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Popular Culture Review
The contradiction between the idea that “all I can be is just me” and that still “I
am whatever you say I am” admits a complex revelation of self. Eminem seems
to admit that a media constructed identity of Marshall Mathers is as legitimate a
claim about who and what he is as what he himself has to say about himself. The
existential statement that “in the paper, the news everyday I am” admits to how
Marshall Mathers exists as a legitimately real simulation of himself. As he says,
“it’s just the way I am.” Again, there is an almost Baudrillardan theme of self and
simulation at work here. In Postmodernism, Jim Powell describes how
Baudrillard’s sense of the simulacrum is that these simulacra that appear through
print and electronic media have become more real to us than the reality that they
represent, or—put in Powell’s words—that the images of a celebrity like
Madonna have “become more real than Madonna the person” (56) in
contemporary culture. “The Way I Am” seems to acknowledge this constructed
nature of the self and to accept it. But at the heart of the song is also an
acknowledgement that his presentation of self also helps to define that figuration.
As Eminem says, if he wasn’t who we say he is, “then why would I say I am?”
The complexity of this balancing act that Eminem plays between the self
he presents himself as and that he has been constructed as is revealed in a 2001
interview with triple j of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Eminem
defends his most offensive commentaries by describing them as merely
representational:
When a guy in a movie plays a racist, does that mean he’s a
racist in real life? When you see him out of that film? Outside
of that film? No it doesn’t. So what makes me so different as
playin’ . . . a persona on a record or livin’ out a character—
y’know what I mean—on a record as opposed to being one in a
film? A lot of my songs are like movies. Like, like the “Kim”
song for example. That’s almost like a movie that I’m kinda
taking you through.
While “The Way I Am” admits that personas become existentially “I am,” his
defense belies this idea, suggesting that a persona is role-playing, an act. Indeed,
Eminem explains that “[i]t’s irony, man. It’s parody. It’s what goes on here in
America. There are really some sick and psychotic people that think like I rap.”
The ironic moment in this statement comes when Eminem claims that there are
“sick and psychotic people that think like I rap.” In order to write his lyrics,
Eminem has to think like he raps; and indeed, his thinking is admittedly related to
the thinking of Slim Shady. His response to the interviewer’s question “How
different is Slim Shady from Marshall Mathers?” shows there is both: