By Lisa Aslanian, November 2nd, 2011 
 This is the second of a two-part series on Eminem by Lisa Aslanian. For the first part, see White Rage: Eminem, the Bad Boy from Detroit. -Jeff
Eminem’s Relapse does not deliver a clean rise from the ashes, a smooth transition from high to sober — far from it. The album, which Eminem released after he came out of rehab for the second time, resolutely off drugs, challenges our assumptions about therapy, creativity and what exactly it means to be cured.
Eminem’s sobriety does not blunt the dark and dank isolation that characterizes the artist and his work (there is very little collaboration on the album), it sharpens it. The music and Eminem himself seem looser. The rhymes are still agile and dense, but the subject matter — child molestation, serial murder and exhausting digressions on being high — is even more profane and harder to take.
Critics tore the album apart. Many accused Eminem of trading in shock value and playing for laughs. A few called the work forgettable, the latest in nasty, a summer blockbuster. A critic for the LA Times expressed dismay that the rapper’s critique of therapy was not explicit enough (I have no idea what it means to accuse an artist of not delivering an obvious enough critique) but all critics conceded that Eminem remains an unparalleled linguistic contortionist, bending and twisting words (see reviews here, here, here, and here). He used his skill to chronicle addiction and beating addiction, including all of the filthy phantasms that haunt him along the way.
Relapse showcases his talent and his feel for unbridled truth, and — here is where you should pay attention — the album is linked to his past (immaturity, self-absorption and fear of failure) and gestures, briefly, toward his future, or a sense that maybe Eminem is, even outside of stardom, worthwhile.
As critics and listeners, we ought to say first what the album is, before we can consider what it is not. To get at (and get) the work, three . . .
Read more: White Rage and the Riffing Cure: An Analysis of Eminem’s Relapse
By Lisa Aslanian, September 27th, 2011 
Eminem’s rise from the rubble is well known. A shy white boy from East Detroit, Eminem was trailer park trash raised by a single mother who was often too high to mother. He regularly changed schools, repeated the ninth grade three times and was constantly bullied. By retreating inward — he read the dictionary and riffed rhymes at the floor — Marshal Mathers (M&M) found his way around ridicule and attack.
Like most rappers, words were Eminem’s weapon and escape. Unlike most rappers, however, Eminem is white. He stands out like a sore thumb. The lyrics that express his deep sense of isolation and vulnerability otherwise absent from rap are twice born — first, he uses rap to talk about growing up “white trash, broke and always poor” and second, he is a white dude in a nearly all black art form, and he believes he is isolated, rejected and often singled out because of the color of his skin.
Eminem does boast but what he brags about having, and having in spades, is unbeatable talent. His linguistic prowess is undeniable, but what separates him is not really his skill — I am not here to say who the best rapper is, though most claim the title — it is what he uses his skill to express: anxiety, timidity, envy and rage. When Eminem digresses on the many shades of depression, he extends rap’s emotional range beyond its hyper-macho comfort zone.
On the debut album 8 Mile, in “Lose Yourself,” Eminem says he cannot:
Stay in one spot, another day of monotony
Has gotten to me, to the point I’m like a snail I’ve got
To formulate a plot, or end up in jail or shot
Success is my only motherfuckin’option, failure’s not
Mom I love you, but this trailer’s got to go
I cannot grow old in Salem’s Lot
So here I go it’s my shot, feet fail me not
This may be the only opportunity that I got
The . . .
Read more: White Rage: Eminem, the Bad Boy from Detroit
By Lisa Aslanian, September 6th, 2011 
In The Atlantic, several prominent music critics reviewed “Watch the Throne,” the fabulous collaboration between Kanye West and Jay Z. Again, critics are angry about the subject matter. The song “That’s My Bitch” met with this reaction — it is the only song where Jay sings about B, and in the song, he does not adequately sing the praises of monogamy. First, he does more than sing about B (his wife, Beyoncé Knowles) — he enters her, as a black woman, into the pantheon of women men dream about (like Marilyn Monroe) and second, yes, he is “crass” and “protective” because he is saying, with cheek and guile, “that’s my girl.”
A host of questions ensue. Do we really associate musical maturity with our image of a monogamous family man? Do we ask our artists to promote social constraints, or do we want our art to articulate fantasy and felt experience? Does the egregiously simple image of maturity= monogamy play on a host of stereotypes about black men — not being monogamous, leaving their families, etc. and even if these stereotypes are partially true — is it the place of music and its’ critics to address them?
Jay Z has assumed enormous social responsibility. He openly discusses his early years dealing crack, cautioning young people not to do it by saying “you will end up in jail or dead.” He is philanthropic. Must we ask that his music, his fantasy, his creativity — his art — be as pedestrian and unambiguous as his politics?
Here is another loopy bit from the monogamy-happy review — another reviewer decided that the rapper in a steady marriage (Jay) sounded happier than the rapper who has yet to wed (Kanye). Huh? I have gone back repeatedly in search of this happiness (because the reviewer does not ground the comment) and for the life of me I cannot figure out what the hell she means — they both sound happy — at the top of their games.
***
Two years ago, young Jeezy and . . .
Read more: More on Rap: The Matter of Maturity
By Lisa Aslanian, August 30th, 2011 
“Rap music is the CNN of the ghetto.” – Chuck D
Rap began — Chuck D nailed it — as news from the streets. Rap riffed ghetto life, syncopated in hard rhymes and dense metaphor the raw reality of the ghetto. In Ronald Reagan’s America, blacks in the ghettos from Harlem to Bed Stuy to South Central formed what George Bataille called the heterogeneous element of society — or the unassimable byproduct of a culture, born of that culture, upon which the culture rests. In plain English, rap was the art of the dispossessed, and as the art of the dispossessed, it tells us the truth of the trickle-down economic era from the mouths of those who were held far beneath the place where the trickle dried up.
Rap began as a linguistic pissing contest — and it has been always more than news. It is also poetry, entertainment and resistance. As news, it is largely unwelcome. As poetry, it is mad rich and ripping angry. As entertainment, the joke is always right-on the money, and as resistance, it is unbeatable because, instead of setting the ghetto on fire, it creates from the ashes — the shit and the garbage — the nothing, going nowhere despair of the reviled and the forgotten.
Much has been made of rap then and rap now. Rap, the argument goes, has been mainstreamed, even atomized. In this process, it has lost its political edge and anger. At the same time, critics ask rappers to grow up, to mature, to stop singing about bitches and hoes. Unsurprisingly, these tendencies contradict each other — and instead of choosing between the two lines of thinking, we note that the paradoxical attitude is a way of still not knowing quite what to do with rap.
Consider two themes that still dominate rap — swagger (and all that comes with it) and brutality. Rap still deals in race and racism, and, I believe, its critical reception is . . .
Read more: Rap as News or Art?
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