A thesis of hip-hop is that society is broken and fragmented. Society is fragmented because of what is and how it sees itself. There is the perception that America is egalitarian and because it’s egalitarian and it promotes equality, parents are the primary role models. This point of view is a top-down perspective where the people in the most affluent and powerful segments of society, look at the poor and see the problems of the poor as of their own making. Hip-hop represents the bottom-up approach. Emcee’s rap about their struggle. Rappers highlight the failings of the broken system and how the system is built to oppress.
Emcees did not point to problems in white communities and make an argument that the causation of those problems was the absence of white parents. Emcees were not interested in telling such a narrative, but they also don’t have the weight and the authority of a politician or a scholar.
In the 1990’s, Ice cube infiltrated white homes. Teenagers listened to N.W.A. but parents were not reading Ice Cube’s lyrics and acknowledging their merit or going into reflective thought as if they were reading the works of Daniel Patrick Moynihan or George Will. To speak on White America, hip-hop needed a white emcee. Eminem’s whiteness allowed him to speak on white poverty and on issues that are problematic in all white culture making hip-hops argument and thesis well-rounded, accurate and true.
THE TRUTH OF WHITE AMERICA IN SATIRICAL FORM
Alter egos and pen names, allow artists to speak with a different voice, different tone and gives the artist freedom. Eminem introduced himself as Slim Shady and at the time of his creation, the public could not differentiate who Marshall Mathers/Eminem was from Slim Shady. Mathers was unknown. He was not a recognizable artist like Tom Hanks and the public could not distinguish Slim Shady from Eminem like they could Forrest Gump, Joe Banks, or Detective Scott Turner from Tom Hanks. Slim Shady was Slim Shady and his voice, content and lyrics were the creation of Slim Shady.
Twenty-three years later we know that he is a prolific writer. He loves his daughter and niece. He has fought drug addiction. Slim Shady was a marketing tool, a vehicle for Eminem to deploy a strategy like the last rap battle in 8-mile. Slim Shady obliterated Eminem. He exposed his flaws, his thinking, family problems, and his whiteness as a way of neutralizing criticism.
In 1999, Eminem became the pied piper and enticed America to follow his flute in the record Role Model from the Slim Shady LP. Role Model references pop culture and pop figures because the figurehead in teenager’s lives was television.
You beef with me, I’mma even the score equallyTake you on Jerry Spring and beat your ass legally
Jerry Springer’s popularity hinged on guests breaking out into fights on live television. Teenagers skipped school and watched The Jerry Springer Show. The people fighting were predominantly impoverished and carrying out infidelity disputes and family trauma on live television. Family trauma is the common denominator amongst all socioeconomic classes. The fights drew the crowds but the underlying reasons for the fights connected with people seeking love, acceptance, friendship, and the betrayal they experienced. People sided with one person over another but there was always a twist that flipped the narrative and shifted the prism and the audience perception flipped with it. The twist cleared the chairs and guest spilled into the audience but the twist exposed people’s humanity and everyone’s ability to do right and wrong.
The Jerry Springer show was the only place-aside from boxing-where you could throw punches and not end up in jail. The segments and fights became popular that the security guard who was hired to stop the fighting, went on to have his own talk show.
When people first listen to Role Model, their reaction is shock. Many conclude that Eminem is crazy or that he is seeking attention and being outlandish to gain attention. Role Model is satire. Satire is rooted in truth. Satire uses humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people.
So if I said I never did drugs, that would mean I lie and get fucked more than the President does
Hillary Clinton tried to slap me and call me a pervert
I ripped her fucking tonsils out and fed her sherbet.
Eminem takes a shot at himself and uses his drug use as a way of setting up the political dysfunction of the late 1990’s. Eminem deflects the criticism that he will receive due to his lyrical content by projecting the irony of his criticism through Hillary Clinton’s response. The presidential scheme ends with comedic flare and the satire is punctuated because Clinton never tried to slap him, and he never fed her sherbet.
Eminem’s main goal is to point out the frail and problematic practice of building role models out of public figures because they are flawed. Slim Shadyis immoral, dysfunctional, vile, and fucked up but Clinton’s impeachment trial reflected society and their views on power, morality, and sex. Slim Shady is fictitious. Clinton, News Outlets and the Politicians using infidelity as a means of stripping power away and removing Clinton from office were real. Change in power and protecting power is the underlined theme of Clinton’s impeachment. The impeachment was not about morality, virtue, or justice. The impeachment was political theater disguised under the veil of morality and justice.
The logic of having drug money pay for the pressing needs of the contras appealed to a number of people who became involved in the covert war. One of the high-ranking officials was Oliver North, Lt Col. Oliver North suggested to the DEA in June 1985 that $1.5 million in drug money carried aboard a plane piloted by DEA informant Barry Seal and generated in a sting of the Medellin Cartel and Sandinistas officials, be provided to the contras
Slim Shadys jabs at the president of the United States and the first lady were tame in comparison to what Too Short did to Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan in Cusswords.
Ronald Reagan came up to me and said, “Do you have the answer
To the U.S economy and a cure for cancer?”
I said, what are you doin’ in the White House if you’re not selling cocaine?
Ask your wife, Nancy Reagan, I know she’ll spit that game.
Like one night, she came to my house, and gave me a blow job
She licked my dick, up and down, like it was corn on the cob
Too Short asked a rhetorical question to paint Reagan as a drug dealer. Satire is used to craft the image of Nancy Reagan as a drug dealer or as a drug addict willing to do anything to get a taste of cocaine. The notion that Reagan was a drug king pin and Nancy Reagan was a coke head is ridiculous, after all, the Reagan’s launched their war on drugs and Nancy Reagan came up with D.A.R.E as an educational program to keep kids off drugs and whose mantra was to “Just Say No” to drugs.
In 1985, The associated press Robert Parry and Brian Barger discovered that the Contras dealt cocaine to finance the war against the Sandinistas. According to The Intercept, in 1989 Senator John Kerry chaired a subcommittee that investigated Parry’s and Barger’s work and wrote a report in which
The Intercept quoted the following from the subcommittees report
The subcommittees report did not get attention from the media but in 1996, San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb wrote a multi part expose that reported many of the discoveries that the subcommittee discovered in 1989. The advent of the internet in 1996 allowed for the San Jose Mercury news to provide links to documents and sound files,
(Kornblash, 1997)
In the 1980’s the Reagan administration supported the contras in their attack of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Kerry subcommittee not only discovered that the Reagan administration knew about the contras using drug money for financing but that high-ranking officials in the Reagan administration asked agencies to do the same.
Oliver North became the fall guy of the Iran-Contra scandal. Reagan was Stringer Bell and Oliver North was Wee-Bey willing to catch extra murder charges in exchange for potato salad. North’s sentence was suspended, and the Bush administration pardoned Reagan administrators that were found guilty of crimes. The person who was penalized the most by the Contra discoveries was San Jose Mercury reporter Gary Webb. Ryan Devereaux in HOW THE CIA WATCHED OVER THE DUSTRUCTION OF GARY WEBB wrote about the coordinated attack to discredit Webb by other reporting agencies and by the government.
The attack on Webb’s reporting harmed his credibility, the Mercury News distanced itself from Webb, he was unable to get a job at major newspaper and on December 10, 2004, he committed suicide and died from multiple gunshot wounds to the head.
Nancy Reagan and the premise of Reagan asking for advice regarding the U.S. economy because he is a drug lord and not the president are satire that touches the Reagans administration role in permitting drug money to fund the contras. The consumer in the drug market were American citizens and Black communities that were ravished by crack in the 1980’s.
The Reagan administration was involved in the destabilization of a foreign government, playing a shadow role that allowed them to stratal both sides of the Iran-Iraq war. News outlets gave attention to the Iran-Contra scandal but when it came to the possibility that the Reagan administration was linked to the distribution of crack in American cities, news outlets focused more on the reporting done by Webb than on investigating and following the work of Webb and the Kerry led subcommittee.
Too Short’s lyrics satire political action with more dire social consequences than Slim Shady’s but the difference between the two was reach. Eminem had greater reach because he was white, because he had Dr. Dre producing his album, because Clinton’s impeachment was a sex scandal and because Hip Hop was bigger in the late 1990’s than the late 1980’s. Too Short and Eminem had shock value, but Eminem could reach where Too Short could not.
A TASTE OF REALITY
Generation X and Y have an underlying pain that manifested into watching programming and reality television that made both generations feel better about themselves. People craved reality and the transition to television programing that was real began in the early 1990’s. Reality television allowed Americans to measure their lives to the lives of people on television. Slim Shady wraps himself with the sentiment of looking at other people’s lives and feeling better about your life with the pop culture events that are discussed in Role Model. Slim Shady is pop culture. He is the events and he asked people to be magnetized by the tv programming and do as he does.
Car Chases were popular and midday programming was interrupted to take the audience to live car chases. Car chases occurred for serious and petty criminal offenses. TV viewers watched and questioned the intelligence of the people in the chase. They had to evade police officers, police helicopters and TV helicopters. The odds of getting away were slim to none but Americans jumped into car chases anyways.
Jump behind the wheel like it was still legal
I’m dumb enough to walk in a store and steal
So I’m dumb enough to ask for a date with Lauryn Hill
News outlets ran into problems when in 1998 the suicide of Daniel V. Jones was caught on live tv. Los Angeles stations bumped children programming to cover the police standoff. The suicide was captured without tape delay.
O.J Simpson Trial: Audiences were glued to the OJ Simpson saga from the slow white bronco car chase to OJ Simpson trying on the glove over latex gloves which prompted the infamous Johnny Cochran line, “if it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
Me and Marcus Allen went over to see Nicole
When we heard a knock at the door, must have been Ron Gold
Jumped behind the door, put the orgy on hold
Killed them both and smeared blood in a white bronco(we did it)
Horror Films: Slim Shady references Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and in the 1980’s and 1990’s Latchkey kids watched Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Child’s Play, and Scream.
I’m about as normal as Norman Bates with deformative traits
A premature birth that was four minutes late
Mother, are you there?
I love you
I never meant to hit you over the head with that shovel.
AIDS Epidemic: The aids crisis became a pandemic when the Reagan administration was unwilling to recognize it as problem because it only impacted the gay community. American’s transmitted and got HIV due to lack of information and knowledge of how the disease is contracted and spread. After school specials, music videos and NBC’s “The more you know” series picked up the dropped baton from the floor and educated children on health, bullying, drugs, drinking and driving etc…
I’ve been with 10 women who got HIV
LATCHKEY KIDS
The Salvadorian girl next door, the Peruvian brothers in the top corner apartment, the white English kid up-stairs, everyone on the block, and the middle-class kids living in cul-de-sacs got home and sat in front of the television. The rules were the same for everyone: lock the door, don’t let anyone in, and don’t go outside until parents get home. Some parents worked until late at night but as we trickled out onto the apartment building quad, other kids followed.
Latchkey kids, a generation of kids who returned to empty households with no parental supervision. When parents got home it was an exodus to play, hang out and get into shit. When Warren G on This DJ said, “the streetlight just came on and my momma is on the streets telling me to come home. I hit the gate and I jump on my Schwinn, and I tell my homies, ‘aight then’”, everyone on the block related to the words. The streetlights brought us inside and for many of us, it meant interacting with our parents for the first time.
Children of working parents. Hard working parents that made a living with their hands. Cleaning houses. Cooking in restaurant kitchens. Cut from blue collar cloth. Parents did all they could to put food on the table, but positive parental lessons were doled out by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, and NBC. Corrections were delivered by hand or by belt. A call from the school meant physical contact. On the lunch line we negotiated and debated the best way to avoid punishment. Some concluded that the best way to avoid punishment was to not do shit that led to being punished. Others reasoned that not showing emotion when the belt or the hand slapped was what would stop the discipline. Don’t flinch. Don’t cry. Lack of emotion and parents would use other methods.
Hard work is a strongly held belief throughout America. Americans subscribe to the benefits of hard work and its ability to provide opportunities. Work is a virtue, but work pulls at you. Parents work long hours. Parents sacrifice time with their family and the pendulum of parenting and labor tilts towards labor. Success pulls parents away. White middle class and upper middle-class homes were empty because of parent commitment to their careers. The pendulum tilts towards success.
Latchkey kids watching television were influenced by the OJ trail, car chases, after school specials and horror films and the problem with being raised by television is the solitude.
How the fuck can I be white?
I don’t even exist
The lyric touches on Eminem’s struggle to be taken seriously in rap because he is white but to the audience the lyrics reflect self-perceptions of oneself. Role Model has the dichotomy of observing and measuring your life with other people’s lives and being entertained by the drama, but it also punctuates the feeling when the television turns off, the house is empty, there is silence between the walls and you’re alone. The silence is eerie and uncomfortable. People stewed in the silence, the loneliness, and the notion that they didn’t exist, and they did not matter. That pain and solitude drove people to seek a family outside of the home or to transfer the pain onto someone else.
Violence is a manifestation of one’s self worth and value. Violence inflected on other people or violence inflected on yourself is done when someone does see their value. Self-hate manifests itself by not wanting to see yourself. You hide from yourself. You feel as if no one sees you. Self-hate can escalate to fantasy of inflecting pain on yourself or on others. Other mental health issues create illusions, and the common denominator is a warped sense of reality. The belief that you are invisible. That your existence is not valuable.
In the 1990’s, violence and hip-hop were interconnected. The death of Biggie and 2pac highlighted this sense of reality and the detractors of the genre pointed their fingers at Black America and lay the blame of their plight on black culture to deflect from institutional racism and the existence of purposeful mechanism built to oppress black and brown people. The focus was placed on the absence of father figures in black and brown communities. Black families are broken, and white supremacists flipped the script and used hip-hop narratives as an example of the violence and crime that drove men to jail. Hip-hop gained notoriety and limelight because of the assassination of its brightest stars confirmed too many that crime and violence were the only virtue of black and brown men.
Violence in America does not solely occur in black communities. Violence inflicts its pain on all walks of life. Slim Shady’s, “how the fuck can I be white? I don’t even exist,” bar was not only applicable to poor whites, but it resonated with middle and upper-class whites. The lyric gained greater meaning in 1999 when a massacre took place at Columbine High School. The massacre took place in an upper-class community in Colorado. The killers expressed their desire to kill and hate in writings and video tapes. There were signs of mental health problems that were ignored. The killers were not seen, taken seriously as if they did not exist but in the post massacre coverage, video games and music were blamed for the massacre. In 2000, Eminem addressed Columbine in The Way I Am:
When a dude is getting bullied and shoots up his school
And they blame it on Marilyn and the heroin
Where were the parents at? And look where it’s at!
Middle America, now it’s a tragedy
Now it’s so sad to see, an upper-class city
Havin’ this happenin’
The failure of the family structure, and the absence of parental role models in white homes was erased because to address the failure would require introspection into the reasons why parents were absent. It would require criticism of American values and how economic foundations influence family values that led to a generation of American kids raised on their own. Instead, the influence of the environment on young white men was put on trial and Doom and Marilyn Manson were the scapegoats. Eminem asked where the parents were at just like America asks of black parents, but America did not do follow Eminem’s lead.
LONG TERM HEALTH CONCERNS FOR GEN X AND Y
An Ohio State University study discovered that health profiles for Gen X and Gen Y were concerning. Physical health for whites for these two generations has increased metabolic syndrome. African American’s suffer from chronic inflammation. The study also discovered that anxiety, depression, and mental health problems have increased for white Americans. The study did not identify the reason for health and mental health concerns. What is also clear is that generational practices due to lack of parental supervision did not give Gen X and Gen Y the coping mechanisms to battle mental health and to live a healthy lifestyle.
CONCLUSION
Black and Brown America suffered poverty, the fragmentation of the family home due to draconian and punitive laws created by a war on drugs. The underline effects of isolation and absent parents were not relegated to Black and Brown families. White America was filled with a pulsating rage that originates from the same absenteeism that Black and Brown teens experienced. The rage has been unleashed and events like Columbine are not rare tragedies but a norm of American life.
The shock value is not Slim Shady. The shock comes from the nihilistic truth that there was no interpersonal guidance. Parents were absent. Television stars, pop culture icons and public figures are flawed. The complexities of life cannot be dissected and taught by figureheads on television but that’s the influence that people turned to and the physical and mental health concerns it caused.
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