Steve Bramucci
When I was in college, I was profoundly affected by Abraham Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Maslow’s spot in history seems to be limited (for the non-psychologist) to diagrams of the “Hierarchy of Needs” contained in Psych 101 texts, but in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature he extends the definition of “self-actualization” that we know from the apex of the diagram’s pyramid to describe people who are living life as one extended peak-experience. In short, it’s used to identify people who maximize what it means to be fully human. Of the peak experience, Maslow writes: “One main characteristic … is just this total fascination with the matter-in-hand, this getting lost in the present, this detachment from time and place.”1
Maslow is describing people who have turned the act of living into a transcendent art. As a nineteen-year-old, having just returned to school after a dropping out for a semester to hitchhike cross-country, talk of peak-experiences and self-actualization flattened me. I felt like he was speaking directly to the On the Road-inspired, everything-now impulsive joys I was swimming in at the time. The whole notion of striving toward an incandescent version of self, toward a set of higher values, found me at the perfect time and quickly became part of my own spiritual belief pattern.
None of which has anything to do with Eminem—besides the fact that by listening nonstop to the rapper around the same time I discovered Maslow, I perhaps bound the two together in my brain.
The version of Eminem that Marshal Mathers III has presented to the public sounds nothing like one of Maslow’s self-actualizers, who have reached the highest plateaus of what it means to be human, typified by virtues that he shares in various books (e.g., “their sense of humor is philosophical rather than hostile”; “they identify with mankind”).
But this idea of striving to meet some unknown “farthest reach” of potential—that sounds a lot like Eminem’s rapping. By the time the Marshall Mathers LP dropped in 2000 (if not before), it was clear that we were dealing with a rapper who was striving toward the transcendent. The song “Stan,” which appears on that album, is a journey into full character creation and narrative point-of-view shifting that was brand new to fans of mainstream rap. More than that, Eminem was digging into “his stuff”—insecurities, fears, and private pain. In the process, he was smashing the mic, burning the building to the ground, and pissing on the ashes. Lyrically speaking, that is.
Point being, when working at optimum levels2 Eminem is fiercely intent on bringing his considerable reservoirs of skill to bear, crafting verses that push deep into the frontier of what it means to be an exceptional MC. In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow says of self-actualizers: “They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them—some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense.”3 The quote perfectly describes Eminem’s approach to rap. He is in the business of exploring the farthest reaches of human proficiency (which we can define as the sum of skill + talent)—looking at rap as both an art and a craft. He’s way out at the frontier, clearing a path for the Kendrick Lamars of the world. He studies words, breaks down syllables, twirls them on his finger, and recombines them in surprising ways. When he slips, he knows as much and isn’t afraid to point it out, as on “Talkin’ 2 Myself,” when he raps that Encore was produced on drugs, Relapse while detoxing.
As a result, his peers recognize him as a self-actualizer. They know how good he is. Lupe Fiasco once said mid-concert: “I can’t fuck with Eminem, but I got everybody else covered”4—a high-magnitude compliment in a bravado-heavy industry. It’s a sentiment that’s been echoed in one form or another by virtually every member of the living rap pantheon.
This absolute commitment to the art and desire to destroy every verse that he puts his name on5 isn’t just what makes Eminem a true artist, it’s what, for this particular writer, makes him listenable at all.
Zing!
Allow me to clarify. I am a liberal-minded person raised in a liberal household, in a liberal neighborhood, in a liberal city. Humanistic, inclusive values were spoon-fed to me with my mashed carrots. When my cousin and I started listening compulsively to Eminem on family vacations, our aunts and uncles found it absolutely horrifying. Being the sort of family that discusses such things over dinner, we were often put on the spot to defend what could only be described as admiration-headed-toward-complete-hero-worship of a guy who sang (with regularity) about murdering his wife. I wish I remembered how we tried to explain the hold that Eminem’s music6 had on us. I’m sure we fell back on tired arguments like “no generation understands the next generation’s music” and “he’s sharing his genuine experience.” To which I’m sure our family, made up of psychologists and teachers, took turns tearing us to shreds until there was little left of these two cocky teen boys but a few empty bottles of hair bleach and two sets of baggy clothes. They whupped us (in that Pacific-Northwest-liberal crumbled-our-best-arguments-over-grilled-salmon sort of way).
A few years later, as my realm of experience widened and I made friends in the gay and lesbian community, this love of Eminem was called into question once more. The general sentiment being “you’re too enlightened to like this stuff.” Once again, I careened back against anyone who challenged me with half-baked rebuttals. And once again, I can only imagine that I lost.
Because, like any argument defending bigoted, hateful speech, it’s flawed at its core. It’s bound up in a quagmire of hypocrisy—the same jester who makes his living off of words is telling us that words don’t matter. But we know words matter and, in truth, so does Eminem. If words matter, if words mean, then mean words matter too.7
The fact is that Eminem’s early albums saw him killing his wife (twice explicitly in extended role-plays, a few more times in subtler mid-verse references), bashing gays, beating women, and committing a host of other ugly crimes that aren’t commonly associated with Maslow’s values. Justice, right action, and benevolence are all mentioned as qualities that typify Maslow’s self-actualizers—content-wise, Eminem’s discography reveals a sparsely stocked pantry when it comes to such things.
Sure, the crimes Eminem raps about are made up crimes upon humanity (Zadie Smith once deftly pointed out that for the attention Eminem got about violence, he carried out almost none of it)—but the fact is: words lead to thoughts, which lead to prevailing beliefs, which lead to actions. Words have power even in the clumsiest hands; when wielded by someone with the prowess of Eminem, words can slice to the bone.
Does Eminem know this?
When his use of the word “faggot” was criticized, Eminem explained to the website NY Rock that he didn’t mean it as an attack on homosexuals, he meant it as “taking away your manhood. You’re a sissy. You’re a coward.”8 Which is apparently the only worse argument than whatever my cousin and I were coming up with to defend him. Clearly, Eminem was identifying “gay” with being less than. But somehow he was trying to redefine the meaning. Without the aid of a backing beat, the argument fell flat. Changing a word’s meaning isn’t that easy and Eminem knows it—which is why he never says the N-word on wax.9 He obviously realizes that certain words hold a charge and can’t be said, even by someone who wants to be excused as a prankster.
Even more thoughtful arguments—like the fact that Eminem often uses aggressive speech in intentionally ironic or provocative ways, or that Marshall Mathers III’s worst diatribes are spoken through his various avatars (Eminem, Slim Shady) or characters like Stan and Ken Keniff—are broken down easily, specifically because of Eminem’s refusal to distance himself from the thoughts he puts on record. To this point, the NY Rock interview actually weakened all of these arguments. Why couldn’t Em have just dismissed every single lyric he ever wrote as fiction? Why didn’t he just say: “assume every word I’ve ever said is spoken by a character?” Then he could have been off scot-free under the precedent set down by masterworks like Lolita: “It’s not wrong if it’s a character!”
Had he chosen to hide behind the veils of persona and character, we as an audience would have been intellectually obligated to separate man and artist. The problem is, this argument doesn’t work for Eminem. It’s too detached, and Em, in the Tupac tradition, has made a point to never be emotionally detached about a single verse that he spits. The prevailing thought on Tupac is that he felt everything he said when he was creating it. No matter how contradictory it was with his other philosophies (compare lyrics of “Keep Your Head Up” to “Wonda Why the Call U Bitch”), in the moment he was writing or spitting a verse Tupac felt it down to his bones. This is perhaps where Pac’s influence on Eminem is most acute: the emotional urgency of every line.”10 Pac went real thug plenty of times, and stood behind his thug talk in score of interviews. The NY Rock interview proved the same for Eminem: he wouldn’t hide behind his characters—which had the result of making his content seem that much more toxic.
And with that, I have officially become one of the content-focused nags that Eminem mocks on record. In “The Way I Am,” for example, he mocks listeners who can’t hear past lyrics. And I’ll cop to that, as old and uncool as saying so makes me feel. But alas—
I still like to listen to his music, quite often in fact. At the gym, in the car, when I’m cleaning my apartment—I rap along, editing out the words (or songs) that I find over-the-top offensive. And, ten-plus years after the Eminem cultural zeitgeist, I think I’m ready to say why I tolerate his content and continue listening: he’s too proficient at rapping for someone who loves rap to ignore.11 He’s too good to throw out because of his content alone. To bring it back to Maslow: though Marshal Mathers III doesn’t represent himself on record as self-actualized, he has certainly fully actualized his talent. He is indeed pushing into the “farther reaches.”
Which is what I really set out to write about in the first place.
INTERLUDE:
We have now entered into the tricky land of tastes, which are, as we all know, variable. It’s not my contention that Eminem is the best rapper ever. That is too vague and too broad. The canopy of “rap” is not as wide spreading as the canopy of “art,” but it’s still far too big to declare a “best.” Rap, like literature, is full of genres and sub-genres and evolves too quickly to crown a grand champion.
BUT:
In all of art, if criticism is to have any place in the world at all, there must be some sort of absolute value. Maybe not for the artist’s entire body of work, but at least for a certain skill set. Example: If I say that Hemingway is the best writer ever, you’d dismiss me. But if I say: “Hemingway knew how to construct clear, evocative, declarative sentences as well as any writer we’ve had in the past hundred years,” my point deserves thoughtful consideration.
So let me apply that level of specificity to Eminem: “When he decides to spit heat—which I’ll define as the act of compiling a verse that dances along the razor’s edge of contained vs. uncontained rage—there is no one in today’s current hip-hop landscape who can rhyme with as much dexterity, cleverness and unarguable skill.”
That is as close to undebatable as I can imagine getting, but it’s all still just one man’s humble opinion. And might be heavily affected by the fact that Eminem’s rise to prominence came during my teenage years, when I was just discovering the intensity of what music could make me feel, or (as the editor of this book pointed out in conversation) the fact that we are both white. But as long as we’re talking about taste, I’ll say that Eminem isn’t my favorite rapper (Chali 2na), my favorite rap philosopher (Talib), or my favorite on-mic persona (Tupac). Hell, Eminem isn’t even my favorite white rapper. Being from the Pacific Northwest and having a very similar well of experience, I have fallen under the spell of Macklemore’s humanistic content and in-love-with-the-world vibe.
BUT:
If my life depended on me picking a single rapper to write a single verse that showed verbal-gymnastics, a complexity of rhyme and the ability to be razor-clever without ever losing the thread of the verse’s central thesis—I would pick Eminem.
100 times out of 100.
Who wouldn’t?
END INTERLUDE.
To illustrate just how proficient Eminem is, let’s look at rhyme scheme. Rap started with a simple: A, A, B, B, C, C couplets.
“Took a walk last week, I went to the store, (A)
Dude acted like I’d never been there before. (A)
Went to the fridge to grab some milk, (B)
Thought ‘I’ll go vegan’—Almond Silk!” (B)
As the art form evolved, rappers quickly adopted internal rhyme (rhyme that occurs within the line before the final rhyming word): B, B, A, C, C, A
“It was a treat to move my feet, shuffle right to the store,” (B,B, A)
Bought milk (Almond Silk!) and took a left out the door.” (C, C, A)
Now allow me to chart out the rhyme scheme for Eminem’s verse from the song “No Love.” Sadly, the lyrics permission people can’t allow me to include the entire verse—but a glance at the video or a read through on RapGenius.com is probably well warranted. The verse is 90 seconds long, I’ll chart out four lines:
Starting with that adrenaline phrase let’s look at the rhyme scheme:
A, A, B-C-D
E, E, B-C-D
EF, EF, EF, C-D
C, GH, GH, C-D
This is all done in the space of a few lines—Eminem rockets forward and back, turning flips and pirouettes, without ever taking the time to catch his breath. He reaches back to pick up rhyme-threads that the listener assumed he’d left behind. It’s breathtaking.
In Zadie Smith’s piece “The Zen of Eminem,” she quotes the song “Square Dance” at length. Her essay ends with a challenge to the various haters: can you do what Em makes look so easy in “Square Dance”? Can you rhyme like that? Can you? And it certainly is an excellent verse. But it’s also filled with a lot of gibberish words. Which is to say: it’s good Em, but not the best he can spit. Smith’s whole thesis is “look how good this guy is”—and yet that verse never came up once in the dozens of fan-polls and hip-hop-head chat rooms speculating on the rapper’s best bars (this is a topic that people apparently love to argue over) that I uncovered while preparing this essay. No devoted fan I’ve spoken with has ever even mentioned it as among Em’s best verses. That’s not to say the gauntlet that Smith lays down to readers is wrong—it’s still 100 percent right. It’s just a little bit like challenging a young playwright to risk comparing their work to Titus Andronicus rather than going full bore and dropping Julius Caesar on them. Smith told people (correctly): “Look at this, you can’t do this!” and she did it using a B+ verse at best.
A better verse to investigate might be Eminem’s portion of the Jay-Z song “Renegade.” Em’s portion of the song is so famous, that it has actually been used as a knock against Jay-Z in his battles with other rappers (famously, in Nas’s “Ether.”) The verse serves up a smorgasbord of literary techniques: alliteration, onomatopoeia, internal rhyme … it’s staggering when added together. But the true brilliance comes in the irony of the verse’s climatic (but not final) thrust when Em points out the irony of the media’s fascination with him while riding the beat so tight that every single syllable seems to be hermetically sealed to the bassline.
Allow me one last attempt to fully encapsulate Eminem’s level of mastery:
In recent albums Eminem’s content has faced another challenge. Not because of what he’s saying this time, but because of the words he uses. Rappers are notoriously falling victim to rhyme repetition (both in their own catalogs and across the hip-hop community). The perfect example of this is any verse that uses “cry, dry, eye” as rhyming words—the three words are so horrendously overused that any verse containing them automatically feels stale and lazy (it already did when Snoop used it all those years ago). As if to avoid such redundancy, Eminem has increasingly made use of complex food references in his verses. Just a cursory examination reveals nods to condiments (a great mustard-mustered riff in “You’re Never Over”), desserts (a play on words about roasting marshmallows in “No Love”) and Mac & Cheese (a layered, extended metaphor in “I’m on Everything”). Each reference is purposeful and hits on two levels. It’s as if Em is playing the magician, letting his hands be bound over and over and over then shedding the ropes in a matter of seconds and appealing to the crowd with a shrug—“I’m sorry, I’m that good.”
He is that good.
He really is. And acumen like Eminem’s makes audiences incredibly tolerant.12 Perhaps one day, Eminem will be as tolerant of others as we’re willing to be of him. Perhaps he’ll start chasing Maslow’s higher values and head toward self-actualization. Perhaps he’ll be the one-time rogue who somehow finds a way to use his power for good.
Or perhaps not.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that Eminem is going to war with words, linking rhymes in a way that is unique and creative and wickedly clever. He is approaching the absolute value of MCing excellence. He way out in the wild territory of what it means to be exceptional, slicing through the spiky brambles and thick vines that block his path. He is deep in the farthest reaches, twisting, spiraling, cavorting lyrically in a way that no one else can.
And so, despite my own objections, I listen. I ignore songs like “Kim” and favor songs like “Mockingbird.” I close my eyes, I zone—and keep coming away amazed.
Chapter Notes
1. Abraham H. Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Compass, 1971), 60.
2. The biggest exceptions here seem to directly correspond with Eminem’s well-documented periods of heavy drug use, though a close listen to his various mix tapes and dis songs, reveals that rushing certain concepts to market has also, on occasion, hurt Em’s standard of quality.
3. Maslow, 42.
4. Old Dominion Homecoming, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zkFCUYlsG9M.
5. “I’m Back,” The Marshall Mathers LP.
6. With Em, unlike other writers I admire (Hemingway, Fitzgerald), his art really was the only piece that ever captivated my attention. I could tell you Hemingway’s favorite drink and list his most passionate affairs, but know very little about Eminem’s personal life. Perhaps that’s because the version that he presents on wax is so very interesting, real and raw all on its own, it doesn’t need to be tabloidized.
7. I’m not saying for even a moment that the work should have been banned or commercially limited somehow. I’m only saying that it’s hard for anyone who describes themselves as non-misogynistic, and non-homophobic (and on the path toward self-actualization) to say: “As a matter of taste, this suits me just right.”
8. Gabriella, “Interview with Eminem: It’s Lonely at the Top,” NY Rock (http://www.nyrock.com/interviews/2001/eminem_int.asp).
9. Not exactly true, Eminem can be on early bootlegs calling best friend Proof “my nig” but occurrences like this disappeared when he hit the mainstream. In “Criminal,” Eminem plays with this by leading listeners to believe that a certain rhyme will end with the N-word, then he leaves the rhyming word off completely.
10. “Square Dance,” The Eminem Show.
11. There is a precedent for this type of permissiveness with regards to mega-skilled artists. Film director Roman Polanski gave a thirteen-year-old girl Quaaludes and forcibly sodomized her, but Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Pianist have yet to be removed from the canon. As recently as three years ago, he had a cadre of Oscar-winning Hollywood stars petitioning for all charges to be dropped. As horrifying as it sounds, letting Eminem slide for hate-speech is far, far, far more reasonable.
12. Roman Polanski would never have gotten the pass that he got from Hollywood if instead of Chinatown his resume was made up of only the Scary Movie franchise. That is an ironclad fact. Likewise, Eminem wouldn’t be nearly so successful with the same content and the flow of a less precise rapper, like Diddy (which is why Diddy’s content has always had to be much more neutral).