Losing Himself in the Music
83
[Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers’s thoughts] are similar in a
lot of ways and different in a lot of ways: my everyday views
on life and things like that . . . Some of my views that come
across in my music aren’t exactly the same as they are in real
life and some of them are . . . A lot of my personal life is
reflected in my music and a lot of this shit is just to get under
people’s skin and its worked so far . . . Just like it may be a
writer’s job or a critic’s job to critique me, its my job to get
under those people’s skins and piss them off.
It’s often unclear just what parts of Eminem’s lyrics are irony and satire
and what parts are not. Clearly, the “Public Service Announcement” from the
Slim Shady LP and the “Public Service Announcement 2000” from the Marshall
Mathers LP show a consciousness of such irony and satire on the part of the artist.
In the first “Public Service Announcement,” an appropriately authoritative voice
of an announcer warns in a serious tone that ‘fchildren should not partake in the
listening of this album,” pausing to allow the gravity of that statement to sink in
before adding the stipulation “with laces in their shoes.” The announcer follows
this mock warning by explaining that “Slim Shady is not responsible for your
actions,” before Slim himself facetiously states his final imperative, “Yeah, [and]
don’t do drugs.” The album itself is, of course, laden with drug references and
violent imagery but such contradictions are how Eminem invokes his ironic
examinations of the culture and himself. His biting rant against “White
America,” consists of a stream of vitriolic invective in which he states that he
wants to “piss on the lawns of the White House” and “spit liquor in the face of
this democracy of hypocrisy.” This diatribe is then followed by a brief pause and
a rakish denial of all of these feelings: “I’m just playin’ America, you know I love
you.” This facetiousness clarifies the contradiction between these two voices: the
voice telling America “fuck you” and the voice that claims that it is all a joke.
But which one is the put on? While Slim Shady and Marshall Mathers are
apparently distinct personalities, Eminem makes no effort in this song (and rarely
in any others) to distinguish between the two. Thus, Eminem’s lyrics become less
a war of competing ideas and more a war between competing selves.
As a 1999 interview with Rolling Stone would seem to suggest, it is as if
the artist himself is incapable of determining who he is. During the interview,
Eminem responds to questions concerning “’97 Bonnie and Clyde,” a song which
features the voice of his then three-year-old daughter Hailie as Eminem describes
disposing of the body of her mother Kim. This fantasy of killing his wife and
escaping with his daughter so it is just the “two of us” is a song that Eminem says
that when Hailie “is old enough” he wants “to explain . . . to her.” He describes
the explanation briefly again in terms that suggest the artificiality and
representational nature of his art: “I’ll let her know that Mommy and Daddy