July 05, 2003

Me? I must admit I’ve never been much of an Eminem fan, as unpopular an opinion as that may be. I remember listening to his first record in our van when we were on the road and laughing a lot, but feeling turned off somehow when the disc got around to the track “Stan”. It was as if I thought he was kidding up until then, only to realize that he was not only serious but self-serious.

And that was only the beginning. Over the course of time I came to believe that Eminem was not only self-serious, but more than just a little defensive and paranoid to boot. It was as if the clown at my birthday party suddenly broke into some disturbingly bad performance art.

I’m willing to believe that maybe I just don’t get it. Fine. But at least I could always write it off as a refusal to take something that is obviously ridiculous as “real” art. As though I was somehow above the sort of Frat boy adulation that comes from rapping about killing your mother and the wife/mother of your child.

Until now.

Suddenly I am being made to reconsider my feelings about Eminem’s clearly juvenile mindset because of a poet named Seamus Heaney, who recently claimed that the rapper “sent a voltage around a generation.” Heaney, who by the way was awarded the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1985, is in his mid 60s.

       “There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of
        what is possible,” said Heaney. “…He has done this not
        just through his subversive attitude but also his verbal
        energy.”

Wow. I must be lame, because I still don’t get it.

Maybe Heaney’s just happy that Eminem examines the immediate world around him and comes up with poetic observations. Maybe he likes Eminem’s “F-you” attitude because it reminds him of what he went through as a young writer. Maybe he thought it was the most shocking thing to say. Maybe Heaney is just happy to see somebody making use of words again in a meaningful way.

Then again, maybe he just likes Eminem.

What will you listen to when you’re 60-something?

Wisdom

                        

“Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate”

                                      - From the poem “Exposure,”
                                               by Seamus Heaney