Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)

[Doug Millison]

A Pynchonian take on rap music, I think, might be to note how rapidly 
the street poetry was co-opted by the powers that be, economic and 
cultural, how quickly They made a few lucky rappers swaggering 
advertisements for Capital's most blatant promises in order to keep 
the rest of the kids under control, buying those records, jes' a 
popping that rag to beat the band instead of engaging with the 
politics of their situation -- black kids spinning discs and 
breakdancing  to entertain the white tourists in front of the Hotels 
Plaza and Pierre - that's what this music had already become when I 
made a New York pilgrimage in the very early '80s. Just as the Reagan 
forces needed some Zoyd-like exemplars as a warning of what might go 
wrong again (after getting that '60s revolution under control, with 
the revolutionaries now transfixed by the Tube), so They also got the 
scary gangsta Others necessary to sharpen social divisions in the 
wake of a civil rights political revolution that threatened to break 
out of control.  Divide and conquer. Rap glorifies the violence 
(street and domestic) that flows from Their socio-economic and 
foreign ("war on drugs" that favors the CIA's favorite producers and 
distributors and floods the U.S. with crack) policies, scares the 
shit out of Most Normal Americans, justifies the investment in the 
police state (S.W.A.T. teams and the rest of the paramilitarization 
of local police forces) that's been erected in most American cities 
-- a good example of the Control that Pynchon illuminates in his 
fictions.
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