88
Popular Culture Review
Eminem. Many of the insights unearthed in examining Byron’s
transgressive mourning for Boatswain help us better understand some of
our own stake in more recent shocking creatures.
A quintessentially taboo artist, Eminem is racially distinct (one
of only a handfiil of white male rappers adopting a musical form
stemming from slave songs), performing music that has always been
outside the norm. He specifically addresses animals in several of his
songs—most notably in “The Real Slim Shady,” a song that exemplifies
the postmodern struggle to identify a coherent self “The Real Slim
Shady” offers a look at the space of taboo now, the decidedly not
normative, that continues to engage animals as unforgettable sites that
figure instability. Slim Shady parses the ubiquity of animality, like
Byron, leaving us with meaningful creatures that cannot be assimilated
into the familiar.
Marshal Mathers, III, the rapper who adopted the pseudonym
Eminem, has been an extraordinarily popular musician since his
Grammy-award-winning major-label debut album. The Slim Shady LP
(1999). In 2000, as part of his second, also Grammy-winning album. The
Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem released “The Real Slim Shady.”
Eminem critiques animality and humanity implicitly through the
Romantic lens, particularly from the perspective of the blurred
boundaries of human depths and heights. This is the mark of the
Romantic beast and the evidence of its exhumation. Eminem has taken
on the voice of the Romantic in the 2 P ‘ century. His self-creation, the
character Slim Shady, is a Byronic hero, surviving “only as a solitary and
sensitive sufferer: with the loss of his titanic passions, his pride, and his
certainty of self-identity” characterizing his heroic status (see Thorslev
187).'^ Slim Shady borrows glory from tradition—^he is an American
rapper, and his now infamous dead moose marks this inheritance.
Eminem adopts these themes as he extends the comedic potential of the
creature.
“The Real Slim Shady” features several animals in precarious
relationships with humans. When Denise Gigante connects eating
animals, cannibalism, and taboo in Taste (100), she does not extend her
discourse into bestiality (a subject rarely mentioned during the Romantic
period except in catalogues of oddities, though it was not unknown in
literature; for example, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, in which Caliban is
portrayed as an animal and Miranda as his sexual prize, offers a different
glimpse at beastly love). Yet Eminem, as the exemplary posthuman