eminem (was Re: hiphop discourse

[jbor]

At the moment there is quite a controversy surrounding eminem's upcoming
tour here. Though the concert dates are already advertised, apparently he
hasn't applied for an entry visa yet. The national 'Family Association' is
making loud noises that he shouldn't be let into the country at all, while
conservative politicians (including the current PM) have labelled his lyrics
as "sickening". 

A local radio station did a phone interview with him the other day where he
stated that his lyrics are "parody" and that his teenage fans know that they
are parody. I'm not so certain about the second part of that, but I thought
the first admission was an interesting one.

In the few songs off the most recent album that I've heard I've been struck
by the strong narrative component to the lyrics. They're a bit jejune --
invariably the complication is a violent one and the resolution is death,
the sort of melodramatic murder/suicide/apocalypse plotlines 15 year old
boys like to go in for -- but not without literary merit. They remind me a
little bit of a certain type of traditional ballad ("murder ballads"?),
quite Tennysonian, perhaps . . . ?

best


Kai:

> according to my opinion hiphop is an
> exciting new art-form, in fact the paradigmatic art-form of our present days:
> "hiphop replaces rock'n'roll as the metropolitan music of global exchange. but
> hiphop ain't no idealistic music, which still dreams and then fails because of
> the wrong circumstances. these were, in hiphop, always already wrong and at
> best one sometimes could observe someone loosening his shackles a little. hope
> in hiphop means in most cases the fact that it hardly can come worse"
> (diedrich 
> diederichsen: freiheit macht arm. köln 1993: kiwi, pp. 53f., own
> idiot-translation). & when we talk about things like "gangsta rap", we, like
> in 
> the case of novels, have to differentiate between the narrative "i" or "we" on
> the one and the empirical persons on the other side. in case of hiphop, which
> focusses on local identities, this is sometimes harder than with other
> art-forms. it's nevertheless possible. take, for example, "devil's night" the
> recently published work of eminem's detroit based crew d12 (läuft gerade
> während ich noch einen drehe). from many details it's obvious that these
> lyrics, though they certainly express personal experiences, cannot be
> understood in terms of the social realism you find in court records or
> something. this is about mc-ing, beats & rhymes!