formal poetry, is effective when its variations are restrained by a well-established regularity. T. S. Eliot would go further and insist that a verse of any quality cannot be free of such contact, because “there is no freedom in art.”2 We can further apply Eliot’s concept to Eminem’s “My Life” verse and claim that the rapper establishes “the ghost of some simple meter” that then “lurks” behind his variations. The ghost meter in rap is usually linked to a consistent beat, and in this case Eminem is always able to return to the regularity established by the beat. It should be noted, though, that unlike the poetry prompting Eliot’s formulation, which was seeking freedom from both meter and rhyme, the ghost behind Eminem’s meter is also aided heavily by rhyme. But even rhyme, as we have seen, is used loosely and abandoned when necessary in Eminem’s verse. Nonetheless, the verse might have gained Eliot’s favor in that while it is not consistently patterned, it does not aim for a “absence of pattern.”3
Still, to rely so heavily on the variations in his verse, Eminem must be able to establish some level of coherence to those variations, or they will become Eliot’s dreaded “chaos.”4 Eminem avoids that because he injects in them enough shared patterns to constitute a coherence among the variations themselves. There is the repetition of the whispered, quickened lines, the periodic insertion of the aforementioned “wake up calls,” the brief returns to the verse’s formal base, etc., all of which hold the variations together as they track the ghost form.
In fact, given the dominant role of Eminem’s variations in “My Life,” it is not certain that the dominant guide of the verse is an adherence to formal consistency, or if the true base is coherence itself, with consistency playing second fiddle. If this is the case, we should turn for guidance from Fussell to Angus Fletcher, whose A New Theory of American Poetry posits that coherence is the dominant base in a great deal of American poetry. For Fletcher, coherence “differs from consistent mechanical conformity” in that it “shares the property of completeness, as distinct from axiomatic consistency.”5 If we look beyond Eminem’s formal attributes and consider, as we shall later on, his art as a whole, Fletcher’s definition fits: Eminem is nothing if not adverse to “axiomatic consistency,” yet his presence remains distinct, complete, and unmistakable.
Regardless, from a formal perspective, a case could be made for either consistency or coherence as the base of Eminem’s work. In that, he stands apart from rappers like 50 Cent, Drake (whose catchy hooks about being rich and famous are firmly in 50’s tradition), or Kanye West, all of whom are dependent on regularity to keep their verses grounded. That is not to say a rapper cannot be dependent on regularity and produce quality work, as rappers from Chuck D, to Tupac, to Lil Wayne (on subdued tracks like “Nightmares from the Bottom”) have proven. It is to say that when it comes to the spectrum from consistency to coherence, Eminem is hard to place, that he is somewhere in between, and that he can navigate that spectrum like few others (Lil Wayne on “Let the Beat Build” comes to mind). This leads us back to Eliot’s conception of verse, for what I am essentially claiming is that Eminem’s verse supports Eliot’s claim that “it is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.”6
Considering the role of formal consistency in rap, a number of tempting analogies present themselves. These are taken either from the art forms from which rap has drawn its formal techniques, or to which rap’s formal techniques are readily comparable. We have seen the usefulness of Eliot’s “freed verse” as a model that escapes rigid notions of formal regularity while not abandoning form altogether. We could also extend Frost’s famous analogy of poetry as tennis and claim that Eminem does not get rid of the net but is no a slave to it either. This would be in contrast to a rapper like Q-Tip, who in Ice-T’s documentary Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap proudly claims to be a “slave to the beat.” Q-Tip, indeed, is solidly in rap’s consistent camp, varying, with rare smoothness, only slightly from the rhythmical and sound patterns that ground his verses, in which the line’s meter closely adheres to the drumbeat. To pick up on that last point, though, it might be beneficial to look outside of literature for a more fruitful comparison.
Rap engulfs music and poetry in a manner rarely found outside of opera. Opera is “an art form that consists of a literary text, a dramatic stage performance, and music [that] should be studied in all its multimedia and ‘multimediated’ dimensions.”7 The same could easily be said of rap; even leaving videos aside, it is difficult to have any sense of rap’s form without considering music. Even in his highly literary, and I’d argue essential, Book of Rhymes, Adam Bradley claims that “rap demands that we acknowledge its dual identity as word and song.”8 So it is worth considering a precedent for Eminem’s formal stretching in a musical ancestor.
Coleman Hawkins is widely acknowledged as one of the most, if not the most, important early innovators of jazz saxophone. But in a young, quickly evolving musical form (sound familiar?), his innovations were bound to become a norm, or a loosely fixed regularity, that would be accepted and then moved beyond. A 1944 film clip,9 gives clear evidence of this transition in action (although this transition was already well under way). As Hawkins plays his solo, a young Charlie Parker lounges in the background, periodically laughing in Hawkins’s direction. What follows seems to hint at the cause of Parker’s laughter, as Parker’s solo begins in a flurry of notes that immediately differentiates him from Hawkins. Bird is faster and more agile than his elder, squeezing notes between the patterns already laid out by Hawkins while managing to maintain that pattern’s structure. As it turns out, Parker’s laughter stems from Hawkins’s attempt to mime his solo (the audio was prerecorded),10 but the viewer’s likely initial thought—that Parker’s laughter is aimed at the limitations of Hawkins’s technique—still contains insight because the difference in Parker’s improvisation is so plain to hear.
Andre Hodeir describes Hawkins as possessing a “traditionally balanced, symmetrical kind of phrasing.”11 It would be insulting to Hawkins to compare his technique to a rapper of 50 Cent’s caliber, but the difference Hodeir finds between Hawkins and Parker is helpful in making our own comparison. Hodeir describes Bird’s difference this way:
Instead of Hawkins’s regular accent on the strong beat and certain pronounced syncopations or of Lester Young’s flowing style, Bird’s accentuation comes alternately on the beat and between the beats. The astonishingly rich rhythm of his music comes from this alternation, from these continual oppositions.12
This description is both reminiscent of Eliot’s claim regarding “the very life of verse,” and directly applicable to Eminem’s achievement. Like Parker, Eminem came to a tradition largely marked by “regular accent[s] on the strong beat,” as well as a popular “flowing style.”13 A proper study of Eminem would cover the former characteristic of rap poetics more than it would the latter. But while Eminem may not posses the admirably smooth flow of many of his peers, his jagged, complex, yet tightly contained verses are rarely matched.14
Few rappers possess the writing and performative chops to pull off the rhythmical variety on display in Eminem’s “My Life” verse, or in any number of Eminem verses (like “No Love” and “You’re Never Over” on Recovery). To find a rapper on Eminem’s par in this regard, listen to his Bad Meets Evil collaboration with Royce ’da 5'9". Royce is not the complete rapper that Eminem is, but unlike most of Eminem’s sidemen, he proves he can hang with him. At times, the two are like jazz players trading fours. But a more poignant modern comparison can be drawn from another of Charlie Parker’s descendants, the saxophonist Skerik. Like Eminem, Skerik possesses the rare ability to constantly push his solos outward and to constantly surprise, while never losing control or the ability to return to a formal base. Guitarist Charlie Hunter defined Skerik’s draw this way: “he’s indefatigable; he just goes to this place where he can do no wrong as your front man.”15 Skerik’s difference is better experienced than explained, but there is one quality that stands out: he has both impressive range and the ability to contain that range. The same is true of Eminem and Charlie Parker.
Again echoing Eliot’s earlier pronouncement, Hodeir claims that “the variety of formulas [Parker] uses in a single solo makes it possible for him to avoid all rhythmic monotony.”16 The word “possible” should be noted—no improviser is capable of avoiding “all rhythmic monotony” all the time—but Bird, Eminem, and Skerik remain exceptional in this regard. Hodeir also claims that “the richness of [Parker’s] rhythmic vocabulary,” and his playing’s occasional “discontinuity” causes “the inexperienced listener [to] often lose the beat in this rhythmic complexity.” Yet, “it is all conceived and played with absolute strictness; at the end … Parker falls right on the first beat.”17 Likewise, listeners can be forgiven if in the midst of lines 10 to 14 of Eminem’s verse on “My Life” they lose sight of the relationship between Eminem’s words and the formal base made by the beat and the more regular lines. But by line 16 he has, with seeming effortlessness, brought the verse back to its native regularity with unmistakable definitiveness.
It would be enough to end this comparison here, and to simply acknowledge that all these artists have their “instrument completely under control.”18 But Hodeir goes on to note that “regardless of its strength, Parker’s kind of individuality cannot do without a climate that is favorable to the manifestation of his message.”19 Hodeir is referring to Parker’s ability to surround himself with those able to help him achieve the “polyrhythmic expression” his one-voiced instrument is unable to facilitate on its own, but beyond the very important context of his band, he needed a culture and a form that valued individuality, and to some extent Bird received both.
Billy Taylor, among others, has claimed jazz as “America’s Classical Music” because it mimics America’s attitude toward individuality: “no other indigenous music reflects so clearly the American ideal of the individual’s right to personal freedom of expression.”20 So while Bird was certainly a unique individual, he could never be considered apart from his band or his cultural and historical context. His band and historical context, meanwhile, did impose limitations within which his freedom had to operate. So he was free to a significant extent, but he was not totally free from dependence on the group or society (he was a black man in the early twentieth century, after all).
Yet Parker’s particular invocation of individuality was different. And if, as Hodeir claims, Bird “accents certain off-beat notes violently”21 and makes songs in which “the melody and the rhythm are disjointed in a way that verges on the absurd,”22 then surely this music must intuit some parallel violence or absurdity of meaning. Again, however, Bird did not invent this violence or absurdity, he simply helped bring it into the light by expressing it with an abandon his predecessors lacked (although they paved the way). The parallel to Eminem is again unavoidable, although here it is less neat. Eminem entered a popular rap scene reeling from a violent culture that had just seen two of its greatest stars, among countless others, struck down by the very violence proclaimed in so many of its songs. Yet somehow he managed to push the envelope, to be known as a violently absurd, and absurdly talented, artist in a field stocked to the hilt with those attributes.
As with Bird, we would not know Eminem’s particular vision of individuality if it hadn’t been for the artistic and formal talents with which he gave it life. Parker, Hodeir writes, “had the courage to challenge aesthetic axioms that were tending to become frozen dogma.”23 In rap terms, Bird was exposing techniques that were “played out.” In Fletcher’s terms, he was calling out undue “axiomatic consistencies” in the work of his predecessors. Eminem might not put it so politely. The larger point, though, might be that both artists were allowed the freedom to express their difference. Their art, then, says as much about the artists themselves as it does about the nation that offered them a stage.
While that stage allows for a certain freedom within formal constraints, it also demands the transgression of constraints in the name of change and newness. Bird is known today because he “freed jazz of a number of trammels.”24 In doing so he risked displeasing champions of tradition, like Ralph Ellison, who wrote that while “Parker’s generation drew much of its immediate fire from their understandable rejection of the traditional entertainer’s role,” they also “confused artistic quality with questions of personal conduct.”25 Parker was not like Ellison’s beloved Louis Armstrong, in whose seemingly cheery music Ellison’s Invisible Man could locate a subversive depth encompassing black America’s long history and suffering. Armstrong could do this because unlike Parker he assumed a “make-believe role of clown,”26 instead of demanding, “in the name of racial identity, a purity of status which by definition is impossible for the performing artist.”27 Despite Ellison’s misgivings, Bird’s antagonistic entertainer stance later became common, for instance in the early electric years of Miles Davis and Bob Dylan, and in punk. Rap would find this stance both natural and lucrative when its stars carved out their place as bestselling anti-establishment tape deck preachers.
Tupac Shakur was of one of rap’s most talented and most controversial stars. His work was heavily debated in the public sphere, as well as in congress, and Eminem’s eventually garnered similarly widespread scrutiny. At the heart of these debates lies the freedom of speech and the responsibility of the public entertainer. The former gives Eminem the right to transgress social mores with abandon, while the latter exposes him to a sea of potential reactions. But there is a third element in this public drama: the artist’s ability to anticipate public reaction. This is what Ellison loved so much in artists like Louis Armstrong: “a clearer idea of the division between their identities as performers and as private individuals.”28 If artists can make this distinction, then they give themselves a chance to manipulate their public personas. Tupac probably knew this better than he is given credit for, and Eminem has mastered his mask, even if he’s also fallen prey to the pressures of his role, struggled to keep his public personae from harming his private life, and, finally, come back from the brink of Bird-like self-destruction.
Likewise, Eminem’s work stretches from the purposely and strategically wretched, to the honestly suffering, to the redeemed, and back. Reactions to his work are similarly varied,29 but there has been a particular tendency to react with disgust. I do not claim this to be overbearing, but it is worth noting in particular because it reveals an important, if not ultimately justifiable, critical shortcoming. To be sure, the amount of disgust Eminem’s work has received roughly equals the amount of his work that is validly categorized as “wretched.” But just as a nation cannot be judged solely on its faults, no part of a complicated artist can be taken in isolation. To do so is to miss the bigger, more relevant picture. To understand Eminem’s wretched transgressions, then, we must also understand his better angels. To understand either of those, however, we must first confront the freedom that allows, or forces, him to choose one, the other, or both.
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman offers a framework to sort that out. In Freedom, he claims that “individual freedom cannot and should not be taken for granted, as it appears (and perhaps disappears) together with a particular kind of a society.”30 With that in mind, Bauman argues for the relevance of “the connections between such a free individual and the society of which he is a member.”31 This suggests it takes an Eminem-ready society to make an Eminem. Writing a decade before the rapper’s emergence, Bauman identified the societal characteristics that would ultimately facilitate and dictate Eminem’s realization of twenty-first-century American freedom in a shift of emphasis from work to consumption: “the individual’s drive to self-assertion has been squeezed out from the area of material production. Instead, a wider than ever space has been opened for it at the new ‘pioneer frontier,’ the rapidly expanding, seemingly limitless, world of consumption.”32
To an extent, Bauman deeply respects the accomplishment of the “consumer version [of] individual freedom,” because unlike the entrepreneurial and work-based model, “it may be exercised without sacrificing the certainty that lies at the bottom of spiritual security.”33 The consumerist system achieves this certainty by generating “a kind of society in which the life pattern of free choice and self-assertion can be practiced on a scale unheard of before.”34 The advantage comes in part due to the fact that in the work-based model, society was threatened by the worker who sought pleasure, and who would thus lose discipline, while the consumerist model so encourages self-definition through the pursuit of pleasure that “spending is a duty.”35 In a society that values both self-assertion and material consumption, a self-or-selves-asserting producer of commoditized art like Eminem naturally thrives.
Bauman strains to find a feasible alternative to the consumerist model, aside from “bureaucratically administered oppression,”36 but doubts remain. For one, if the “social approval of free choices” by others, is, as Bauman claims, a necessity, and if that is available only “together with the identity kits” consumers purchase through the market, then consumerism is a method of social control that is difficult to escape.37 “It may well be,” Bauman writes near the book’s conclusion, “that the human drive to freedom will not be satisfied by market-led approaches,”38 and it could be argued that Eminem’s music contains a latent, and sometimes active, political strain that acts against a consumerist ideology (even if this is done through a consumer product and only apparent in his general anger—but more on this later). Barring a social or economic revolution, the popular artist may well be judged by how well he or she copes with the inevitability of consumerism.
Eminem is clearly a product of consumerism. For Bauman, in a consumerist society “everyone has to answer for himself the question ‘who am I, how should I live, who do I want to be?’”39 Eminem could hardly be understood without examining how he has gone about answering those questions. His first three commercial records form a kind of identity map of the rapper’s public personae. Carroll Hamilton summarizes the matter succinctly:
The issue of naming is particularly relevant because, while they are each different, the titles … are eponymous: The Slime Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show. The progression from the earlier pseudonym to the later, via the artist’s real name, logically culminates in the citation of “Eminem” as the proper name of the celebrity subject that Slim Shady has become; if Slim Shady is white trash, Eminem is a celebrity. Marshall Mathers—as persona if not real identity—occupies a liminal space between the two, through which he manages his twin personas.40
Bauman—whose signature book, Liquid Modernity, argues that our era is defined by fluidity as opposed to fixity—would very quickly recognize in the above description a creature of the age he has described. Notice that even Marshall Mathers, the legal name of the man, is not endowed with certainty, but with a liminal presence. The ability to name or redefine one’s self is by no means new; Whitman’s oeuvre is full of self-iterations and Dickinson, in her solitude, was seeking to define her self in all its evolving particularities.
However, with the continual advancement of television, which Bauman points out is a “dramatic mode of communication,” we are faced with the fact that “the world split into a multitude of mini-dramas [via the medium of television] has a distinctive mode of existence, but no clear-cut direction.”41 Whitman might have had pretenses to containing multitudes, but it was Eminem’s immediate predecessors who first engaged with mediums actually capable of touching those multitudes and it was Eminem and his contemporaries who were left to deal with the further expansion of possibility that is the internet. Of TV—although it also applies to the internet—Bauman writes that “armed with a medium of enormous power, the world of professional communicators and entertainers expands well beyond its once limited, stage-confined territory, appropriating estates previously managed by, say, professional politicians.”42 There is a double challenge presented to the popular entertainer here: he must both take on the ramifications of having a gigantic and highly connected audience, while mapping a media landscape “with no clear-cut direction.”
In meeting the latter of those challenges, a natural ally is the self-identifying process, with the self now capable of reverting to directionlessness and picking any of the multitudes of paths available therein. It makes sense, then, that Eminem enacts his dynamic play of identity through mediums—radio, TV, and internet—that allow for maximum freedom of representation. In fact, this fruitful combination of liquid mediums and a changeable self has gone a long way in making Eminem the representative figure he is today. But it is also in the liberty with which Eminem has used this freedom that his harshest critics have found their disquiet.
In Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity, for instance, Carroll Hamilton accuses Eminem of manipulating his racial and class identity in order to reap the traditional benefits of the white male. “Eminem’s valorization of white trash serves ultimately to enable his escape from it” she writes, because “he transforms white trash into a valedictory identity in order to transcend it.”43 By claiming “white trash” as an identity apart from “white,” Hamilton argues, Eminem is able to identify with the oppressed other—in this case black people—while still retaining the benefits of being white. Eminem himself has supported this claim, as when he points out in “White America” that “suburban kids” dig his work at least partially due to his blue eyes.
Hamilton’s critique lines up in other ways with Bauman’s concept of the entertainer’s role in a consumerist society. She claims that Eminem “overcom[es] the inevitability of white trash … through the production of a traditional narrative of self-sufficiency grounded in the ideologies of possessive individualism [which] result[s] in the acquisition of a compensatory form of celebrity identity.”44 So by banking on the consumerist version of the self-made man myth, Eminem is able to catapult himself from “white trash”—which Hamilton defines as “a class based subject that is so debased as to become racialized”45—to the celebrity figure who serves as one of Bauman’s “model identities.”46 Eminem’s dangerous rhetoric, Hamilton concludes, “should give us pause,” because the faults of Eminem are part and parcel of the “the mainstream culture,” which “now uses white working poor identities to shore up rather than criticize the excesses of white privilege.”47
I do not doubt that last point, but Hamilton is not convincing in her claim that Eminem is somehow responsible for this turn of events. Her ability to draw a correlation between her criticism of Eminem and that of “mainstream culture” does not justify her implied claim that the two are directly linked, and Hamilton makes little effort to explicitly draw that link. Instead she presents a slanted argument for Eminem’s improper use of his own race—as if he could avoid the consequences of his race—points out that it looks similar to some other troubling patterns in society and suggests this “should give us pause.”
In New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory After Post-Modernism, Robert Samuels attacks Eminem as “a strong example of how African American presence represents a source for personal self-promotion and a strategy for self-denial.”48 Like Hamilton, Samuels argues that Eminem has identified with the black “other” to his own advantage. Samuels also accuses Eminem of “engag[ing] in the backlash rhetoric of reversed racism” and claims “the people who want to promote tolerance are shown to be intolerant [of Eminem’s free speech], while the intolerant [Eminem] have to be tolerated.”49 Samuels bases this on the first three lines of “Cleaning Out My Closet” with no textual context whatsoever provided (Hamilton also fixates on these lines, although she does provide some, but not much, broader context). Still, Samuels’s critique contains at least a partial truth, for Eminem is a rich celebrity claiming at least some victimhood in that song, even if that is not the overall effect of the song, which is actually focused on the act of moving past victimization (he’s cleaning out his closet, not filling it up).
However, Hamilton and Samuels do not simply zero in on details of Eminem’s songs in order to justify their preconceived theories. They also blow those details up to monumental proportions. To her assumption that whatever goes for Eminem must also go for “mainstream culture” as a whole, Hamilton adds that despite their public dispute Tipper Gore and Lynne Cheney “fail to recognize just how completely [Eminem] typifies the conservative values they embrace.” Those values, apparently, can be found in his “capitulation to a conservative mode of possessive individualism.”50 Hamilton also assumes that Eminem “believes the transformations of civil rights have adversely and predominantly affected white men,”51 while providing little evidence tracing Eminem’s actual work directly to any such political or ideological belief. Eminem may be a white man who takes pride in his self-sufficiency, but that in itself does not make him a likely guest on the Rush Limbaugh show.
For his part, Samuels claims Eminem supports the opinion that “since we now live in a post-prejudice society, the only people who still cry racism, sexism, and homophobia are liberal academics” who want to expand the welfare state, presumably for its own sake. Thus, “we are able to cut taxes to the wealthy because in a post-prejudice society social programs helping minorities are no longer needed.”52 So Eminem is also an ideological ally of Paul Ryan and his punishing austerity budgets. Samuels is quick to point out that he is “not arguing that Eminem is part of some large right-wing conspiracy; rather, his rhetoric samples and recirculates the underlying backlash ideology of automodern society.”53 That backlash ideology depends on the reversal of the victimizer and the victimized, meaning that because Eminem falsely claims victimization, when he is actually the victimizer, he is implicitly supporting the larger cultural argument behind Right-wing ideology, which views government aid to the needy as oppression of the well-off, who are assumed to be completely self-made.
By “automodernity,” Samuels means to indicate “the seamless combination of individual autonomy with technological automation within a backlash rhetoric”54 which reacts “against the postmodern desire to promote tolerance for all minority groups,”55 among other “progressive” targets. We have already established Eminem’s “individual autonomy,” but his connection to “automation” is less obvious. Samuels finds it in Eminem’s “reduction of language to meaningless repetition,”56 which allows Eminem to skirt the social responsibility implied by his public words. Samuels claims Eminem’s “word choices appear to be based more on the identity of sounds and letters than on the semantic value of the terms,” thus “reveal[ing] the nonmeaning at the heart of language.”57 This excuse from responsibility allows Eminem to participate in a “new media libertarianism,” undergirded by a bogus claim to free speech, that “support[s] a generalized backlash against the welfare state, postmodern social movements, minority rights, and a progressive political culture.”
It is absolutely true that the meaning in Eminem’s words is often sacrificed for the sake of musical advantage, and Eminem does, often, insist on a certain level of meaninglessness, or that he is “just clownin’,” in granting himself the freedom to speak the unspeakable. It is also true that Eminem uses “misdirection to hide the true essence of his discourse,” but in extending that to argue that that discourse “replicates the rhetoric of premodern traditional hierarchy,”58 Samuels is taking liberties with the rapper’s supposed “meaninglessness” to reach his own theoretical ends (premodern!).
Without a doubt, these critics speak some truth. The problem with both Hamilton’s and Samuel’s treatments of Eminem is that they limit the scope of their inquiry and thereby create a straw man which they can easily attack. Bauman disapprovingly cites “self-appointed guardians of public morals [who] protest against scenes of violence or sex [and who] assume that the viewers’ violent instincts and sexual appetites are boosted by exposer to such images.”59 While the description certainly applies to the Lynne Cheneys and Tipper Gores of the world, Hamilton and Samuels are guilty of a similar moral grandstanding. This is especially apparent when one considers the details of Eminem’s art that they leave out.
Consider racial identity: could it not be argued that Eminem complicates our very notions of race? What does it mean, after all, to be black or white? Hamilton correctly claims that Eminem is “a troubling figure … able to work across boundaries of race and class.”60 Here, Hamilton could consider how that ability might disrupt the identification of those boundaries themselves. Instead, she moves on to consider how it reveals “middle class white culture’s libidinal investment in American black culture,” as if that were the only takeaway from Eminem’s racial play. Is not Eminem’s acceptance into the rap elite a signal that one need not have black skin to be accepted as a bona fide member of a black-dominated culture? Is this not at least worth considering? Both Hamilton and Samuels suffocate the life of Eminem’s work by insisting that it be seen only through the narrow lens they bring to it. This not only discredits their arguments, but it also crowds out the potential for the honest criticism Eminem’s insensitivities do deserve.
To find holes in Hamilton’s and Samuels’s arguments, one need only turn to the work itself. Eminem’s “The Way I Am” describes the thoroughly unfixed nature of his media presence. The basic argument is that because he is a mass media phenomenon, lacking a “clear-cut direction,” and because this makes his public reception largely beyond his control, Eminem allows that “I am whatever you say I am,” suggesting that he accepts that his audience will define him. So in that sense Hamilton and Samuels are acting with Eminem’s blessing in making him whatever they would like him to be. But not really. Eminem still has a say in your reaction to him and he can anticipate your reaction (especially if you are gullible). Still, only the audience can have the final say. Realizing he cannot control his audience’s reaction, Eminem offers us something that can at least destabilize our preconceptions the way Charlie Parker’s best solos did: ambiguity. He is not who he says he is, exactly, but he is not what “you” say he is either; he cannot be the latter because that “you” is necessarily responding to something Eminem did or said to prompt the response.
In “The Way I Am” Eminem gives his ambiguity because that’s all he has, all he can give from within the panoply of his virtual and limitless auditorium. This is consistent with one of Eminem’s favorite hip-hop invocations, “fuck the world,” because if you are to face a potential sea of criticism, it is advantageous to enter it in a “me against the world” headspace. Eminem is also executing an Armstrong-like awareness of the reactions he generates, which allows him to anticipate those reactions. You might argue that Eminem is more like Parker, but the fact is that different eras call for different entertainer masks, and today’s includes the antagonism for which Parker was infamous. Eminem knows, as Samuels points out, how to “push cultural buttons.”61 What Samuels does not appreciate is how well Eminem has mastered this cultural guerrilla warfare. Sure, much of Eminem’s provocations, especially early in his career, aim directly at drawing attention and increasing record sales, and his struggles with addiction and his withdraw from public life prove he is as much like Bird as he is like Satchmo. But even after his sober comeback Eminem remains a master of public manipulation on par with the early electric Bob Dylan, the meat-dress wearing Lady Gaga, and the greatest current American satirist, Stephen Colbert (based on some of the simplistic responses Eminem generates, one may wonder if his critics also think Colbert is actually a right-wing pundit).
This all comes down to Eminem’s ambiguous use of sincerity, a characteristic Hamilton and Samuels acknowledge but fail to grasp the full significance of. It is often easy to detect if Eminem is being sincere, or if he is ‘just clownin’—“Cleaning Out My Closet” is sincere, while “My Name Is” is a clown show. The more interesting examples are those that seem to oscillate between the two, like “White America.” Hamilton and Samuels both latch on to the song’s final line—“I’m just playin’ America, you know I love you.” Samuels posits the line as yet another example of automodern “nihilism”62 while Hamilton takes it to mean that all of Eminem’s preceding diatribe is just a ploy and that he really sincerely loves America for the “possessive individualism” it allows him.63 Neither consider that “playin’” might be the most important word in the whole song, if not in Eminem’s whole body of work. To play with the listener is to lead the listener astray, and in these critics’ case, Eminem has been successful.
Properly read, though, Eminem does more than deceive. Consider “The Real Slim Shady,” where we find the usual transgressions, but with a turn near the song’s end. Eminem raps that in every person there is a version of Slim Shady “lurkin’.” With that Eminem extends a self-centered song to a universal base. When Eminem performed this song at the MTV Video Music Awards, the army of Eminem lookalikes featured in the music video entered the auditorium, providing further proof that Eminem’s aims have never been purely individualistic, but that there has always been a tendency to connect his individualism to “every single person.” People will rightly be disgusted by and reject Slim Shady, but the logic of his claim is undeniable. Look under you bootsole, Eminem suggests, and you will find my residue waiting for you.64 Or as the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man would put it: “who knows but that, at the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”65
This connection is made in far more Whitmanian terms in “Not Afraid,” that most public of personal poems. It was his decision to get clean. “I did it for me,” Eminem raps, before admitting he might have done it “subliminally for you.” This “you” is the fans, who are addressed throughout the song and whose support “helped see me through.” Here’s where it gets interesting: after sincerely thanking his supporters, for a second time, and suggesting they might not realize how important they were to his recovery, Eminem allows “believe me you”—a play on “believe you me”—to linger on the end of the line. That he pauses at this phrase before moving on is suggestive. Given the I-you connection forged above, there seems a chance that Eminem means to draw attention on more time to the connection between his “me” and the “you” that supports him. At the same time, it is difficult to imagine a song more neatly fitted to the great American myth of reinvention and second chances. And so one of our era’s most prominent individualists created an anthem that argues both for his own renewed individualism, and that we are all in this together.
Elsewhere in Recovery, Eminem still reserves the right to be a “sick puppy” and claims he’s a “sick pig” even without the swine flu. He remains hard to call, but only when we meet Eminem on the terms dictated by his multiplicity and complexity can we begin to asses his true relevance—the good, the bad and the ugly. We cannot do that unless we come to the work with an open mind and a willingness to invest in ambiguity.
As we have seen, Eminem’s formal balance between fixity and chaos mimics the ambiguity of his subject matter. I have already compared that balance to T. S. Eliot’s concept of “freed verse” as well as to Charlie Parker’s technique. Ralph Ellison, for his part, connects Eliot’s “new aesthetic for poetry,” via the “juxtaposing of earlier styles” to Armstrong’s work. All these artists, in turn, mimic the ambiguity of their social and historical milieu. We have also seen how ambiguity gives Eminem’s critics the opportunity to cherry pick attributes that they can then attack.
Ellison, too, was unfairly attacked by the literary left. Eric J. Sundquist recounts Larry Neal’s 1968 attack on Ellison’s Invisible Man as representative of the belief that “the experiences of Ellison’s protagonist lacked recognizable relevance.”66 Neal would recant this opinion two years later, claiming it represented “one stage, in a long series of attempts … to deal with the fantastic impression that Ellison’s work has had on my life.”67 Neal explains that his past opinion rested on “the question of political activism and the black writer.”68 While the Neal of 1968 resented what he viewed as Ellison’s evasion of the day’s important political questions, the Neal of 1970 appreciated Ellison’s contention that “[the novel] is always a public gesture, though not necessarily a political one.”69 Neal attributes this blurring of the public and the political to literary Marxism’s belief that “all literature is propaganda, or becomes propaganda when it enters the public sphere.”70 But while Neal eventually backed off that position, he did not do so entirely, claiming that Ellison’s separation of the public from the political is only a “half-truth” because “the minute a work of art enters the social sphere, it faces the problem of being perceived on all kinds of levels, from the grossly political to the philosophically sublime.”71
Like Eminem, Neal understands the value of ambiguity for the artist, who has limited control over his work once it goes public. “Therefore,” Neal concludes, “what we might consider is a system of politics and art that is as fluid, as functional, and as expansive as black music.”72 Neal sees in Ellison a potential model for this system, and we can identify the same in Eminem, especially considering his connection to black music. Neal’s opening should also be familiar to us: “it is no easy task to fully characterize the nature of Ellison’s life and work. He cannot be put into any one bag and conveniently dispensed with. Any attempt to do so merely leads to aesthetic and ideological oversimplifications.”73 That statement’s application to Eminem should be obvious by now.
What may not be obvious is the negative criticism Eminem actually deserves. Take Samuels’s half-true argument that Eminem evades criticism by claiming lyrical meaninglessness. When Eminem does revert to this strategy, he is essentially claiming trickster status, or that his lyrical transgressions are just the randomized spewing of a sick culture’s product. But this is not totally genuine. Echoing Ellison’s own denial of the trickster’s role in Invisible Man, Jason Puskar claims the relevant figure in Invisible Man is not the archetypal trickster—like Briar Rabbit in African American folklore, or Coyote in Native American myths—but the joker. Puskar explains that in the African American tradition, “tricksters defy and disrupt the plantation hierarchy from within, but that hierarchy is fundamentally unshakeable. Jokers, however, disrupt a different kind of hierarchy, the aristocracy of kings, queens, and jacks who rule the deck of cards.” Puskar goes on:
Standing in for modern liberal society, the deck of cards acknowledges real power disparities, but it also expects regular power upheavals. More importantly, it makes the joker the most consequential card in the deck, because only the joker can change identities, temporarily usurping and using royal power while leaving the basic power structure intact.74
The protagonist in Ellison’s Invisible Man rose above the role of the trickster when he accepted a level of agency and responsibility denied that figure—when his protagonist learned from Reinhart to “change identities” in order to “usurp power.” Eminem, on the other hand, retains a disappointing tendency to revert to a trickster cop-out in an attempt to avoid the social and artistic responsibility inherent in his role as one of the most widely heard and discussed public poets in world history. An innocent example of this is found in “My Life,” in which he retreads familiar content that is only saved by the impressive formal achievement of his verse and the sharpness of some of his metaphors and images. Relapse, meanwhile, is almost entirely forgettable because of its rampant disregard for basic decency. We can accept the wretchedness of Relapse only if we buy that language is meaningless and that Eminem is just a trickster pulling our chain. But that falls apart with a song like “Beautiful,” in which the words are clearly meaningful, and poignant. Eminem can have it both ways—he can have Shady pulling chains and Marshall giving us sincerity—and he has, but the balance in Relapse is far too much in Shady’s favor. Left to his own devices Shady is a trickster, but if Eminem uses him for a limited and specific purpose, as he does on Recovery, Shady can make Eminem the joker, unsettling our expectations and widening our receptive capacities, while retaining the ability to be sincere.
To claim Relapse is regrettable is not a purely moral charge, although it is that; but it is also an aesthetic judgment, and one Eminem himself echoes in “Not Afraid,” calling the album and its accents “ehhhh.”
The Slim Shady shtick can no longer sustain Eminem’s development. Eminem’s partially continued reliance on the Shady persona, in play also in his recent collaboration with Royce ’da 5'9", exemplifies a tendency Ellison once observed in jazz: that it is “fecund in its inventiveness, swift and traumatic in its development and terribly wasteful of its resources.”75
Recovery’s development of a more mature, less-shock dependent voice is thus a welcome step. Indeed, Recovery marks the beginning of perhaps the most intriguing era of Eminem’s career, promising to set a template in which Eminem can still entertain and unsettle with his wit, humor, and sheer skill, while attaining the ability to speak, as it were, from a position of authority and responsibility. Perhaps Eminem can soon join the ranks of his contemporary Black Thought, of The Roots, whose treatment of narrative in the masterful undun shows an ability to speak not only from the ambiguity of the raw moment, but to direct that ambiguity from the outside as well. In matching that, Eminem might help pave the way for what Bauman suggests is one possible way out of consumerism’s hold: to channel “consumer rivalry” to “the more ambitious end of communal self management (98).” That is, Eminem might move beyond self-definition, and further into the communal-based work he has already gestured toward in Recovery and to a limited extent before that, in songs like “Mosh.”
That said, one need not be explicitly political to strike politically important notes. In 1930, John Dewey wrote:
I see little social unrest which is the straining of energy for outlet in action; I find rather the protest against a weakening of vigor and a sapping of energy that emanate from the absence of constructive opportunity; and I see a confusion that is an expression of the inability to find a secure and morally rewarding place in a troubled and tangled economic scene.76
That could easily describe the motivation behind the Occupy movement, but also Eminem’s body of work so far, which personifies unrest, emanates more from confusion than from specific actionable aims, and describes an economic scene heavily pocked by dead ends. In expressing his own unrest, like Ellison’s protagonist, Eminem has expressed that of countless others.
But not explicitly, and not to the degree that he might. A comparison to Ellison’s own craft and that of his characters provides a useful gauge for Eminem’s progression so far. We can organize the main levels of elocution shared by Ellison and the characters in his novels in the following manner. In Invisible Man, Trueblood and the protagonist’s grandfather represent the common person on the ground. Louis Armstrong reveals a deep history to the protagonist behind the mask of popular song. Then there is the protagonist himself, an underground writer for now but on the verge of emerging from his subterranean wilderness. Then there is Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, a first book, who had explicated the first novel’s unsettlement from without. Finally, there is Adam Bradley’s assessment that Ellison’s never-finished second novel was an attempt at a grand act of “summing up” America.77 All told, Ellison’s explicators, including himself, span the social gamut, from the most common and unseen to the most responsible and visible.
Using Ellison’s novel as a template, we can say that at this point in his career, Eminem is his underground-man stage. He was in the world and he was wearing the mask of public performance and then, like Invisible Man’s protagonist, he escaped into hibernation. Relapse was written from his hibernation, when he was “flushing [the drugs] out (“Not Afraid”).” Recovery was his first peak out from his hole. So for now he’s with Ellison’s protagonist in beginning to recognize “the absurdity of [the] American character.”78 He is not yet approaching the “summing up” ambitions of the later Ellison, let alone the authorial position held by the Ellison of Invisible Man or by undun’s Black Thought. Then again, Eminem is supposed to have a new album out by the time this essay is published. Who knows what that will reveal.
Chapter Notes
1. Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Form, rev. ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 32.
2. T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Vers Libre” from Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, 1975), 32.
3. Ibid., 32.
4. Ibid., 36.
5. Angus Fletcher, A New Theory of American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 226.
6. Ibid., 33.
7. Linda Hutchens, “Interdisciplinary Opera Studies,” PMLA, Vol. 121, No. 3 (May 2006): 802.
8. Adam Bradley, Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop (New York: BasicCivitas, 2009), xvii.
9. “Jammin the Blues,.” directed by Gjon Mili (Warner Bros). Released May 5, 1944. Released by Warner Home Video to DVD 2006. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036968/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.
10. “The Charlie Parker Story,” BBC 4, directed by Tony Followell. Aired April 19, 2009.
11. Andre Hodeir, “Charlie Parker and the Bop Movement,” in The Andrè Hodier Jazz Reader, Andre Hodier and Jean-Louis Pautrot, eds., (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 64.
12. Hodeir, 61.
13. Might Biggie be rap’s Lester Young?
14. Rappers can use their form in so many ways, and any discussion of formal prowess cannot successfully play the fools’ game of “who is the best rapper?” For instance, Nas’s technique has evolved to utilize silence and space, while his early work is marked by speed and density. Both approaches have their advantages, and Nas has used both well. So in claiming Eminem’s work is formally complex, I am not making a value judgment but an observation. A verse can be complex and boring, or it can be sparse and brilliant.
15. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=23225#.UYV5Ryt376k.
16. Hodeir, 63 (emphasis mine).
17. Ibid., 62–63.
18. Ibid., 64.
19. Ibid., 65.
20. http://www.billytaylorjazz.com/Jazz.pdf.
21. Hodeir, 62.
22. Ibid., 63.
23. “The Bird is Gone,” 127.
24. Ibid.
25. Ralph Ellison, “On Bird, Bird Watching and Jazz,” in Living with Music, Robert G. O’Meally, ed., (New York: Random House, 2001), 69.
26. Ibid., 71 (emphasis original).
27. Ibid., 69.
28. Ibid., 70.
29. For more on this, see the comment section from “Why ‘Love the Way You Lie’ Doesn’t Redeem Eminem,” from the Atlantic blog, in which Eminem is discussed at length and from every angle possible. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/08/why-love-the-way-you-lie-does-not-redeem-eminem/61641/.
30. Zygmunt Bauman, Freedom (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 7.
31. Ibid., 6.
32. Ibid., 57.
33. Ibid. (emphasis mine).
34. Ibid., 60.
35. Ibid., 76.
36. Ibid., 86.
37. Ibid., 64.
38. Ibid., 98.
39. Ibid., 62.
40. Carroll Hamilton, “‘My Skin Is it Starting to Work to My Benefit Now?’: Eminem’s White Trash Aesthetic” in Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 111.
41. Bauman, 79.
42. Ibid.
43. Hamilton, 104.
44. Ibid., 109.
45. Ibid., 103.
46. Bauman, 63.
47. Hamilton, 127.
48. Robert Samuels, New Media, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory After Post-Modernism: Automodernity from Zizek to Laclau (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 135.
49. Ibid., 135.
50. Hamilton, 119.
51. Ibid., 101.
52. Samuels, 136.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 137.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 140.
58. Ibid., 139.
59. Bauman, 77.
60. Hamilton, 118.
61. Samuels, 137.
62. Ibid., 136.
63. Hamilton, 119.
64. In a Harper’s interview with John Lofton, a born again Christian, Allen Ginsburg once discussed what Lofton would call “sin” and Ginsburg would call simply “desires.” The interview ended this way: “Lofton: Is nothing black-and-white? Ginsberg: Nothing is completely black-and-white. Nothing.”
65. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Second Vintage International Edition (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 581.
66. Eric J. Sudquist, ed., Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,13.
67. Larry Neal, “Ralph Ellison’s Zoot Suit,” in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Case Book, John F. Callahan, ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 88.
68. Ibid., 88.
69. Ibid., 106.
70. Ibid., 82.
71. Ibid., 106.
72. Ibid., 107.
73. Ibid., 81.
74. Jason Puskar, “Risking Ralph Ellison,” Daedalus, volume 138, no. 2 (2009), 84.
75. Quoted in Sundquist, 11.
76. John Dewey, The Philosophy of John Dewey: Two Volumes in One, John J. McDermont, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 612.
77. Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days before the Shooting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
78. Ibid., 559.