Eminem acts black because of class, and in so doing questions the whole construction of race and class in America. The confusion of these boundaries is transgressive. Rabbit surprises working-class blacks in 8 Mile by being more like them than they expect, and Eminem surprises middle-class whites by being less like them
(and more like "Them") than they expect. To be sure, many of Eminem's fans are white, middle-class kids who get off on the Myth of the Black Male, like the white fans of NWA ten years ago, or the white lovers of Black Panthers thirty five years ago, or the Beats fifty years ago. But few if any white soul artists, white jazz musicians, and other white rappers take pride not in the external trappings of "black" culture (in this case, hip hop's violence and glamour) but in the revolutionary impulse the culture contains. Eminem doesn't seem to be getting off on being "black" - when Rabbit disses Papa Doc for going to private school, he seems to be saying that it's not black or white that hip hop is really about. It's about power, class, and privilege - which is why it is revolutionary in its mindset.
In this way, Eminem's boundary crossing is very different from Elvis's. Elvis took the musical power of blues and R&B and stripped away most of its cultural context. (Of course, for many whites, the rhythms themselves were too "black," and it fell to artists like Pat Boone to bleach the music more thoroughly.) Eminem, in the medium of hip hop, remains firmly within its cultural milieu - indeed, Rabbit occupies it, and dislodges Papa Doc -- and thus makes the argument that the context is economic and not ethnic.
4. "Smack a bitch and say faggot": But isn't he sexist and misogynistic?
Now I'm catchin' the flack from these activists when they raggin'
Actin' like I'm the firstst rapper to smack a bitch and say faggot
("White America")
8 Mile's etymology of "faggot" notwithstanding, Eminem still has many
critics who accuse him of being homophobic, misogynistic, and so on. Well, yes.
Yes he's misogynistic, yes he's homophobic. What did you expect -- that working
class rage was going to sound like middle class liberal discourse?
That the unemployed, undereducated, and chronically poor population of the country is going to get on TV speaking like Charlie Rose? Even John Lennon, everyone's favourite working class hero, expressed sexist and anti-semitic views before he got "turned on" in the late 1960s. Class context doesn't make such attitudes right, but it points up the hypocrisy of Eminem's critics, who expect him to stick to the same hollow political correctness that they do.
Moreover, many critics of Eminem miss either his cultural references (e.g. the Tom Green parody in 'The Real Slim Shady') or the conventions of rap that, as 8 Mile documents, define the genre (e.g. roasting everyone else and self-aggrandizing to the max). Eminem also includes others' voices in his songs --'heteroglossia,' a method that T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (the noted racists) also used to good effect. This isn't just a cover though. The proliferation of identities-Marshall Mathers Jr. (his given name), Eminem (his rap name), Slim Shady (his rap alter ego), Rap Boy (his ironic super hero persona), Stan the fan and a myriad other cameos-allow Mathers to engage himself in dialogue and to perform the debates that surround him within his music.
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